Sunday, January 12, 2020

A Place to Remember




This photo accompanied an article entitled, “This is One of the Most Beautiful States in America-But I Bet You Can’t Find It on a Map” by Teddy Minford.  I immediately exclaimed to myself, “I’ll take your bet and double it!”  The answer is Idaho and I would have won the bet.

My mind was subsequently flooded with wonderful memories.  In 1976, five months after Rett and I were married, we departed Tennessee for a state that a few months earlier we had to look up on a map and that our only association was with potatoes.  What an adventure!  We were young, brave, and foolish and were happy to have employment. Little did we know what beauty we were soon to behold.

During the summer of 1977, we discovered the awesome beauty of the Sawtooth Mountains including Redfish Lake.  We remember cooking freshly caught trout on an open campfire for dinner as we watched the sun set over the mountain range mirrored on Redfish Lake. Stunning!

Memory is our ability to encode, store, retain and subsequently recall information and past experiences in the human brain. It can be thought of in general terms as the use of past experience to affect or influence current behavior.

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain so yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a young and callow fellow,
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
The fire of September that made you mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember then follow.

One model of memory known as the levels-of-processing model was proposed by Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart in 1972, and posits that memory recall, and the extent to which something is memorized, is a function of the depth of mental processing, on a continuous scale from shallow (perceptual) to deep (semantic). Under this model, there is no real structure to memory and no distinction between short-term and long-term memory.

Idaho 

1861 as a place name, originally applied by U.S. Congress to a proposed territorial division centered in what is now eastern Colorado; said at the time to mean "Gem of the Mountains" but probably rather from Kiowa-Apache (Athabaskan) idaahe "enemy," a name applied by them to the Comanches. Modern Idaho was organized 1861 as a county in Washington Territory; in 1863 became a territory in its own right and it was admitted as a state in 1890.



My memory of Redfish Lake certainly substantiates “Gem of the Mountains”.


CPW

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