Blog Prompt 8/ Place Prompt 8 What I've learned and what my place has teached me real good

The semester's drawing to a close and this is one of those rare occasions when I've been in a shift in perspective prior to returning for the next semester. Normally, it takes me a month or more to actually process and analyze what I've learned in a given course, but I feel that because of the more interactive practice of writing from my place has given me the luxury of jumping to my realizations rather than easing into them.

So I seem to be meandering to the point of learning quickly. I come to appreciate the world around. Not just my backyard place, but I am more cognizant of the impact I'm making on nature with something as simple as driving to work. That's not to say that I was ever really ignorant, however our discussions on moodle and writing on this blog have afforded me the time to slow down and reflect. Especially during my blog, I've been able to see the thaw of ice and snow as well as being able to taking on my own personal thaw in my prejudice or preconceived notions about nature writing.

I still have some opinions that haven't been dislodged. I still don't like Thoreau, but feel the mental change that would have had to taken place would have to be on the same scale of a lobotomy. I still appreciate his role in essentially cementing a genre, even if it was established in such a way that the diversity has until recently been very limited in terms of subject matter. It was refreshing for me to discover a more urban nature writing as well as nature writing that is not so gaggingly reverent. I see beauty in nature, and don't think I need to be told so explicitly in every reading that grass is green and lush and wonderful. Thankfully, Mel showed us that there's more than that. I enjoyed some of the pieces like 'Ecology of a Cracker Childhood' with its gritty comparisons between her family and their environment. I loved seeing the way that the environment is reflected in those who inhabit a particular region.

I still haven't changed in the fact that I'd rather read about people than flowers, but we were able to read some pieces this semester that established human relationships (both good and bad) with the natural world. Edward Abbey was a breath of fresh air as were Joyce Carol Oates' pieces. I liked that we ventured outside of my preconceptions of the genre and I was even exposed to pieces that I didn't realize fit into the genre.

I feel this course has opened me up and enabled me to be more critical of myself and more analytical of the natural world, which brings me to my place. It's not in full blossom just yet but on this lovely morning it is lush with life. The birds have returned along with the dew. My world, the backyard that i know still exists and exists again, but this course really made me take into account that even when it's not a welcoming backyard, it's still there. I discovered a world that until now I'd chosen to only experience on a minute basis, but now I'm able to appreciate the minutia of my backyard. I can now recognize the bend of each blade grass or the nest that's forming on the window ledge on the back of our shed.

My stump has been worn in with my shape just yet, but I'm beginning to feel more welcome in my backyard. Before it was a false comfort, but what I'm developing feels more involved and genuine. I'm still looking forward to being able to cut the grass again. I'm looking forward to re-connecting with that lost part of my backyard and revive from the winter lull. Most of that brown patchiness has disappeared and I'm ready to take the next step into a greener life.

Prompt 7 Grass

For me, grass has always held a mystical power over me. When I was little, I threw a tantrum because I hated the was it felt between my toes. I hated that only in the grass, as I climbed a ladder to get into a pool, I got stung by a bee. Grass is unique. It is at once expansive to the point of being overlooked and at the same time it is minuscule in size and scope. We can see it as a large unit or take into account each individual blade and although I've such a tentative relationship with it, it's something that I can't and no longer want to escape. I am the grass. I am the field. I am the fairway. I am each and every blade of grass. I am every bug, worm and bit of dirt that sustains it.

I like to think of myself this way. I can be a big picture, a stereotype that you can see coming from a mile away or I can be that smallest grain of seen nestled down beneath your freshly mown lawn. I am bold and easily seen, but what's going on beneath the surface is hard to predict.

As I've grow so has my attachment to the grass where I will wiggle my toes and let each tendon grip the ground beneath the grass. I've grown to love the dew that glistens when I'm the first one on the golf course, only the chirping birds to keep me company as the dig for worms and tell each other secrets out loud. I grow to appreciate the clipping glued to my sweaty ankles on a steamy summer afternoon when I have other plans.

It has become so many things to me, so much so that it has even become me. I can't draw the lines between what I am as a person and all that is hidden within the grassy expanses. I can't make out the juxtaposition because it all one world to me. The idiosyncrasies and that which remains to be discovered is what I've become. I'm still discovering myself as I'm still discovering what grass means to me. It is my world and I am unavoidable.

Place Blog #7 (Hello Scotland?)

