Late on Sunday I got back from a trip to the West Coast, my first significant one since I moved back to the States four years ago. Stephanie and I flew to Seattle and met Regula, then over two and half days the three of us drove down the splendidly grey and green Oregon coast, through the severe desert hills of northern California and Reno, over Spooner Pass, and into the Lake Tahoe Basin. We stayed there, two blocks from the blue of the water, for a little over a week.

We laughed when things went wrong, made lists like our lives depended on it, hiked up and down, cooked and cleaned, lay on golden beaches, read aloud, took so many photos, and dressed up and took a sunset cruise on a boat called the Tahoe Gal. It was all very good.

In the last few years as I’ve settled into my contented adult life, I’ve not been able to shake the nagging feeling that I’m not as good at joy as I used to be. I’ve become placid. There are worse things, but I miss the child self who I suspect knew without being told how to carry herself into excitement, how to look forward to a thing, how to fall speechless from delight, how to feel beauty for what it is. Now it seems I require teaching.

I took this trip with friends, though, and I think they helped me remember.

Really, I’ve taken three big trips in the last few months, all of them very much with others, so the lesson has been knitting up its little threads inside me the whole time. These last two weeks were just a sunny culmination. The thing which I am coming to understand is this: there are nearly as many good ways of responding to beauty as there are people. It is possible to arrive at the Pacific Ocean or St Paul’s Cathedral or New River Gorge, to climb a stile in the Cotswolds, watch a 92-year-old blow out his birthday candles, see an Amish farmer plow his fields, and respond with a gasp, with a question, with quiet, with laughter, with the urge to create, or the urge to weep. I know this because I’ve experienced all of these things on my recent travels and I’ve had people beside me. I’ve seen their faces.

Sure, I had eighteen expressive and impressionable teenagers with me in London, but as dear as they are, I’m not talking about them. I mean the adults. If it were only the kids who knew how to immerse themselves, that would just support my earlier dreary hypothesis that only children know joy. It was the people who are thirty and up from whom I was seeing these reactions. Sometimes they were picking up a camera, sometimes they were spinning in circles, sometimes they were examining, discussing, and sometimes they were just saying, “Look at that—Oh, look at that!” But all of them were waist-deep in delight.

So all is not lost. In fact, not only is Lake Tahoe still very blue and the water at Emerald Bay still full of something that shimmers, but in southern Oregon on highway 97 there is a remote old gas station where they’ll tell you the pumps only work on one side. On that one side, the front cover is off as you pump your gas in the July heat, and you can see the gears and belts and clanking things whir furiously at their task, inches from your kneecap, while your tank fills at a glacial pace. On Saturday afternoon, I pointed and laughed to see this absurdity. My friends were, understandably, too tired and hot to care much, but in a good and precious rush, I felt joy.