I have noted before the division of outdoor love that occurred in my birth family: For three kids, we got three doses, but all three somehow went to my brother, Rich, who has walked the Appalachian Trail by himself (yes, Georgia to Maine), gone to Outward Board and National Outdoor Leadership School, taken a graduate degree in forestry, and accomplished many more similar feats.

As I write, he's in Maine, kayaking with a friend for a week, and last week, he was biking the Erie Canal with his wife.

I'm sitting in a Starbucks, typing, and wishing they'd turn down the air conditioning.

Even so, I have been forever changed in the past year or two, in my respect for nature. I may not have the lust, but I understand now the paramount importance and wisdom of the natural world, and how practically every problem that humans have created on earth arose from ignoring nature's ways, or believing that they could be bested. But I'm not going into all that today.

I wanted to report evidence that I'm starting to feel the love, too, even if still in a couch-potato kind of way. We got iPhones recently, and one of the options is to choose wallpaper, the background image for the main screen. I chose a scene of gray, tumbled river rocks. In itself, that could hardly be much less notable.

But during my horrendous recent outbreak of SKA (severe keyboard aversion, aka writer's dread), I was fiddling with iPhoto and felt a new appreciation for my nature photography, not only the content but the volume; how does a couch potato assemble more than 500 photos — roughly 10 percent of my library — of the outdoors? (Mostly, from my cross country trip, my Lake Powell trip, my Hawaii trip, my Costa Rican honeymoon, and a bunch of local stuff.)

So I made that file my screensaver. Then I made it easier to trigger the screensaver. Then I changed the energy saver settings so that the screensaver is visible for longer before the screen rests.

What makes this worth noting, in the small way that it is, is that these have all arisen organically (so to speak). I take them as evidence of a change that I'm witnessing, as well as being the venue for.