Every year we would take a week in early June and another week in September or October to drive to New Hampshire's Waterville Valley. When our children were young we would go there for the express purpose of seeing the mountains in the White Mountain National Forest and year after year we would climb as many as we could pack into a week. These were day climbs, ascend in the morning, descend in the afternoon. We climbed to many peaks, but never Mount Washington.

Little Haystack, Eisenhower, Moosilauke, Lafayette, Cannon Mountain and many others filled out our year-by-year experience. As the children became adults they would sometimes accompany us, sometimes not. Until the time came when we would carry on ourselves. The older we got the more confined to more modest mountain hikes like Welch and Dickey and Rattlesnake. By the time we turned 80 we gave up the former and continued the latter.

For the past twenty years or so we kept coming back to one place in the Waterville Valley near Franconia Notch, and struck up a friendship with the owners of the site. Years ago when they hired someone to set up a new website for them, they asked if we wouldn't mind having our photos taken and one of them still appears on their website, of Irving and me and our elderly little Apricot poodle, Riley.

The last trip we took was in September of 2019. And then came the global pandemic and everything was shut down. So for two years we haven't gone to our summer idyll in the White Mountains. Everything shuttered including the border between Canada and the U.S. for non-essential travel. The very term non-essential is debatable, but clearly it's meant to identify travel that is not absolutely necessary.

We certainly miss those trips. It would take about eight hours of driving to get to our destination. Jackie and Jillie became very good travellers, like their little predecessors Button and Riley. It was Button, our miniature poodle, who had climbed many of the difficult mountain peaks when we were still able to do them ourselves. But Jackie and Jillie became avid mountain climbers too, though the mountains were far more modest in size and height.

Eventually we satisfied ourselves with hiking the mountain trails requiring not too much energy and endurance in achieving height. We'd take Jackie and Jillie to the Basin at Franconia, to Sabbaday Falls, to the Lovequist Trail,to SmartsBrook, and that along with the Rattlesnakes would satisfy our mountain-climbing urges the last five years.

With two years' absence from the mountains, there's something missing. On the other  hand, we have such easy access to a forested natural setting close to home that satisfies our daily need to take ourselves to a natural landscape. In our mid-80s now, it seems a little less urgent for us to undertake an eight-hour drive, pack up all the essentials for a week's stay in a mountain landscape, roam about hither and yon to our hearts' content. But we certainly do miss it.