So beautiful!

When I was a wee lad my mother used to pack us children into our station wagon, as many who were at hand at any given moment, and take us for a drive.  In the 1930's there were many fewer cars on the road (although ironically one was available to have a head-on collision with the car in which my father was riding--actually probably because neither driver was paying close enough attention to notice the proximity).  Taking a drive was a pleasant diversion, not the nightmare we know today.  At intervals she would vaguely pull to the side to stop and exclaim: "Children, children, look at the view!  So beautiful!"  And we would look out across the gently rolling hills of rural eastern Iowa, and know that it was indeed beautiful.  A professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop once remarked to a colleague of mine that it was "just like Tuscany."  I am always grateful to my mother for sharpening our instinct to seek out beauty in the views we confronted--she took us to Maine, to the Rockies, to Vermont before the gas rationing put paid to such excursions.  This morning, whilst my husband and I waited for friends on the ferry out from Boston, we sat staring at the blue sky, white clouds, glittering water, and the myriad islands of the Boston outer harbor.  In the last thirty or so years I have spent a great deal of time staring out at the Atlantic or Hingham Harbor, at sunrise or sunset, always glorious in sunshine or clouds.  The mother of my children introduced me to the glories of tramping through an extended deep second growth New Hampshire forest, the surround of green and the dappled sunshine.  My instinct is, however, strangely enough for the streets of Manhattan, looking north from Columbus Circle, or standing in Central Park and gazing out at the skyline.  I cannot get enough of the urban scene.  Standing in the Carousel, for instance, to the west of the Tuileries Palace and looking out in the direction of the Place de la Concorde or standing at the western edge of the Pincio and gazing out over to the dome of St. Peters pink and orange at sunset.  More than nature's treasures those are my preferred views.  Still, nature's colors can be ravishing.  I once lived for a year where I could sit on the edge of a portico to which my house was joined and have an afternoon cocktail while looking over to Mount Hymettus slowly turning that delicious delicate purple which marks the end of the Mediterranean day.  I am even a sucker for the petit urban view, looking out from our terrace in Rome down into the gardens below or over across the rooftops of the city of Rome.  Rooftops are one of my favorite defining features of views.  We live in Sarasota in a condo which is on a third floor in an unpromising building set between a school parking lot and a mall parking lot--well, more or less--but I cannot get enough of sitting in the late afternoon watching over the roofs at the clouds turning pink, staring northwest at a lone palm tree that stands as a marker against the blue sky, at the roofs of a mall department store that gives exquisite definition to the evening.  Or standing in the morning, The New York Times in hand, mouth agape, as the sun peeks up over the marvelous lines of the roof of the public school next door.  I never tire of the colors, the line.  It's all wonderful!  (I still hear her voice "Children, children". . . .).  Don't you go to the beach, we are asked constantly.  Well, no.  I prefer sitting there on the third floor looking at the sky against the roofs.  Can anything be lovelier?