Many thanks to Frank at dVerse for this fantastic prompt. I think I could revisit this prompt with several entries but am trying not to be greedy, so I’ll go with the nearest and dearest (at the moment) ;).

West Virginia, Mountain Mama

At nine, I thought the sloped shouldered Appalachians were mountains as I climbed and ran and dreamed of being in their embrace forever. Their summits were swaddled by groves of scrub pine that I scampered around but never through without an adult. But I was always safer there than here. My childhood dreams were interlaced with a taste of nirvana as sunshine spilled and freckled my face and sweat bee stings were prickles of the worst day, far more precious than painful.

Adventures have taken me to the Sangre de Cristo, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, wilder and higher by far than my Blue Ridge. Astounding though they were, my heart remains captive for a little cottage on a gentle slope by a meandering creek, where the wind sweeps through a pine grove and the rain echoes far before it falls, and the mullein grows wild and looks like warrior sentries during a lightning storm. Home, home, always, in my heart.

West Virginia, Mountain Mama
years in my heart.
Finches on purple summer thistles.