on coming home

I didn’t think much about it before I did it, but I bet the unconscious, bedrock of me did, and waited patiently as only bedrock can do.  Waiting for me to realize that I needed to be back home. Allegheny home. I had been wandering, ungroundedly for a few decades.

Most of that time was spent giving the Ozarks a try on … having to give the Ozarks a try on and they never became comfortable. Too  dry and scraggly in the summers, for one thing, when I was used to drippy mosses, hillsides that seep water from every pore and sometimes a quick, sharp cloudburst at 3:15 every afternoon. Besides that, the Ozark rocks were angular, had square corners and arranged themselves into stoic shelves, whereas the creeks of the eastern uplands draped themselves into soft contours that were sensual and sparkled with bling; (surely the work of the Fae) glittering with specs of ground mica and swaths of pink seed garnets. This was obviously and comfortably  a feminine landscape. 

On the last drive east,  with our extremely culled down possessions (but keeping my motorcycle) I watched as the geology changed the flora at the eastern edge of the Cumberland Plateau. Poplars and hemlocks started appearing and I shivered, as my life had always been defined by the plants around me. Here, now, I was seeing childhood companions. 

At age 11 I found myself so smitten with the fragrant wild plum at the edge of our woods that I asked my dad to help me make some incense from the blossoms. 
Once on one of my evening rambles  I came  across some anise goldenrod (as opposed to goldenrod goldenrod) and at age 15, it held enough significance for me to remember precisely  the details, 45 years later. We moved away when I was 16 but I got another chance to resume the dialog with my first of kin when I went away to college in the mountains of North Carolina. For the next 6 years the Smokies became my more significant other, especially the years I lived next to the park in an attempt to homestead in a tarpaper covered cabin... where sometimes baby salamanders would come out the kitchen faucet and I would walk them back up to the spring.

Aaron Copland knew exactly what he was doing when he chose “Appalachia” to exemplify “Spring”  as both spring and his symphony  start out with a moving from stillness, into a startling aliveness.  They gather momentum as temperatures rise and the mountains release water and soon mists and fogs rise and swirl and coalesce  into delirious birdsong.  A million shades of green march up the slopes, week by week (the poplars as brush strokes) and the climax must surely be when the flanks explode into sheets of wildflowers that go for … m i l e s.

And now I am home. And now it is spring. And that pair of wings in my chest open up and float on updrafts of GLEE, the spirit plants within wear shit-eating grins and tears stream down all our cheeks.

Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4E1JYP5Tgc

photo credit Wyndhamtrips