The red rocks of Capitol Reef loom over us, at once imposing and fragile, the sandstone fragmenting in oddly symmetrical sheets.

We’ve come to Capitol Reef many times in our marriage: for us, it’s come to represent a place of refuge and retreat, a place for family renewal—and a place for grief.

I’m convinced that places have memories (the battlefield at Gettysburg, for one. And the sacred grove). Beyond that, I believe that places have a significant dimension in our own memories. The Romans, who were among the first to study ars memoria, or the art of memory, called the mental storage places of memory loci, the same root in our word location. Memories take place, both literally and figuratively.

Driving into Capitol Reef on the fringes of a thunderstorm in mid-September, all the linked memories of the place come flooding back to me, forming a kind of spiritual palimpsest over the rock and sage landscape.

July 2003

My husband and I are three days into our honeymoon. We spend our mornings hiking along trails where the light refracts off sheer rock, our afternoons swimming in the hotel pool. Mostly, we’re puzzling through the exquisite strangeness that is newly married life—the way someone can be familiar and foreign, the way eternity seems both a terrifying omen and a gift.

August 2011

I look out the window at the hills behind our hotel, at the boulder strewn green rise meeting abruptly with the fortress-like wall of the red rock. Above, the sky is so blue it hurts. My children tumble around the room behind me, excited by the promise of vacation, but I am waiting.

We take our kids hiking in the heart of the park—well, walking might be more apt for our three and five-year-old children. We scuff our feet in the dust, listen to the call of a rock wren, and watch an eagle soaring overhead. My oldest clambers up a small mound of rocks and crows at me, king of the mountain.

That night, when darkness textures our room and my children and husband sleep, I go into the bathroom and I bleed. The baby I knew I was miscarrying passes, and I sit silent vigil beneath the bright fluorescent lights.

September 2013

Driving into Loa for what has become a bi-annual family reunion, we hit a deer. The kids are traumatized; Dan and I are relieved the car still drives. After a weekend of family and food and a long hike along the riverbed to a pool where my toddler baptizes himself, we arrive home to face the damage: one deductible and two weeks later, we get our van back.

September 2014

Like most family gatherings, this one is mixed. Some of our favorite people are missing. The food is excellent. My youngest wears blisters on his feet before I notice. And while nothing can dampen the grandeur of the surroundings, the relentless rain on the last morning creates a somber atmosphere.

But there’s something about this place that I can’t shake—something beyond the red mud now ground into the carpet of my car. Something in the bones of the rock, the way the hills beyond the red walls are crowned with white, the way the trail beside the Freemont River grows thick with yellow flowers and plants as high as my head, incongruous in an arid region. I suppose I could call it numen, that inexplicable sense of the sacred that sometimes obstrudes itself into mundane routines.

One line of research into theories of place explores what makes places sacred. Ideas range from human ritual, beliefs, even the shape of the landscape. But part of what makes individual places numinous are the memories that light it, layers and layers like a fine patina adding depth and richness to the landscape of our lives.

What places are sacred to you? What memories of place make that location rich?