2:02 AM 2001-01-16
I've made it back. The drive up was really enjoyable. It was an absolutely marvelous day today, by which I mean the temperature approached seventy degrees. I exult over any warm days in winter. It makes me feel as if I, personally, have achieved some kind of triumph. I, having fooled winter, am living in a warm and pleasant day. Actually, I don't have any illusions over having fooled winter. I am quite aware that winter is far stronger than I am. A very warm winter day, especially in February, carries with it an insane wildness that can be really intimidating. The sky is so high and pale, but everything seems as if it could bloom the next moment. As if winter is coming to you wagging its tail, but with a glint in its eye showing you that it could bare its fangs any time it wants to. Those days make me nervously excited, thrilled by the wildness and precariousness of it. They are moments of seemingly-friendly calm in the midst of an entirely unsympathetic time. They are kindness from something that really doesn't care the least bit about how you feel at all. Reluctant thought I am to admit it, I love them.
Driving down the highway, I kept my windows cracked, and thought about how much I do love the country around here (southwest and central Virginia). I want to move south, and probably will, but there is something about these old, old, mountains that is unfathomably beautiful.
The way smooth grey and white granite rocks just rise up here and there, low to the ground, out of hillsides and fields and in the middle of the woods. They're the worn-down bits of mountain peaks, the underpinnings of this entire land, quietly rising up out of the brittle yellow grass.
And the constant, brittle-wet smell of the decaying leaves on the ground -- the mixture of skinny pines and scaly-barked sycamores and tall old oaks and Jeffersonian tulip poplars -- chipmunks and squirrels and groundhogs and deer and turkeys and buzzards -- everything here is full of a kind of bridge-spanning life.
Go much farther up, and it's north: brown grass till mid-may and sweet, austere sugar maples and virgin birches. Travel down (but no farther west -- otherwise you keep in the mountains -- an entirely different terrain) a couple hours, and you've reached the undeniable south: sandy soil and scrawny carolina pines, low, reedy land and warm Spanish moss starting to trail from branches.
But here, in the mountainous region of Virginia, there's this balance. There's sun shining out of the clouds in that smoky-ray way that makes you think of movie-gods pointing their fingers down from heaven onto low, furry mountains that really glow blue.
There are brown/green crackling woods, alive with deer and fern and mint and five-leaved Virginia Creeper covering breathtakingly green acres of sudden vibrancy -- both wet and dry, cold and warm.
There are chilling mountain waterfalls and low fields full of okra or tobacco or something to take to that dusty building I pass on the way to school that's always advertising the dates of the County State Fair.
There are places where you can stand in the miserable grey, living, uncaring rain, in a soggy field of brambles and cane and hollow, yellow grass, and look out over the outcroppings of grey rock showing themselves as darker places on the grey mist, and bitter cedars raising themselves up out of rocky clay soil, and see something in the mountain peaks over the ridge that makes you want to cry and cry, until you're as old and wise as the rocks.
I think, really, that's most of the reason I stayed in Virginia for school, despite knowing that I might not fit in here as well as somewhere else. I was in love with Smith College, in fact. It would have been a great school for me. Small, completely liberal-arts focused, happy to have undergraduates (happy to have me), and full of free-thinking women (everyone seemed to have a diversity flag hanging out of her window). I went up north to visit there and a few other places in march of my senior year of high school. It was a fine visit, except that I got dreadfully sick on the last day. (Have you ever had a real stomach illness on a plane? Don't try it. It's hellish.) And I loved the school. And yet, when we finally touched ground back in North Carolina (we'd flown out of Greensboro to save money), I got into the car with my father, and, watching the beautifully green and growing leaves begin to multiply around us in the night rain, breathing in that heavy, already warm air, I realized I had almost never been so relieved to be somewhere in my whole life. I almost cried. It simply felt so good to be back where things begin to grow in March, and where rain makes the air heavy, not hard, and where I could smell the thick, clayey earth and unruly vegetation with every breath. Simply put, I was glad to be home.
