Another kind of memory post.

The idea for this post came to me last week while I was working on my most recent Austrian memory post. Writing about my encounters with some significant sites of memory in Innsbruck, I found my mind turning to memories of a very different kind - memories of the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that I encountered on a more or less regular basis last summer. I'm sure that I took some of these sensory phenomena for granted at the time, but the examples that came to mind last week were ones that I consciously savored as I experienced them - the sort of things about which I thought, "This is something I'm going to miss."

One ordinary Innsbruck experience that I knew I would miss later (and that I miss even now, as I write these lines) was that of seeing clouds spill over the surrounding mountains on rainy days. The above images give some sense of what I'm talking about, though mere photographs can't compete with real experience. I'd like to think that I'd still be moved by the sight of these clouds even if I spent a lot more time in Innsbruck, just as I'm still captivated by the stars in the night sky even though I've spent my whole life looking at them.

I'm sure that those who are reading this have had experiences similar to mine. At the start of a new week, perhaps we would do well to recall some of these experiences in a spirit of gratitude. What are the simple, everyday things that you got to know in a particular place, and that you have missed - and perhaps always knew that you would miss, once those things were gone? AMDG.