Place, Fall

The wind here is different. Perhaps the thousand little peaks and valleys bubbling beneath these city streets stir the air, press it this way and then that, now blocking this breeze, now channeling that one. This wind chuckles and jogs, spins and swoops. Contrast this soft turbulence with the Albuquerque wind: ricocheting off the west face of the Sandias, that air takes a running start and screams across the city, scouring in a straight line, feeling like a lemon zester on my face and shins.

This is a recurring theme: soft here, harsh there. But it’s not an absolute, and I don’t want to bely the fearsome toughness inherent in the Blue Ridge, thickly populated and laced with pavement though they may be. There is stone beneath my feet in both places, its ancient heart even more exposed here. The mountains of the West are brash and young, thrusting their chests up to the sky, full of swagger and energetic allure. The southern Appalachians are mother and grandmother, though neither pastel nor Hallmark-y. These will cradle you to their bosom and sing you to sleep, yes, but the hard lessons are yours to be learned, and they, knowing the value, won’t save you from them.

Mountains, old and new, hold for me bruised skin and a pierced heart.

All of this is simply to say that it is beautiful here today, and full-blown Fall. I want to tell you how it felt this morning to wake with a cool-almost-cold air moving through the windows, how the slant of light itself seems to be cajoling the leaves to turn, how the tanktop sunburn on my back is probably this year’s last.

But these things happen everywhere. Seasons change; places mystify and bewitch and ensnare hearts; I am not the only person to be madly in love with the play of light through trees.

For writers, this question of place is tricky business. I believe I would love here if I saw it for the first time today. But today I am seeing it for the thousand thousandth time, and what I love isn’t just this moment. It is also how I sat in this same cafe window twelve years ago, watching these same trees prepare for winter while I studied Shakespeare. It is also a childhood under oaks and among weeds, blackberry stains under my fingernails. Same place, but different. Same me, but not. Same love.

But why should you love it, here on this page? Have I failed if you read these words and cannot see in your mind’s eye these trees, shrugging off their summer greens to don the gold-plated mantle of fall? Have I failed if you can’t smell this air, and remember the time when you were most happy? Because this is really what I am talking about: even without the trees or the air or the light, the joy remains. I don’t know where your joy lives, and its surface probably looks nothing like mine. But, passing on a dark night, I think I’d recognize it, and you mine.

That is the trick of words played right, this shared ownership of a feeling. You read about my place and make it yours; this lattice of words frames a place between us.