Reminiscing.

The other day as I looked outside at the ground covered in snow I reminisced.  I was reminded of a time that seems so long ago, when I was a university student at BYU-Idaho.  My memories brought me back to sophomore year of college, humanities class with Brother Flora.  This humanities class has become a class I remember with fondness.  I learned the word, aesthetic, I not only learned the meaning of the word but I learned to incorporate it into my daily life. I knew about Beethoven, Mozart and Bach...but in this class I was introduced to Debussy and his Clair de Lune and Rodrigo's Concerto de Aranjuez and many other incredible composers.  I fell in love with learning about the humanities, so much so, that for a moment I thought how sophisticated it would be to major in it...but that only lasted a moment when I realized that I probably couldn't make a living if I majored in humanities.  In this class I was also introduced to the poet Robert Frost and when I admired the snow on this wintry day of a different life I have now, I was reminded of the poem I had to memorize for Brother Flora's class: 

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is a mistake
The only other sounds's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I'll admit that I had to google it to refresh my memory.  But as I read the words it all came back and I started to reminisce again.  About a time even longer ago, than my sophomore year in college, when I was a child living in my birth country of Perú.  My mother was good at visiting her parents who lived in a province close to the Andes Mountains, 8 hours north of Lima, by bus ride.  The bus ride was quite the experience.  Riding in very narrow roads of the Pan American Highway was at times frightening and the change in altitude from Lima (which is at sea level) to Caraz (over 7000 ft. above sea level) was quite dramatic.  We often experienced soroche-altitude sickness.  But the 8 hour bus ride and the soroche didn't discourage us from going to this charming and picturesque little town up 7000 ft. above sea level to spend time with my grandparents.  The memories I have there are a treasure I carry and will carry with me forever.  One of those memories is a tradition of memorizing poems and everyone gathering in the living room after dinner and then reciting with as much enthusiasm as we could the poems we had memorized.  After finishing we would take a bow, everyone would clap and my grandfather would reach into his pockets and take out what seemed like hundreds of coins to give to us as a tip of our 'good' performances.  

The recollection of memories is an interesting thing and as everyone, I have many of them.