Silent Valley Reservoir, County Down, Northern Ireland

I was sitting in a hostel in Maine with multiple other hikers. I asked this good old boy from Tennessee if he'd taken the side trail the day before to see the spectacular overlook from Spaulding Mountain. He looked at me confused and said, "I wouldn't take a side trail to watch a dragon fight a unicorn." He had one thing on his mind, obviously. He was ready to reach Mt. Katahdin and finish the Appalachian Trail.

Although there are a seeming countless number of beautiful views along what is, after all, called a national scenic trail, most of the journey is spent in what hikers call the green tunnel. You see nothing but trees, rocks and a never-ending footpath. In many places, towering rhododendrons form a literal tunnel, blocking out the sky and any view up or down the mountain you're hiking on.

I'm from the south and I love the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but we can't hold a candle to the beauty one experiences in northern New England. Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine are breathtaking over and over. Going above the tree line in the White Mountains is unforgettable. The hundreds of lakes scattered through the dense woods of southern Maine allow you to snap photos every couple of miles worthy of being made into post cards.

I'm partial to mountains when it comes to looking for landscapes to appreciate. One of the most beautiful days of my life was spent driving the high road to Taos, New Mexico from Santa Fe. There is little to no humidity, unlike what we have in the eastern mountains. So there is no haze. The sky is crystal clear and a clear blue that abruptly changes to many shades of green as your eye moves down to the peaks of the mountains. The mountains are taller than what I'm used to. After all, it is ski country. You can return to Santa Fe along the low road which skirts the Rio Grande in high walled canyons.

Fans of America's mountains should visit Colorado Springs. From anywhere in town, you can see Pikes Peak. A train ride to the top is only a few doors and is something to put on your bucket list. Also in there are, the Garden of the Gods provides ample opportunities to capture photographs of the landscape and of the big horned sheep who live there.

For a different kind of beauty, the Mourne Mountains, located in County Down in Northern Ireland are a mostly treeless expanse of grasslands divided by stone fences and few man-made structures. There are a couple high mountain reservoirs that catch the water they need down in Belfast. The few people who do live there are friendly. If you're lucky, you can find a tea shop where you can get a cuppa with a couple of biscuits to sip while you sit beside a peat fire and just take in the wonderful Irishness of it all.

My bucket list includes seeing the Alps in France, Italy, and Switzerland. Recently, as Internet friend told me that there is a trans-alpine railroad journey from east to west on the South Island of New Zealand that provides some of the best views to be seen on planet Earth, and now I want to go there too. I have no great desire to see Kilimanjaro or the Himalayas, even though the beauty of those places in undeniable. I think the altitudes would do me in.

What about you? What mountains have you loved?

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I remember vividly when I was finally able to go grocery shopping without having to constantly calculate the cumulative cost of the items in my basket. On more than one occasion I had to reluctantly tell the cashier that I'd decided not to get an item or two when my math was bad, and I ended up short while standing at the register. I remember, too, the inability to afford a full tank of gas in the beaters I drove in my early adulthood. I rarely had more than $10 at a time when to buy fuel. When the day came that I could fill up the tank whenever I needed to, I felt like I'd reached a new level in the game of life.

One of the best mental health practices anyone can adopt is what 12-steppers call an attitude of gratitude. I've been makinga three-bullet list in my journal for well over a decade. Many days I record nothing but the little luxuries life offers. I'd rather have a whole basket of the little things than a big, fancy car.

I lived in a 100-year-old farm house in high school. For air conditioning, we had a couple of window units in the house, but none of them reached my bedroom. Our heat was a wood stove. My first adult jobs were mostly of the outdoor type. When I finally scored employment with the state, it was at a prison constructed decades ago. There was no AC, just giant floor fans to blow the hot air around. Subsequently, I moved to a giant Westinghouse factory with a massive machine shop, high ceilings and shipping bay doors open to the summer weather. I'd already turned 30 before I finally made my way into the white-collar world where I could work at a desk, sitting down in air conditioning.

We didn't eat out much when I was a kid. I'd use my money from whatever little hustles I had going on to occasionally treat myself to some fast food. We lived for a while in Jacksonville, NC and there was a place on the outskirts of town selling three hot dogs for a dollar. I loved that place! To this day, I get more excited than I probably should by the prospect of restaurant food, I don't care how mundane. I'm super happy if I get to go to a taco trailer, and on top of the world if we go to a real sit-down Mexican place with chips and salsa. We could conceivable afford to eat out for every meal, and it's only Wonder Woman's sensibilities that keep from indulging in that.

