My childhood memories are framed by mountains. I lived in the Appaplachian forests. Barefoot, curious and wistful. I needed the sky, the creaking pines, the red clumps of earth in the tobacco field behind our house.
I was an odd, quiet girl with gangly limbs and eyes always looking past what was right in front of me. This annoyed adults. “You need to smile more!” They’d say, “You should put yourself out there! Just look at what your siblings do.”
But I didn’t want to be like my siblings who played tennis and participated in community theater. I tried, but doing those things made me feel the way a salamander in a creek does when you lift up the rock she’s hiding under, exposed.
I only ever wanted to be me. I liked who I was.
Looking back, I see the awkward teenager. The homeschooler who was unpopular with the popular kids at church. At least I had the mountains. Most days, I’d cloister myself away to a spot in the tree line behind our house where I didn’t have to impress others into accepting me. A place with a view of the Smokies.
Tourists will rave about the blue haze of the Smokies. I never understood the fascination with the atmospheric ingredients that bake our mountains into a one dimensional hue.
Locals know those mountains use their name to hide a fantastic secret. After a good rain, that haze lifts. They're no longer 'smokey' but sharp, vast and incomprehensible. You can see every holler slicing into those hills like facets in a cut gem. Tennessee mountains may be flat blue to most but to Appalachian locals they are an inexhaustible trove of gold quartz, green jasper and fiery ruby in Autumn.
I’d spend hours out there listening to film scores composed by Howard Shore, Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard; my eyes conjuring visions of dragons splitting the sky above the fields and foothills before disappearing into the distant jeweled peaks. I’d play out entire battles in my mind and write the poetry of it down in a teal covered, college lined notebook.
Sitting alone under the mud brown trunks of pines and oak trees, I was simply myself; an uncivilized thing with only ancient Appalachian giants to bear witness as I wandered into womanhood on trails of my own making.
Now, I’m 33 years old and…