(Our daughter Coryne took this amazing photograph of the beautiful Blue Ridge near where we live.)
My entire childhood was spent in sand & salt water. I grew up a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean in New England. And when it came time for me to move away from home? The northern California Pacific, in the San Francisco Bay area. I had never lived out of sight or walking distance of salt water in my entire life… until, in my mid-20’s, when I got a job offer I couldn’t refuse & ended up back on the Atlantic side of the country, in suburban Philadephia, with the ocean a ghastly 2 hour drive away.
I hated it.
It was like living in an armpit. I felt absolutely suffocated. All the damp summer heat. None of the breeze. No relief. The humidity came in in May and dropped like a glass bell over the entire Delaware Valley until October. So believe me when I tell you, I never, ever, ever thought after five years of that I’d ever willingly move inland again. And for better than two decades, I didn’t have to. Happily, by my 30’s, my husband’s work took us out of the armpit and landed us back near my ocean-town parents while we raised our children, who had the great blessing to have a relationship with them, and with the ocean. So the the thought that someday, in my 50’s, once our kids were launched & my parents were gone, you’d find me inland again? Getouttahere. Absurd. My lungs needed the salt air to function properly. I was sure of it. Like, clinically. Sure.
But here we are, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of America’s magnificent southeast, and you know what I’ve discovered these last five years since we arrived? You can turn your back to the mountains… but you don’t want to!
“But… mountains just… lay there… doing nothing… being… mountains.”
At the risk of going all “Sound of Music” on you, “the hills are alive.” There’s kind of a lot going on here, the seasons, the sun, the clouds… the palette is different every single day. Like no two snowflakes are alike, no one day in the mountains is exactly like another. Moody but not manic. Changeable but not crazy. Over & over & over again.
And my lungs? I’m breathing in & out just fine, thank you very much. Though my ears do miss the caw of gulls. That was one of the first things I noticed: the loud sound of their absence. I’d heard them so long, I’d never paid attention to what a racket they made, pleasant though it was. It’s very, very quiet here. And when we do venture near the coast, and I hear them, my heart twinges a bit. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s a completely fair trade. The mountains are every bit as moody & changeable as the ocean, and they won’t rush up behind you and knock you ass over elbows in a pile of arms & legs & utter, usually laughable, humiliation.
And they are absolutely packed with stories to tell.
We live on an old logging road, which also has a collapsed gold mine just off it. (Yes! There was – a little bit of – gold in them thar’ hills!) Scarcely a day goes by when I don’t look at the ridge lines & valleys and wonder about those who came before me; how they looked upon this very same vista, walked these very same woods. How hard it must have been for them; the men, their wives, their children, the brutal, hard work they all did, the hopes & the dreams of all those families, living off the land, loving, birthing, dying… so much emotion in these woods, so much loss, so much joy. All done dawn to dusk, then some rest, all together, by fire and candle light. Oh no. The mountains are every bit as full of mystery, with a many, many stories to tell. What we lack in gulls, we more than make up for in the whisper of the leaves, telling us who and what came before with every breath of wind, every day.
And that’s when I concluded the ocean — at least in the northeast where there are hurricanes and blizzards and nor’easters — was for my younger self, and these Blue Ridge Mountains are exactly where I belong at this stage of my life, a newly minted nana. I can love both oceans & mountains equally without thinking of myself as a faithless harlot, and… peek through the veil to hear the souls I am ever closer to meeting in the afterlife.
Still, it made me wonder: did I get it wrong? Was I not an “ocean person” all this time? Because until now, I had always believed, firmly, that people really were divided into those two camps. Was I naive? In an almost childlike way? Or just faithful?
For the longest time when we first moved here, I wondered about that a lot. Had I been lying to myself? Because when you live by the ocean, you can’t count the number of times you or others say, “Oh, I could never live far away,” and you all nod in agreement, as though it’s as true as saying “Water is wet.” “Puppies are cute.” “There is gravity.” It simply is. It’s an article of faith. Nobody doubts it for a second.
So how on earth did I get something so seemingly fundamental wrong about myself? And wasn’t that unsettling!? Because then, of course, you wonder if you’re wrong about other seemingly fundamental things. Then the anxiety sets in. Oh dear. Exactly how flawed, unsteady, full of quicksand is my judgement? And if it’s really that simple, just an intellectual choice to be an ocean person or a mountain person, and not a fixed orientation one simply cannot escape, like eye color or height, being, as it were, the way God made you, was I not then choosing to be unfaithful to my lifelong true love, the ocean? And then the operative word: love, answered my question for me.
It’s not somehow untrue or even unfaithful to the sea and to love these hills. Love is like that: there’s always more. I wasn’t wrong about being an ocean girl all these years; I just never knew it could be a kind of G-rated menage-a-trois: me, the ocean and the mountains, not at all torn between two lovers, but with abundant room in my heart for both.
So, I’ll just be here in my little corner of the Blue Ridge, watching the morning “cloud lakes” in the valleys burn off, the evening fire-in-the-sky sunsets, the clear, dark skies full of stars at night, and listening to… the quiet; very, very grateful I’ve had the great privilege to live on both coasts of this magnificent country, spend my sunset years free to roam the in-betweens, then return home to enjoy this magical little mountain corner of it.
May all our children, and grandchildren, be so blessed.