A Child of Appalachia
To call myself a mountain child is to fix myself to the land of my birth. Appalachia is a warren of caves and rivers worked into light and darkness, forest, meadow, and unmapped trail. Really, these are the craggy and ancient roots of the tallest mountains Earth has ever known (those existed before names, but are termed the Pangea Mountains). The sky here is sacred too: pastel and tawny at dusk or dawn; filled by refractive curtains of stormwater and lightning; robin's egg blue at the height of day; silver-bright in memory.
Its spirit is a genie, recognizable even to those who've never conjured it by visiting. Concealed animals with glowered eyes plot secret courses from water to water. Nature convolves in distinctive seasons. Airs change but ever flow into well-hollowed ducts of travel. All keep watch over the folded and carven lands: walled Edenic gardens of dreaming and destiny.
Truly, I'm a child of these mountains, where fossil trees and trilobites dot stone peaks, sable bitumen spills the ground, and hidden hollows roil with vaporous smoke... rising ghostlike from gorge and gulley. Here, chasm and profundity elate to the red hawk's cry, responding in skybound echo; mornings mourn with the gently nesting dove. Here is the landscape which gave me life. Old as ever I become, I'll always remain but a wide-eyed child -- in this place -- wondrous and free, where time churns spirals and then stands still.
