Sometimes I'm reminded why it's worth following a path less trodden.

We're members of the Denver Botanic Gardens and enjoy strolling there in the spring, summer and fall. But rarely do we go in the middle of winter. Yet this week, on the day before Christmas, Judith and I took my 87-year-old mother to the sanctuary in the city for a walk.

Scarcely a soul was inside. A few workmen from the parking lot excavation across the street. A solitary shopkeeper. And a couple of other visitors.

We meandered down to the Japanese garden and through its gate to the carefully shaped pines bordering its small lake. Snow covered the ground. There, in the farthest reaches of the enclave, next to Cheesman Park, we seemed far from the city.

The frozen surface of the water rippled, as if the wind had been captured in time, unlike anything I had seen before. The pattern's rough texture evoked the bold black lines of a Japanese painting.

We shuffled forward on the path until we saw that work in the gardens prevented us from continuing. And so we returned the way we had come. And when we were but 30 or 40 feet from the gate, who should walk through it as confidently as if he had entered his own home but a fox.

It stopped. And we stopped. It stared. And we stared. Quietly we stood and admired the copper-colored creature. Its fur was healthy, thick and long. I have often seen foxes in the shadows of our neighborhood in east Denver. They never seem afraid. But they also are not so bold as to stand in plain sight.

This fox stood there in the light of day and wouldn't move. Nor would we. We just regretted that we had no camera to capture the moment. In my time living in Denver I've seen raccoons go through our yard. Coyotes run down our street. Foxes trot under the trees of the Sixth Avenue Parkway.

But never had I been so directly confronted with such a beautiful and calm creature. Clearly, we were in its home. Yet it wasn't about to do anything about it except watch us.

Finally, as we began to move again, the fox started padding across the snow-covered, rolling landscape until it lowered its nose and appeared to begin hunting some invisible creature. Quickly, it was gone. As were we.

A quiet moment on a day off from work. A special time with my mother that I'll always remember.

Something that never would have happened if we hadn't gone where we normally don't go. Something that never would have happened if we had said that the only time to look at a garden is when it's in bloom.

The visit and other moments in the special day that followed were reminders to me that it's too easy to think that because the world as we know it is a certain way that that's the only way it can be. Or that it can't change. It's too easy to narrow our sights of what's possible.

I worry in these days of depressing economic news that many now cannot envision a bright future when just a few months ago few of us could imagine anything but a world where stock and home prices would continue to rise forever.

When times are good, it's hard to imagine anything else. And when times are bad, it can seem so unrealistic to believe that the tide will turn.

Such are the limits of our imagination. I could not have dreamed what I would have found in the garden on my brief visit this week. I expected only a quiet place. No surprising beauty.

And yet, there I found the surface of the Japanese pond and the look in the fox's eyes. And these I will remember. Reminders that many of the pleasures of life, many of the things we treasure, are actually simple experiences.

This feeling is something I hope we can bring with our own newspaper. On the same day we visited the garden, the Rocky distributed a 24-page section of photographs our staff took in the past year. And we shared a column by Bill Johnson celebrating Christmas and what it means to him.

I hope you don't need to go out of your way to experience something that enriches your life. I hope we provide it for you in the paper you pick up in the morning, that we offer surprising pleasures or vistas just the way the garden did for me.

I always tell the people I work with that a newspaper is an experience, and that we should think of it that way. We should ask ourselves whether you will value the Rocky as a result of your daily encounter with it, just the way I value the Botanic Gardens as a result of my brief experience there.