Romanticizing your hometown

I always loved my home in the south but, after moving away, it became even more magical. Even more ethereal. I grew up by a babbling creek, and worried that the bog-like waterlogged ground of our backyard would one day swallow me like quicksand. The nights were far from silent, staccatoed with the chittering chirpings of cicadas and katydids, nestled with the lonesome whistle of a train searching for its destination.

We often drove by empty, abandoned fields; I made up stories in my head about the splintered wooden buildings that were surely unoccupied. 

Maybe it took coming to a big city to realize that I feel most at home in an expansive plot of land far from adult supervision, crisping in the sunlight, bouncing from cobweb to cobweb (spiders don’t scare me when they’re outside, in their place). 

A couple years ago, when I was feeling really lost in the world, I took to the road and drove to a lighthouse. Unfortunately, it was closed that day for a race, so I looked up the nearest lake after buying a ridiculously sugary Dunkin’ Donuts beverage (it wasn’t worth it). What was worth it was accidentally stumbling upon a lake in Palos Verdes that made my soul awaken in a way almost inexplicable. I think it burrowed into my marrow, and was the beginning of the novel I’m currently working on (which takes place in a swamp, which in my head, looks a lot like that sliver of lake heaven I found.).

I am often besieged by the anxiety we all associate with adulthood—the never-ending to-do’s, the shoulds, and especially the can’t’s. But when I’m outside, I am at peace. I look at a pond, and I consider—the pond never asked to be anything, it just was. Thousands of years ago, a depression in the earth formed (perhaps by the rump of an animal that repeatedly sat there, I think with a laugh). It grew deeper and deeper, and then one day it rained, and then it became a pond. Seeds fell in, and things grew. And then the rain stopped, and it drained, but did the pond worry? No. It was what it was.

I want to be like that pond. I want to be like nature, accepting what God gives and takes. Maybe I’ll grow a tree, or maybe I won’t. Maybe my stagnant water will attract all sorts of duckweed, or maybe the constant tornado of chaos in my mind will keep the water clean of any debris. 

I think it’s a crime that so many of the gorgeous hills in Los Angeles are caged up like zoo animals with barbed wire fences and angry signs that say NO TRESPASSING.

But the land was made to play on, to dance on.

It is ours, isn’t it? 

So, if you’re moved to tears when you see the bottle-green fir trees of the PNW laced with moss, or the bulbous stalks of cypress trees in southern swamps, or the golden hills of California—I get it.