bellemorda

and the smell of everything is overwhelmingly nostalgic for me. we drove into town from the state route that I used to take when I lived in college and drove to see my grandparents once every month or so. the road is incredibly winding, with hairpin turns and the kind of curves that make you feel you're driving in one of the craziest road rage games. seriously sick, somebody should map out the road for some insane track for *any* racing game, its just blisteringly tough to drive.

driving in this way, which was about a 40 min drive, I had to put all the windows down and let the whole humid, resplendent air wash over me. it untames my hair into whipped silver threads caught between my lips, and turns my skin to this dewey pinkness that makes my eyes shine green as new magnolia pods. that smell, the combination of freshly washed pine trees and gently decaying pine needles, mimosa trees in their garish flouncyness and creek beds sponged thick with runoff. everything wet and blooming and new.

that's what sprung my heart. to see this place that changes and never changes, smell the same things that as a child reminded me I was coming home. that wild little mountain girl came back to me, pulling me by the hand up the hill where I ran barefooted wearing clover blossom crowns and whistled crabgrass between my thumbs. I'm back to the time where the people who knew me most love me still. in the place where I rolled down hills and caught junebugs and watched fireworks and ate every delicious concoction my venerable aunts and uncle blessed us with - delicacies I can't find anywhere but here. all that sweet tea and apple butter and banana pudding, green beans and new potatoes and roasting ears of corn, fried pies, tomatoes and peaches that dripped down my chin and made me grin.

something about here is what I needed, only for a few days. maybe I need more. it grounds me, bolsters me. when I got here I fought against being here; I want to leave, to get back to the necessary but how badly I needed this place I'm only just realizing again. I want to hear all over the gentle cadence of speech here, peppered with the pronunciation of words that confound anyone outside appalachia: twiced, warsh, git, thar, hailf, hunny, darlin. the soft and sedentary ways of those who despite being highly intelligent and educated are content to rest and sit and rock on the porch in the firefly blinking dusk while the whippoorwills twee at each other and the glittering eyes of creatures at the edge of the woods watch us. I'm alien to them all, prodigal, with my burnished brown children, my too-long-gone-from-home ways and my tastes that reach far beyond the ridge behind the house, and the next ridge, and the next. they love me nonetheless. they make me belong somewhere. rootless, unowned me, homeless, the one who belongs nowhere in particular, she needs that.

love
me