Ella Judson

love in the mountains.

For me, love was never something that came easy. It was earned and fought for, cherished and misunderstood, messy and short-lived. For me life started at a downward spiral, from the second I was born I lost myself to love. When I was a kid my dad was poetry and music. There were hundreds of stories and poems that he read to me, and songs he sang to my sister and me that shaped the person I saw him as. To me, my dad was kind, giving, and strong, but to the world, he was sick, hopeless, and hurt. His pain wasn’t his own, it was his father's and his father's fathers, the sicknesses and suffering he inherited were deep-rooted in our family tree. My dad passed his pain on to me like a torch, letting his struggles light the way I saw my life. His past became my present and future.