Okay, so I at least know enough to realize that I'm in my backyard and not Scotland, but it sure feels likes the old country this morning with chilly temperatures and a steady drizzle. I can't even count how many mornings I woke up and had to walk to class in this, but it doesn't seem right after I was squeezing in 9 holes of golf between my two jobs yesterday in shorts and a t-shirt.

The conclusion this leads me to is that I need to do a better job planning when I come out and sit on my stump. First it's cold, then it's cold, and yet cold again, now it's slightly warmer, but still cold and rainy. Blood seems to obstinately refuse to circulate to my fingers and my butt seems to collect moisture through the towel I've laid on the stump and water drips off my golf umbrella. I'm not embracing the weather, but can you blame me. I can still see my backyard and observe the little bit of green that's been tempted into the blades of grass. I can also see the chunks of yard from my short game practice sessions and I know my dad's going to pissed, but in the scheme of things, I'm the one who takes care of the yard, so who cares?

I'm actually looking forward to being able to cut the grass again and being able to repossess or restake my claim on a world that's been lost to me for a winter. I'm looking forward to re-uniting with my backyard as some life finally gets breath back into it by the warm vitality of spring to come. I want to see the birds and hearing the buzz of the wasps that build their paper combs (minus the honey) underneath the deck railings. I want so much from my yard that's been missing, but more than anything I want to enjoy sitting out here again. For so long it's been laborious and mostly unpleasant to my human weakness to spend time on this stump already greening up with it's Statue of Liberty hued lichens. I know I don't own or control the back yard but I feel as though I've relinquished something comparable between the time I mulched the last of the fallen leaves and a day that still hasn't come yet.

The world is about to open itself up to me and all I can do is sit and wait.

Scotland, the gift that will forever keep me longing (Prompt 6)

It's been almost three years now since I came back from the land of outcasts known as Scotland. For those who haven't spent a considerable amount of time in the country and gotten to know what it means to be Scottish or at least for those of us who didn't have the luxury of having a class called 'Culture and Society in Modern Scotland' to explain to us this paradigm, let me provide some background.

I could go into the whole Bonnie Prince Charlie thing and the fact the English stole the throne from the Scots, but I was never very patient with history. Don't tell my girlfriend (the history whiz kid), but history, although important, bores me.  So here's the down and dirty of Scotland that helped me find a home at the very heart of a culture or at least helped shaped my world view. The true state of the modern Scottish psyche can be encapsulated by one single paragraph in Irvine Welsh' cult classic and dialectical roller coaster novel/collection of inter-related stories about heroin addiction, Trainspotting. At one point, the main narrator Mark Renton stops in the middle of the field to express his self-loathing as a Scotsmen, his says something along the lines of not hating the English for essentially making Scotland another colony, but instead hating is own Scottish heritage for allowing themselves to be taken over so easily by a bunch of wankers. The tone of this rant echoes through out contemporary writing and if ever a culture carried around a thinly veiled chip on its shoulder, it's the Scots. My professor was a renowned poet, Don Paterson. He pointed out to us what the Scots deal with and have come to accept on a daily basis which is that their very culture is a lie. The kilt is nothing more than a bit of folklore dredged up by Sir Walter Scott and the people of Edinburgh who hosted the English King at festival. Most clans, including William Wallace, most likely still wore the tartan that is so romanticized in travel brochures, but it wasn't the kind of kilt Mel Gibson wore in Braveheart. Ironically enough, the Scots don't even really own their own folk hero, William Wallace. At his monument in Stirling, it's Gibson image immortalized in a statue rather than what historical reports of Wallace's appearance conveyed. The culture is one searching for an identity. They are no longer the pastoral visages created by Burns' poetry or Scott's novels, but instead there is a seething frustration with not knowing what it truly means to be Scottish and this intrigued me.

I know I said that history lesson would be brief, but these feelings have been building up since the 1700s. The book we referenced was a history of Scotland from 1700 to 2007 and it did a lot to explain the why rather than just what events took place, but none of this really explains why I fell in love with Scotland and will never be able to let go what I found there. Of course there was all that golf that I played. I spent more time playing the Old Course than I spent in two semesters' worth of classes, but that's not what makes me want to go back. It's the smell of the North Sea settling over the cobble stone of St. Andrews and the sponginess of the ground that never really dried out while I was there. Most importantly, it the wind that comes from nowhere and everywhere. If this sounds a bit abstract, it's because it is. I love the way the Scots cling to an identity that they don't really believe. Honestly, how many times can you hear the bagpipes and actually discern what song is being played. It's about the peat earth and the purple heather between the treacherous gorse bushes which don't look nearly as threatening when they're in bloom, but don't be fooled. I love that the Scottish people are much like this gorse bush, a tangled mass of thorns that distracts from its dangers with bright yellow flowers. I love that the national whisky, Scotch, still contains the flavors of the very earth it comes from: peat, smoke and salt for the islay malts. The culture has been pre-packaged and in the very literal sense even bottled.