I've made it back. The drive up was really enjoyable. It was an absolutely marvelous day today, by which I mean the temperature approached seventy degrees. I exult over any warm days in winter. It makes me feel as if I, personally, have achieved some kind of triumph. I, having fooled winter, am living in a warm and pleasant day. Actually, I don't have any illusions over having fooled winter. I am quite aware that winter is far stronger than I am. A very warm winter day, especially in February, carries with it an insane wildness that can be really intimidating. The sky is so high and pale, but everything seems as if it could bloom the next moment. As if winter is coming to you wagging its tail, but with a glint in its eye showing you that it could bare its fangs any time it wants to. Those days make me nervously excited, thrilled by the wildness and precariousness of it. They are moments of seemingly-friendly calm in the midst of an entirely unsympathetic time. They are kindness from something that really doesn't care the least bit about how you feel at all. Reluctant thought I am to admit it, I love them.
Driving down the highway, I kept my windows cracked, and thought about how much I do love the country around here (southwest and central Virginia). I want to move south, and probably will, but there is something about these old, old, mountains that is unfathomably beautiful.
The way smooth grey and white granite rocks just rise up here and there, low to the ground, out of hillsides and fields and in the middle of the woods. They're the worn-down bits of mountain peaks, the underpinnings of this entire land, quietly rising up out of the brittle yellow grass.
And the constant, brittle-wet smell of the decaying leaves on the ground -- the mixture of skinny pines and scaly-barked sycamores and tall old oaks and Jeffersonian tulip poplars -- chipmunks and squirrels and groundhogs and deer and turkeys and buzzards -- everything here is full of a kind of bridge-spanning life.
Go much farther up, and it's north: brown grass till mid-may and sweet, austere sugar maples and virgin birches. Travel down (but no farther west -- otherwise you keep in the mountains -- an entirely different terrain) a couple hours, and you've reached the undeniable south: sandy soil and scrawny carolina pines, low, reedy land and warm Spanish moss starting to trail from branches.
But here, in the mountainous region of Virginia, there's this balance. There's sun shining out of the clouds in that smoky-ray way that makes you think of movie-gods pointing their fingers down from heaven onto low, furry mountains that really glow blue.
There are brown/green crackling woods, alive with deer and fern and mint and five-leaved Virginia Creeper covering breathtakingly green acres of sudden vibrancy -- both wet and dry, cold and warm.
There are chilling mountain waterfalls and low fields full of okra or tobacco or something to take to that dusty building I pass on the way to school that's always advertising the dates of the County State Fair.
There are places where you can stand in the miserable grey, living, uncaring rain, in a soggy field of brambles and cane and hollow, yellow grass, and look out over the outcroppings of grey rock showing themselves as darker places on the grey mist, and bitter cedars raising themselves up out of rocky clay soil, and see something in the mountain peaks over the ridge that makes you want to cry and cry, until you're as old and wise as the rocks.
I think, really, that's most of the reason I stayed in Virginia for school, despite knowing that I might not fit in here as well as somewhere else. I was in love with Smith College, in fact. It would have been a great school for me. Small, completely liberal-arts focused, happy to have undergraduates (happy to have me), and full of free-thinking women (everyone seemed to have a diversity flag hanging out of her window). I went up north to visit there and a few other places in march of my senior year of high school. It was a fine visit, except that I got dreadfully sick on the last day. (Have you ever had a real stomach illness on a plane? Don't try it. It's hellish.) And I loved the school. And yet, when we finally touched ground back in North Carolina (we'd flown out of Greensboro to save money), I got into the car with my father, and, watching the beautifully green and growing leaves begin to multiply around us in the night rain, breathing in that heavy, already warm air, I realized I had almost never been so relieved to be somewhere in my whole life. I almost cried. It simply felt so good to be back where things begin to grow in March, and where rain makes the air heavy, not hard, and where I could smell the thick, clayey earth and unruly vegetation with every breath. Simply put, I was glad to be home.
Labels: identity, liminality, nature, space
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