Granite heart (photos)

An accident while scanning negatives last night, I reversed one, and when I loaded them onto FB, I was surprised to see the images made a heart of granite and snow. I also realized the reason why John's smile looked all wrong, because it was reversed! It was as if a stranger was grimacing at me.Maybe if I had seen the mirror image, then, I might have saved myself some grief. I literally scaled mountain peaks—even the heights of Machu Picchu—with this man. It was a short, fierce relationship, it lasted only a few years, but came with a lifetime sentence. But sometimes the sentence is all there is: verb and noun. The temporalness of snow and the endurance of granite. We had decided to forego following the trail (we don't need no stinkin' trails) and traversed a narrow bridge from one summit to the next, a "Thank God" ledge no wider than our feet, we inched along the crest of a sheer wall, I was terrified. Even Edwin Drummond had never taken me out on a ledge like this. I nearly fell off that mountain because I forgot to hug the wall with my hips. John reached over and shoved my ass back to the wall. I hugged that wall with my hips for all I was worth. I damned near made love to that blasted rock face and lived to tell the tale. I'm not too sure what happened to my pants. I seem to be wearing only longjohns. Awkward family photo mpment. Desolation Wilderness, near Echo Summit, 1986. Pyramid Peak stands at 9,984′, but soon it will be 10,000'. The Sierra Nevadas are young mountains still growing.

RIP John Oliver Simon. Gone little over a year. I still miss him. (John was Ansel Adams's cousin—scaling mountains was in the bloodline).