The land itself can be charming, green as far as the eye can see for most of the year and relatively moderate, at least to us north-easterners who are always prepared for cold streaks of subzero temperatures. The coldest night I remember as I trudged back from the pub, warm and tingling with singed throatful of Scotch and chips with cheese (french fries in a styrofoam container with shredded cheese, which one shakes until the cheese melts and then consumes while drunk) was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit and this was at the coldest point of the night. Most days in the winter were in the mid-thirties to low forties and in the 50s during fall and spring, although the potential to feel much colder than it really was is a unique feature of Scotland where the wind is always brewing with a damp cold that cuts right to your heart.

I know none of this may sound appealing. It does seem hopelessly bleak, but it's very real. It's the best of coastal Maine and Central Pennsylvania and if I ever earn enough money, I hope to move there where the North Sea laps below the cliff that holds the castle ruins directly across from the school's English building and poetry house. I know I said learning about history is boring, but living it or at least living in and around it, especially when it's an unfamiliar history that would scoff at what Americans call longevity...that's something more. The University of St. Andrews is at least twice as old as the U.S. and although it can be touristy with the golf courses and whatever, there's something genuine hidden just beneath the surface. Although the Scots put up a front, their identity is just waiting to be plucked from the gorse bush or uncovered on the West Sands. It can be picked up and embraced at any time, but what is most intriguing is that they don't necessarily even know what 's real anymore. It's all about a feeling that has yet to be absorbed as a nation and that potential volatility is just as thrilling as the landscape and attractions.

Place Blog #6

It's a still night, dark, except for the glow from family's watching tv in their houses or reading stories to kids who just can't fall asleep. There's no wind rustling the branches which remain bare despite a couple of warmer days. It's so still that I can hear the rumble of trains on the tracks almost a mile away. The only wildlife out here right now is me. Who else would be rambling around at this time of night?

That's just what I hope to find out. I came out tonight to find out what goes on in the world when I'm not around. We are such a self-centered species that we believe the world stands still without us. We expect everything to be in the same place we left it when we return, but night has a way of obscuring the familiar and that's why I'm out here. I want to find what's been obscured from view. I want to catch the sly saunter of the fox or watch the raccoons who topple our trash cans, but maybe they have a certain reverence for this stillness too.

I feel the light from my macbook is somehow in violation of the code of the evening. The click of my keys and the hard pop of me striking return is almost deafening because it's so close, too close. It drowns out the trains and keeps the animals away. I am standing in my own way of truly experiencing nature, but I can't close the lid. I can only hope that one creature is brave enough to explore this forbidden light that glows on my face.

Somebody's poisoned the water hole...

Where I currently work and will eventually move, if I can find a way to swing the rent and still pay tuition is lovingly referred to as Morrisons Cove or just simply the Cove to those who know it best. Ever since I started working there in late January, I've wondered how this area earned its name because I usually associate coves with some substantial body of water. Sure, there are ponds and irrigation run-off areas in this heavily agricultural area, but the real problem is the name but rather that the water itself is contaminated.

Some may know and others may not (myself included prior to starting my staff writing position at the Herald) that farming areas often have an excess of nitrates in the water. I've come to learn from my co-workers that high nitrates levels are often caused by areas where concentrated nitrogen can be found like septic systems, animals feeding grounds (farms, barns, pigpens, etc) and heavily fertilized fields. Too much nitrogen probably won't effect a healthy 24-year old like me, but it's particularly dangerous for the nursing mothers, pregnant women like my co-worker, Kazia, and infants. It's unsafe to use in an infant's formula, juice or drinking water and can lead to a variety of complications including blue baby syndrome in which child takes on a bluish hue.

A unique characteristic of nitrate contamination is that water cannot be treated by freezing, boiling or letting the water settle out. Actually, in some cases, the concentration can be intensified by boiling the water.  Many blame the contamination on area streams that are not properly secured from farm animals entering them on private farms. One of my co-workers was outraged when she saw a cow in a stream the other day because she said that the cow's uncleanliness and exposure to nitrates further contaminated the water.

