Fragments From Floyd

The morning sun streaming through the early fog along Goose Creek is striking enough that we slow down--or even at times pull over, stop, and stand beside the car in awe. It is always lovely, a blessing, otherworldly but familiar. And yet, this Gap of the Morning Light is the sacred ordinary of this place, anticipated as we round the bend in the road, known and claimed as an amenity of living in this valley of broad-leaved forest in the hollows of blue ridges.

But we never take for granted that this is a landscape uniquely Appalachian. Nowhere else on earth but in these ancient, worn mountain valleys and coves so magnolia and sarvice, rhododendron and alder, white pine and eastern hemlock coexist. Together they nurture a sanctuary of bird and insect life, of wildflowers and ferns. Those creatures live there because it serves them just exactly that recipe of light and dark they require for their existence. Only here does sunlight perform in glory and grace just so.

To someone who lives on the coast or to another who comes from Midwestern plains, and certainly to any city-dweller, such a scene as this is an alien beauty unfamiliar in their daily drives between home and work, school, the nearest store. It has no role in their sense of belonging, but it does to us. This is what home looks like, and somehow as we take it in by osmosis or intent season after season, it changes us. We become part of the landscape, form a personal ecology of belonging. I feel it even as I am poorly able to speak it.

The places where we stand become the points from which we judge where we are, said Eudora Welty. They give us sense of direction. Or should.

How much we would miss that for us has become both ordinary and essential if we had not found home on a slow road that cuts into the very heart of a place. As the leaves change this autumn, we will change. It is a rhythm not for everyone, with costs and privations that we will feel more acutely as winter approaches. But winter too makes this life here what it is, and gives this land its character and dance. The short days of winter bring their own light, and smell, and feel on our skin and in our souls.

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