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| Sandy toes are a beautiful thing. 🙂 |
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| Moments later, we drove away without Sunshine’s flipflops. She was THAT excited about Lake Erie. |
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| “Really? We’re okay to get wet?!” |
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| So close! |
The scenery of my home state is green. The mountains are a spongy, living-organism green. The frequent showers magnify the texture of the trees and wild plants that cover the slopes and hills the way a microscope brings to light the individual fronds on a fern. The implied lushness and fertility feels like a gentle laugh and a comforting embrace by my mother. Things grow here. But I am not moved in the way I think I should be after all of this time. I look past the explosion of wildflowers and sought-after mountain laurel and I see only the changes. I see more buildings, more roads, more urban sprawl, more big-box stores and I cannot fully appreciate the vistas that Penn’s Woods has laid before me. The topography of my home state has never failed to impress me, but the landscape of my past is cluttered. Panoramas that I have looked at a thousand times before stir me again, but in all of the wrong ways. Once gentle hills of clover and corn, it is crowded with cookie-cutter housing, retail expansion and half-forgotten outbuildings full of junk. Do the places in my memories exist anymore? Is this a fool’s errand? If the geography has changed, so have the people. I returned $100 that a bank teller accidentally gave me. I returned to give her my cell phone number in case her drawer wasn’t even. In tears, she later called me and thanked me for saving her job. I didn’t know what to say. When did doing the right thing become the unlikely thing to do? Has my yearning for a bygone era cost me more than I know? Am I looking for a place that no longer exists? And is it absent because the ideals and mores that existed then are no longer purposeful? Are the behaviors I wish to instill in my children outdated? I don’t think so. The places I look for do not exist within a zip code, but where I create them. Yes, I have to remind my son that when you put money in a newspaper box, it only entitles you to take 1 paper, not several. Yes, I have to explain to my daughter that she should hold the door even if the elderly woman exiting is slower than molasses in January. Someone told me the other day to “Lift where I stand.” I have turned it over and over in my head as to how it applies to me and my uncertainty about moving here. I have decided this-I will change what I can, where I am. I cannot do anything about the families that turned their farms into apartment complexes. I cannot change the fact that being honest has gone out of style, apparently. But I can recycle. I can put a suet cake outside my window for the birds. I can teach a child how to tie a knot or whistle with a blade of grass between their thumbs. The place where I lift – where I stand – will be an island of good. Even if it exists between a Best Buy and a Starbucks.