This is not merely a local problem, but it was the extends to the entire Chesapeake Bay Watershed as there are a great many farming community between the Cove and the Bay.  According the press releases that brought this problem to light and prompted a few are nitrate treatment plants, as our water flows outward, not only does it carry with it our nitrate heavy water, but it also gathers nitrates from the other communities along the way.  The end result is that the nitrates are dumping into the Bay at a toxic levels and harming the wildlife throughout the entire watershed area. Fish and land wildlife are adversely affected by the contamination and many communities have been required by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to do something about it.

As I said, in Martinsburg they've built a Nitrate Removal Plant, but these things take time and money.  We've got all the time in the world, but money is a little tight in our region. The Plant which only makes a small dent in the problem cost the community four million dollars.  Right now, it's the best the community can do and it's unfortunate because Roaring Spring, a neighboring community is also effected because they bottle water and sell it throughout the area. I can't imagine this problem will be too good for business.

Everyday, I drink bottled water and do my best to avoid tap water, but the problem isn't going to go away.

Place # 5 Settling back in

It seems like the cold spell's broken or at least enough to be tolerable again. 45 degrees is doable rather than insufferable and the sun is shining which allows me to indulge in the delusion that it's really warmer than I feel sitting out here on the stump.  All the snow's disappeared again and I can only hope it's not just another quick tease. The tan grass is in its full bland glory and matted down in places like greasy bedhead.

I've seen a few birds out here the last couple days, but maybe that have wriggled free from their straw blankets yet this morning or maybe my seeing them was another bout of selective spring fever. Who knows? The wind is blowing but not enough to be oppressive and it smells like some one in my neighborhood is burning their wet leaves. I can see the milky smoke puffing upwards and unfolding like an afghan, but I don't have the necessary motivation to find the source.  Instead, I lean back, almost forgetting that my stump has no back and enjoy the smell that it disperses across my otherwise wasteland-like landscape.

I look at my shed and wonder when the rabbits will make their next appearance, but guess it's not really feasible in terms of food for them to be out and about yet, especially because none of my dad's flowers have started to bloom yet. It's a yearly battle between them and one I don't understand. He could just not make us plant them and then the rabbits would not terrorize his precious, but untended flora.

The quiet right now is a little eerie and doesn't match the overall look of the day. It's the kind of day that suggests activity, but there is little to see. My neighbor lets her dog out, some kind of miniature beagle or weiner dog with a lot of yap in him. He rails against the garbage truck that grinds to a halt between our houses and let's me know I'd better get inside. I've been putting off going to work because I was out so late covering a story last night, but I think I'm pushing the boundaries of acceptable comp. time and better get to it. That school board story isn't going to write itself and for that matter, I don't want to write it either...not on a day that holds so much promise.

As I walk through my back yard to my deck two little gray birds--sparrows, perhaps-- flit after one another before settling on the rain gutter. They watch as I close the door on one world to enter another.

Prompt 4 Great Snakes!

It's a kind of heat that suffocates you where wind blows dust in your eyes and whistles, but the desolation of the desert it ruptured by a rattle.  There are no cribs or playpens in sight and the first instinct is to run, but that's the worst thing you could. Stand still and search all around you at your feet, study the pile of rocks only a few feet away until you see movement on the rock ledge, but you still shouldn't make any sudden movements when you're in the home of the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.

I've always loved reptiles, but I would have to say that my favorite would be rattlesnakes.  We have timber rattlers and copperheads in Pennsylvania, but we don't the beauty and fear inspired by the diamond pattern and the black and white banded tail just below the rattle.  Our snakes are boring by comparison.

When I was eleven, my parents took me away from building a tree house with my friends and a fairly successful little league season to head out west in a mini-van and the only thing I had to get me through the aforementioned boyhood milestones were the promises that we'd get to see all kinds of wildlife. I was strong into my snake phase then and what I wanted almost as much as I feared was to be out hiking and hear that rattle.  I wanted to see a diamondback up close.  For some reason, this was my ideal of the west with it's expansive deserts and I'd seen it so many times on tv that I just wanted something cool I could tell my friends when I got back (I didn't think Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, the Grand Canyon or any other national treasure were worthy of tree house stories...it had to be something better).

I eventually did get to see my snake, but it was behind glass at a reptile house in Arizona and none to pleased about its regular meals or audience.  I like different things about the snake now than I liked then, but as I stood there, a little closer to the glass than my parents would have liked, I watched its tail wagging violently, but not like a dog.  The black and white strips just below the rattle blurred a little as it reared up into the S-curve that I learned means it's about to strike, but I could move and I'm fortunate the glass was between us because I don't know if I would have moved in the wild.  It was hypnotic and I was transfixed in a way I haven't been since.

