The Appalachian mountains are amazingly beautiful! Their ridges and valleys are at once both awe inspiring and pastoral. Forested ridges interspersed with pastures and fields that in so many ways and so many places remain unchanged completely for the past 150 years or more. This is the area that my family has called home since the beginning wilderness days and the revolutionary war.
There is something here that is incredibly mystical and really beyond perfect–beyond description. There are simply no words to truly describe the feeling of sitting on a mountainside alone underneath the canopy of trees, surrounded by what some may call nothing. And yet it is everything that is the mountain. There are sounds and yet the silence in some ways is almost loud to your ears. There are birds and squirrels scampering around on the pine needles. The wind whispers through the trees, though it can roar on those blustery days in the fall. There are times when you can almost sense the wind pushing one season to the next, spring into summer, and summer into winter.
Ever since my childhood when I first crawled underneath the huge rhododendrons in my grandfather’s yard, I have felt absolute joy at being alone in the woods on the mountains. The smell of musty leaves creating a moist cozy scent where little is disturbed. I have been so blessed to have been able to experience that feeling time and again as I have grown up and it has never changed though so many other things in my life have.
Since making this move, I have been able to do a good deal of hiking on these mountain sides, crawled into small ravines, crossed clear cold streams and have begun to embrace the fact that I won’t be going away again. There are secrets and treasures here that I feel I will never be able to fully explore or understand.
On our property, there are incredible things I have seen and want to share here. There is a part of me though that feels to do so–to reveal some of this to the world would be a betrayal of the secrets the mountains hold–seemingly to be revealed only to those who walk their soil and climb their heights. This however, is my diary, my journal to be written, saved, and read by those I love today and those I will love in the future.
