Wonder

It was around 7:00 in the evening. Patrick and Sarah were rattling around in the kitchen preparing dinner. Pam was in the shower. Jon was getting a fire ready for later while Kaitlin was sitting on the dock reading a book. I was in the living room reading book number four of this trip, when I got to the end of a chapter and thought to make myself a cup of coffee. As I got up I glanced through the big windows that face the lake and noticed a bright splash of color in a straight line across the surface of the water that seemed to be pointing straight at Kaitlin. It stopped me in my tracks. “Look at that on the water…what the heck?” Then I noticed Jon hustling down the path towards the dock. I thought to open the door to our bathroom to tell Pam that she might want to take a look. Then I too ran down the path until I realized that what I was seeing from the upstairs of the house was a reflection of the thing and not the thing itself…

Soon, all of us were on the dock, faces aglow with wonder, snapping photographs which were destined to disappoint. In a particularly delightful moment, my wife appeared, her hair bound up in a turban, having stepped out of the shower, camera in hand, determined not to miss the experience. Dinner would have to wait. next thing I know, Pam and Kaitlin were off chasing another sunset…

It’s very easy to romanticize our memories. Fond memories can easily become myths with the passage of time. How many of us have had warm memories of some childhood experience that when revisited 40 years later disappoints? But this rainbow is exactly the kind of thing that always seems to happen up here. Each new day up here brings to life the dormant capacity for wonder that is cooked into our DNA as human beings, but is largely neutralized by the relentless slog of our routines. Quantabacook inspires wonder like no place else for me. It reminds me that the world is a beautiful place. Up here, beauty isn’t an abstraction, its the air you breathe.

After we finally finished dinner around 9 o’clock, we gathered around the fire, mesmerized…