I can still see it and it thrills me.  I was frightened, but couldn't look away.  I still love these animals, I've watched specials about them being milked so that their venom can be turned into anti-venin.  I've had dreams about falling into a winter den of western diamondbacks, I've been bitten, I've gotten sick, but I keep coming back to them in my dreams.  That coiling S returns to my mind and for me represents the west with its barren hostility.

I feel a certain kinship with these snakes. They are coarse and dry. They warn you before the strike, but don't hesitate to make you pay for ignoring their warning and then they slide away.  I always though of them as solitary animals, but once a year they come together to hibernate and I feel this way about my best friends.  We too can be venomous, but once a year we must get together and share our vertical slit stares and warn the rest of the world that when we're released back into the wild, we're hungry and ornery and ready to strike.

My scales are bristling.  I missed out on hibernation this year and the exhaustion leaves my tail with an incessant rattle.  Hikers beware.  I'm curled up on my ledge soaking up the sun when I can and waiting for the next thing to invade my space to strike.  I'm not spiteful and hateful by nature, but given the opportunity, I can play that role now that indifference has evolved into deep rooted seething and frustration.  I'm hungry.

Place Entry 4 A little Squishy

I finally got what I wanted, but not exactly.  The snow that covered substantial patches of my yard while I ate breakfast this morning was gone by the time I got home from work. Seeing the brown grass fully exposed, I immediately thought of the dry grass around Scotland in the winter and grabbed a gold club from my trunk and marched or rather to suctioned steps up throw my backyard, dodging the doggy landmines that had for so long lain hidden beneath the snow.

It was a reverse mirage where I saw a dry and arid landscape and my mind fooled me with hopefulness, I instead brown speckles creeping up the back of my khakis, but did that stop me?  Hell no! A junkie, especially a golf junkie, knows no bounds, besides it's nothing a little stain stick and a Tide pen can't fix right?

I squished my way to the middle of the yard and enjoyed the soggy blankness.  At this point, anything was better than the expansive white misery.  The 61 degree whether felt like a bit of a tease with so much wetness, but it felt good to be outside.  A gathered a few of the balls that were scattered around the yard and started hitting pitch shots up and down the yard.

I only wore a t-shirt and a pair of dockers and I couldn't have been happier.  My boss asked me the other day if I knew what state I live in when I was complaining about the cold whether.  I told him I never knew any other state, I've never been able to officially call anywhere else home but with the forecast, I can be a little hopeful.  I'd played golf in hip waiters if I have to, but come hell or high water, I can feel that gold bug building as the neighborhood seems to come to life around me.  Golf balls pop up in the and splatter 30 yards from me.

Dogs are chasing each other in a fenced in yard a couple houses over and on the street behind my I can make out the subtle pock sound of a baseball hitting a catcher's mitt.  My neighbor plays college ball and must have come home for dinner or to have a catch with his dad but either way I can see a change in my mood as everything I love in the natural world is coming back into bloom even if it's temporary.

I chase the most recent round of golf balls to the other end of the yard and switch to hitting flop shots until I dig too deep sending a huge chunk of real estate down the yard and splattering my forehead and nose with a little much.  Even the earth smells fresh.  It's been trapped in the ice that it doesn't even smell like I remembered.  Everything is new again and the world has potential.  It has diversity, and as I round up my golf balls and head back to my trunk to put my club back in my bag, I see them.

They're faint but unmistakeable. I may not hunt, like so many other people in central Pa, but I know deer tracks when I see them.  I reach down to touch the compress ground.  A certain firmness among the sludge and I can't help but wonder what else I missed today.

Blog Prompt #3

I've said this before, my intimacy with my backyard and my whole yard in general comes from cutting the grass, but it's a disconnected intimacy.  While I pushing the mower back and forth or up and down the yard, depending upon orientation, music plays in my ears.  I kick clumps of grass that are too much for the bag and I know it's time to empty again.  It's really only on these segues of emptying the  bag that I look up and see what I've created with my yard.  Parallel lines on one side.  Neatly arranged and beautifully shorn.

As I scan across the yard, I'm very aware of what's still to come, an unruly bristling of overgrown blades of grass, desperately in need of a hair cuts.  I wipe the  sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm and the slickness of my forehead combines with the coarseness of grass clippings that have inserted themselves into my arm hair.  Even through whatever music is pumping in my ears, I enjoy this grittiness and I observe it other place on my body as well.  Right along the seam of my sock or just above the elastic waistband of my gym shorts or even in the creases of my exposed neck.  I know I'll carry this interaction with me beyond the actual grass cutting.

