Oh. You never told me that art was so important to you. I knew it was what you wanted to do, but I didn't understand that you had... that you had all those ideas.

Tina, my family never went to the Sierras the way your family does. When I started going up to see you, I looked at the world around me, and then I began to read about the ecosystems. The ponderosa pine and white fir. The Canadian zone. Red fir, lodgepole pine. The names of wildflowers, rocks, the soil. the Hudsonian zone; and the the Arctic-Alpine zone, their very names so evocative of... reminding me of... the meadow you showed me in the early morning. The little lake we walked to. The one where we had lunch.

Tina, today at the party, I was talking with a woman who lives in the mountains and writes for an environmental journal. And I thought: that's what I want to do. I want to write about the environment. But I'd need to know a lot more. I'm thinking of changing my major ...to environmental science.