No, my subject is not that TV show. I’m writing about the real thing: a view.

Having a special view in the course of daily life affords a particular blessing. It doesn’t matter what the view is. It simply needs to be something that catches the eye, delights the mind, and comforts the heart.

Perhaps your eyes seek the sparkle of a fountain placed between tall buildings as you ride downtown to work. Perhaps you are regularly struck by a deep meadow behind the high school that rises up and vanishes into a frame of hills. Maybe your eyes thrill to a dramatic drop every time your car rounds a certain bend on a road regularly traveled. Or your special view could even be a cluster of warehouses off in the distance whose metal roofs, on a sunny day, send flashes of sparkles back to the sun.

Whatever it is, you have grown to anticipate this view. It makes you happy.

I grew up with such a view. Once I stepped out into the world, I discovered my view was actually celebrated: namely, a stretch of the renown Shenandoah Valley, ringed sumptuously by the Blue Ridge Mountains. True, the view involved just a stretch that lay along the northwest side of Roanoke, Virginia, but it was enough to dazzle.

My vantage point came from a rather large, rounded hill that rose up suddenly above our street. It was called Round Hill and everyone in the area knew it. The city placed a light on top of Round Hill so that planes descending into the nearby airport wouldn’t smash into it.

Upon driving over the knoll of Round Hill, the deep hue of the Blue Ridge Mountains would hit you directly in the eye. I didn’t know much about Cezanne or any other painters when I grew up. Nor did I know that painters sometimes painted a favored view repeatedly across different hours of the day and seasons of the year. But I can say with confidence that such painters topping the knoll of Round Hill would seriously consider stopping and pulling out brushes to capture this view.

Lest you think I loved this view, though, I did not! I was irritated by it. Why? Because my mother could not stop herself from pointing it out every time she drove across Round Hill.“ Look at the mountains today!” she would say every time.“ Aren’t the mountains pretty today?” Or, “Look at the mountains: they are so hazy today.” Or, “Carol, look at the mountains [a.k.a. get your head out of the book], see how dark they are getting.” The possibilities were endless. “Look at the frost.” “Look at that skiff of snow up there.” “Look at that line of fall leaves coming in already.” “Look at the way the sunset is turning the top orange.” You get the idea.

I sort of looked. But, alas, children proverbially do not appreciate what lies before their eyes. They can recoil from something perpetually pointed out to them. My mother likely knew that, but she didn’t care. That view provided her daily solace. Growing up in dark tenements in the Bronx between the First and Second World Wars, her life had been hard. Her decision to elope and marry my charming Southern, guitar-playing father in 1938 had lifted her out of that life, but also unleashed a wave of challenges she could not have imagined.

On the other hand, it had given her the mountains. And the velvet valleys leading up to those mountains. Her constant love for the topography of the Shenandoah Valley cannot be conveyed in words. She had landed in paradise, and she knew it.

When my grandfather built our house in 1950, he was a contractor with some means which allowed him to choose the spot. He did not chose the top of Round Hill (where winter ice would cause problems), but rather chose a lot on the gentler flank.

I still have that house today, rented out, but never far from my mind. Having it still means that, whenever I am in Roanoke, I follow the same path my mother drove across Round Hill no matter which way I am going. As it did for her, the green valley and its blue embrace stretches before my eyes.

Always I hear her voice: “Aren’t the mountains beautiful today?” Only I no longer roll my eyes and say through gritted teeth, “Yes mother.” Instead, through teary eyes, I say, “Oh Mama, you tried to point out this beauty every day, every time we went anywhere.”

Why else would she have perpetually driven over this knoll? It was not the direct path to any of our destinations. But this was her way of teaching me that beauty lies in what we can view, whether it be scraggly petunias in a window box or a timid row of conifers across the street that, year by year, inches up to become a curtain of evergreen.

Beauty is in every glisten of water coursing through the park across the road. It’s there in the spectacular geometry of frost decorating windowpanes in January. Beauty catches our eye when squirrels scamper across dew-laden grass, leaving dark furrows in the late-summer grass. And it positively sings from the skies, urging us to behold with awe as clear blue fields are invaded by puffy cotton balls or grey boulders about to unleash angry storms.

“It costs nothing to look at the mountains. Anyone can do it,” my mother would say. It waits for us, every time we lift up our eyes and seek it.

Levavi oculos meos in montos (“I have lifted mine eyes unto the hills,” Psalm 121).