Not to overdo metaphors, but it's not unlike the residual effects of making love.  You can still smell that other person on you, intricately woven into your own scents and sensations from the way you sweat, once moist, blended and dried or the lingering smell of a lover's private parts.  It's never a constant impression, but when the winds shift or you reposition your body the essence of the encounter catches back up with you.

When you itch your face the deep aroma of grass clippings or sex can fill your nose or as you strip to shower you find stray clippings or strand of hair that is not your own.  It ties you to the past and many times the promise of future encounters.  I know it's crass to compare working in the yard to sex, but the sensations of touch and smell after both encounters were inescapable for me.  It's that sharing of fluids and fibers, that blending that occurs when we dry out and move onto the next activity whether it's the morning after or standing at the grill in the backyard waiting to flip the burgers or turn the chicken.  We dry out, we mix together, we share a little bit, and the evidence of our intimacy is rarely something visual.  It's usually a little more subtle than that.

Place Entry 3 Crunching

I should pick better times to come and be with nature, but I have to tutor at the private school I work at by night so, I'm going to have to make this count.  I'm sitting on the stump listening to the crunch and crackle of my neighbor pull up her drive way.  They didn't do any better clearing their ice than we did and now the tires splinter the ice like panes of glass.

The weather man keeps saying its going to warm up soon and all I can think about is what's hidden been this ice-scape I call my back yard.  A few brownish flecks dead grass dotted the receding ice flow like whiskers and it gives me hope--or maybe hope's not the right word, but it makes me believe that there will be an end to this eternal cold.  I have to laugh at myself even as I shiver.  What the hell kind of mountain kid am I?  I've gone soft.  I've gotten old.  That's what's happened.

When I was younger, my friends and I would spend all night playing tackle football in my back yard and the ice only made it more fun.  It proved your toughness as you lunged through the air and mashed the other guy into the ice.  By the end of our games the entire backyard would be shattered.  We'd have sore ribs and scraped lips, but we never complained like this, bitching about 8 degrees with snot crystallizing in our noses and our team down two scores.

Maybe that's the biggest reason for my whining: I'm alone.  I'm sitting out here wishing for action, for something to write about, but there's nothing and no one to talk to or at least be mocked by. I think toughness and my ability to endure nature requires me to have something to prove.  I know that doesn't say anything good about my individuality, but as I grow older and I have no more friends around, my sense of adventure and mental toughness has withered away.

I need to revert, at least mentally to a time when friends would still come over and play football, when I could tolerate anything as long as there was cup of hot chocolate waiting for me somewhere.  Tonight as I stand up and head for my car, all I have waiting for me is obnoxious girls who don't feel like doing their homework on their own.  Spoon feeding.

Blog Prompt 2 A home that's not a home

My concept of home is a bit of a conundrum.  That is if I interpret home as somewhere where I feel truly comfortable and at ease with myself. I'm not putting on a performance, but I am playing.  I have friends and people who make me feel welcome although I'm not very talkative and I'm not a people person.

I say it's not a home because nobody lives there, unless you count the the club secretary who is always in the same seat at the bar waiting to tell me that I could be a scratch golfer if only I'd get my putting under control. My home or at least where I feel the home connection the most is at the Summit Country Club in Cresson, PA.  This is where my mountain people are.  For those of you not familiar with this town, it's about 20 miles "up the mountain" from my physical house.

From the first time I pull into the parking lot each spring and yank my bag from the trunk, I look forward to what is ahead of me.  I know each roll hillock and neatly trimmed fairway.  I know what sounds I'll hear once the birds return to the trees and the people who inhabit these 18 holes are genuine.  They're just as interested and friendly to play with as I am in my desire to spend time with them.

It's on the fifth hole where I hit my tee shot and dip down into the little valley or artery that leads to the very heart of my home.  It leads me the furthest away from the road, away from civilization and it's here that I'm free to absorb the trees on either side of the fairways and the little openings where I've found so many lost balls, but more importantly it's here as I'm searching for an errant shot that I can do most of my thinking.  Aside from my frustration at the last shot, this is where I really plan out stories I want to write or I imagine where the world will take me because in that time I can get away with that.  On the course, there are no consequences just potential.