I've only slept a new mattress a couple of times in my life. One of those times was just a few years ago when we got one of those foam jobs that comes in a box and expands when you take it out. After relying on cheap hand-me-downs, actually having a quality place to sleep was a luxury I didn't know I needed. It's a rare night when I don't feel incredibly lucky climbing beneath the sheets. My super-power is being able to sleep anywhere at any time under just about any conditions. I can now save that skill for when I really require it.

There are plenty of other things that make me feel a little like a Rockefeller:

• Never, ever going on a road trip without a stop by the Circle K for soda and a snack
• That first trip to a bathroom with porcelain after spending days upon days on a hiking trip
• Owning and using fleece lined slippers
• Being able to get the fastest Internet you can get to a residential building
• Car repairs that don't go on a credit card
• Rarely saying no to our favorite charities
• Every pair of Levis blue jeans I've ever owned

I'm not a perfect gratitude machine by any means. I despise flying. I am almost always glad to be traveling somewhere, but the miraculous act of hurtling across the country miles up in the sky leaves me singularly unimpressed and grouchy. I also thought email was cool for a while until I realized it was a way other people could add items to my to-do list. Then I didn't like it as much. Still, though, there is enough of that poor kid left in me that any time I buy something and I don't feel forced into getting the cheapest model of whatever it is, I'm amazed on the inside. I feel like I've arrived.

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My mother believes in participatory humanity. Whatever she's doing, she welcomes you to join right in. Some parents discourage their kids from using household appliances or cooking because I guess they are scared the kids might break something or get hurt. My Mom does not have that fear. I don't remember not knowing how to start a load of clothes in the washing machine, turn on the dryer (after cleaning the lint filter because you don't want the house burning down) and I certainly don't remember feeling helpless or lost in the kitchen.

I remember being tasked with cooking bacon for breakfast. Mom had these distinct tongs used for just that purpose. A few years ago, when I mentioned how I'd never been able to find a set like that for myself, she gave me hers, the same ones I used 50 years ago as a kid. I know for a fact that some food prep tasks she handed off to me were things she hated doing herself. Grating cabbage for coleslaw is a prime example. I'm willing to bet she only has it when I'm visiting her, and she can rope me into doing it. I didn't mind helping, actually. Back in the day, we didn't worry about raw eggs in cake batter and getting to lick the batter from the mixing bowl or the beaters from her handheld mixer was a rite of passage.

I left home as a teenager and got married. My wife could cook and enjoyed making fancy dishes, but I took on the day in and day out food prep duties. She was a military brat and didn't know much about Southern cooking, My grandmother advised her to season vegetables with a little grease, as we do down here. Mema was referring to pork grease, rendered from fatback or bacon, but the young lady I was married to didn't catch that part and soon poured hamburger drippings all over a pot of green beans and didn't understand why they weren't as tasty as she expected.

My kids all managed to make it into adulthood without dying of malnutrition. Their food memories tend to center on things they didn't like rather than all the delicious meals I prepared for them. My son, was the kind of kid who ordered chicken fingers and french fries at Mexican restaurants, has excellent taste as an adult and an adventurous palate, but he swears that the only way he survived his teenage years was by begging me to let him make extra sandwiches to eat in his room. My girls favorite food group was cereal. The happiest days of their lives were the times when I'd buy something apart from raisin bran.

After the kids left home, and I was heavily involved in endurance sports, I learned a lot about nutrition and training. Some of my favorite activities burned massive amounts of calories. I was dedicated to clean eating and went through chicken breasts, sweet potatoes, bags of spinach and cage free eggs like mad. When Wonder Woman and I got married, she was just as dedicated to that diet as I was. She still is, although not quite as rigidly as before. She still prefers brown rice over white rice. I've never known her to eat canned vegetables. For years, she prepared a week's worth of the most colorful salads imaginable every Sunday, and we ate them for lunch during the week,

Since I decided I didn't like being retired and went back to work, we've opted for meals that are quick and easy to prepare so we can have more leisure time at night. I've promised to go back to more cooking from scratch when I finally retire for good. I have a quite nice grill and smoker combo that hasn't gotten a lot of use lately. It does great pork shoulders, beef brisket, whole chickens and turkey breasts. I need to fire that back up soon.

I get the same complaints other male cooks get, primarily centered around being messy, which is true. I am messy. It took me a while to learn how to judge the right portion sizes for my diminutive wife, who, while indeed small, also has to stay fueled up for ultramarathon training. I have also learned that by some miracle of modern medical science, I am to blame for any numbers on the reports she gets after her physical that she doesn't like. Either I'm not serving enough foods rich in vitamin D, or I'm screwing up her HDL and LDL readings.

She still loves me though and readily accepts her plate each night when I deliver hot chow to her after she's waited for me to prepare dinner for us. Few things make me happier than to see her dig into whatever I've made.

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