I discovered home when I was eighteen years old.
Sounds like a line from a romance novel, doesn’t it? But what I fell in love with was the mountains.
Growing up in northwestern Pennsylvania, I was surrounded by the Allegheny Mountains. I spent hours as a teenager walking and bicycling in the hills that surrounded my childhood home. The forests and meadows were part of my nature. I studies the plants and knew which ones were food and those that had other uses. I even knew where a few rare plants were sheltered.
But after high school, I took a Greyhound bus west to a college.far from my familiar surroundings. It was an exciting transition—new surroundings, new friends, new educational challenges. It was wonderful, and I was on a continuous high.
And then it happened. For one of the classes I was taking, we took a weekend field trip. In a college-owned bus, we piled in our sleeping bags and luggage and took off to study local flora. The road we took was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Hairpin turns, sharp inclines, cliffs that dropped hundreds of feet from the side of the road.
Finally we got to the top. And I never wanted to go down again. I’d found my place on this earth.
After that I could not be content with rolling hills. I needed sharp peaks and deep valleys. I joke that I must have been a mountain man in a previous life. Some days, I’m not sure it’s a joke. The mountains are where I feel the most like myself. From the lower reaches where you have to have to lift your eyes to see the snow-covered peaks to the upper heights where you can see for miles and beyond that’s where I want to be. When I’m among them, I feel fulfilled.
Life’s journey hasn’t always allowed me to make my home among the mountains. Bit even when I lived in what other people considered paradise, I wanted to leave and return to my personal heaven or as close to it as I can get while I’m still alive.
Soon after the trip, I met a wonderful man and fell in love again. He loves the mountains too, so he doesn’t mind sharing me with them. Most of the time, anyway.
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July 25, 2016
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