I find my ball and do my best to hack it out of the woods and save a good score on that hole, but it doesn't matter I know by the time I make the turn and go into the bar to buy a powerade and a granola bar, I'll be met with hearty greetings, a few pats on the back and questions about my game that are thinly veiled inquiries about how I'm doing as a person.  Up there, there seems to be a bit of a code, but it makes the caring any less genuine.

By the time I climb the last mountain on the 18th hole, I'll be able to wave and be welcomed by the guys on the first tee or who ever's working out on the range and I'll be sad to leave in November when the leaves get so bad that you don't want to bother looking for your ball.  Every winter I leave this landscape and these people that I know so well and I go into hibernation until I can do it all over again.  I'm already anxious to get back there.  To hop over the creek and listening the clacking of my clubs echo through the trees.  This is where I really belong.

Place Post #2 Snow, Snow and More S-No

I feel that I've drained all descriptions of cold, snow and miserablism from my wary fingers.  It snowed again yesterday, in a way that made most school kids cheer until they realized, as my brother did, that it wouldn't last long enough for any kind of delay or closing.  As I mentioned, I'm sick of snow, both in describing it and my experiences interacting with it in my backyard.  I'm going to write from a carved out little patch in my memory that not too far from the rectangular bathroom zone that my brother and I dug out for our dog (the one that she completely disregards and comes back inside completely covered with snow).

It's weird, the things you think about when your all alone scuffing through a place you've been so many times before, especially when you're wishing that you could be in that place five or six months from now.  It would be June then, and I've had many great Junes in my backyard.  I've built and a few years later tore down a wooden swingset, I've pushed the lawnmower back and forth, creating perfectly straight (almost sports field worthy) lines and patterns, I taught my brother how to hit a baseball, golf ball and throw both a baseball and a football.  What I came to realize is that this isn't just a yard simply stepping out here is like passing through a gateway into memories and experiences that I didn't know I'd even had, or at least at the time I didn't think they were significant.

As flakes fall around me, sporadic and lifeless like nuclear fallout, The white blanketed ground reminds me of setting up the large white tent for my bon voyage party.  The concept of a bon voyage party in itself is ridiculous, but the extent to which my parents carried it out prior to my departing for Scotland was equally asinine, and for some reason I always end up doing the work for parties that are thrown for me, but that neither here nor there.

It's the day before the party and this enormous tent has been delivered to our backyard as a pile of disconnected aluminum poles, a few yellow ropes, so ground stakes and what looked like a folded white tarp.  May I just mention that there weren't any directions, my dad has a doctorate and little common sense and my brother a scathing tongue without a filter.  It was not prime work conditions by any means and we were crunched for time with a thunderstorm scheduled to role in before dinner.

My dad tried to make sense of the unmarked poles and refused to listen to my advice even though I'd set this tent up the week before as a part of working for Penn State Altoona's maintenance and operations staff.  Each time he incorrectly assembled a certain combination of poles, my brother made a smart-assed comment and I wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of my forearm.

I figured it was better to leave my dad and brother to annoy each other.  It was really a matter of who would reach the tantrum stage first and storm inside so that I could actually get some work done.  I unfolded the tarp and laid it out.  I put together the frame and tried to ignore my brother making another jab at my dad about how many degrees does it take to put together a couple pieces of metal.  I had almost the entire skeletal system put together when the first bit of lightning flashed across the sky.  That was all the cue my dad and brother needed to high-tail it inside, but I'm a little more stubborn than I should be when it comes to adverse weather.  I wrestled with the poles my dad and brother had been arguing over and just as I assembled the last leg, the white tarp took off with the wind.

It rolled like a tumbleweed across my yard and into the neighbor's yard.  I dropped the poles and chased it down to the accompaniment of my brother's laughter and my dad yelling at me to get out of the storm.  When I finally wrangled the tarp, and let me say this was no small feat because I literally had to use my entire body to ball in back up into something less parachute like, the storm was raging.  The skies had opened up and the thunder rumbled, but our tenting would have to wait.

I think about this now as the snow looks vaguely reminiscent of that tarp, but I can't wrestle this blanket.   I can't get it back in order.  This is another thing I guess I'll just have to ride out.

Place post 1-Fingertips

Another morning, another cold.  This is a new kind of cold, not that I haven't felt four degrees before, but it's new for this year.  How soon we forget the bitterness, whether its from a past relationship or from a kind of food, or, in this case, from the natural world.  It's a blinding kind of cold that stings you into existence and then makes you wish you weren't alive to know the sting.  It's the kind of cold that cuts through your gloves and leaves for fingertips with a numbness that will return the sting and then the ache if you warm them to quickly.

This is the morning I choose to sit in my backyard.  The is reflecting painfully of the fresh powder from the recent snow fall and the winds from last night have hidden all traces of life.  They've even swept away my dog's foot prints.  I notice the way the snow has drifted by our bank and it reminds me of the wispy dunes when my parents took us out west to White Sands.  It reminds me of that until the wind shifts throwing grains of snow about like an hourglass, grains blowing every which way.  The house behind me groans and the dampness in my nose freezes and cracks, then freezes again.

It's a deceptive morning.  Were I not sitting out in my backyard, waiting for the living world to wake up or at least make its appearance, I might think that it was a beautiful day.  It's not a day for playing outside or skiing.  It's not a day for running errands or doing anything productive.  It's a day to build a fire or at least turn one on and be entertained, whether that's with a good book, a new movie, or even taking a nap.  If it were warmer, with the sun shining like it is, I'd stay out here longer.  I'd make real plans, but my fingers ache from the cold and my breath is freezing in the scarf that covers my mouth.  I have plenty of nothing left to accomplish today.

Blog Prompt 1 My Side of the Mountain People

I come from mountain people.  Well...not exactly, or at least not literally.  My parents are by no means mountain people, but they do not make up the whole of my existence.  Of course they influenced my growth and development, but their Ohio lifestyle and Ohio attitude are somewhat lost on me.  I am definitely a product of the Laurel Highlands.  I don't say youns (yinz) and I don't hunt, but there is some connection to this mountainous landscape that is indelibly a part of my being.  Although, I complain about the winters every time I'm jonesing for a little golf, I don't really mean it.  I need winter.  I wouldn't know what to do if I never saw snow again or didn't the luxury of an all out March slush fest.  For those of youns from 'round here you know what I'm talking about.  It's that brand of snow, usually coming sometime in early spring where it looks like snow, but when you shovel it at the end of the driveway it splashes out gray water.

Of course winter exists many places, but what exists in me is a saltiness about it.  I have an attitude and some might call it a sense of superiority about it, but it's not that exactly.  What gets to me and makes me realize this part of myself is the way I get in a snow storm when I'm stuck behind someone who's clearly not from around here by the way they panic behind the wheel, swerving and making abrupt jerks of the wheel.  It's just snow people!  No need to freak out.  There's also no need to race along like an idiot who thinks they're oblivious to the effects of snow and rubber interacting.

What proves to me that I'm a mountain person is the way that I can't stand cities and the pretension associated with them.  (This is where I also take note of the fact that I'm not completely without some nature writing inklings)  I know that I couldn't live in a place where I have to go somewhere other than my own to find grass.  I feel at home when I can just walk outside and see a few trees or a night expanse of lawn.  I like knowing or at least believing that my neighbor is a genuinely good person and if I pull over on the side of the road someone will offer to help.  All of these are things I've experienced first hand.  All of these are things that I can't live without.  It's the simple wisdom of the guy leaning on his truck and talking about what the clouds mean or going to bar that was funded by money from either coal or the rail road.  The thing that is most important about a mountain person is there sense of history.  Even if your family is from these parts, you're a part of something because you grew up here.  Sincerity isn't just an act and people follow through with their promises, maybe not right away, but eventually because they have a sense of duty and no concept of time, especially in the winter.

Home Sweet Home

The snow has fallen mixed with a little ice and my brother probably should have had a two hour delay today.  I had to chase the dog out in the yard.  My mom and dad's vicious little schnoodle (schnauzer poodle mix) got spooked by something went off on a tear into the neighbor's yard, barking but not scaring anyone except for me, but that was more because I had to crunch out across the newly frosted expanse of my backyard in flip flops.

I shouldn't have stayed home today, I think as I take careful, but purposeful strides up the hill and into the neighbor's yard.  For such a domesticated animal, virtually a cat/dog hybrid with her natural tendencies to use family members as her personal pillow or stretch out lazily on the back of couches, Sadie has an uncomfortable adeptness at moving on this new ice.  I probably should have found something more gripping, more solid than these flip-flops, but nothing else was close at hand, but as I'm wrangling her up and re-directing her barking tantrum back toward our property I would hardly have the nerve to call these flip-flops convenient for their immediate closeness.  My toes feel chapped and ache with a coldness that is too easy to forget when you're sitting by the gas fireplace typing blog entries.  Sadie is stretched out on the back of the couch now, reading over my shoulder in a way that would annoy me if she weren't such a hair-brained dog.  And, as if on cue, she's off the back of the couch and proving my point, yapping away at an icicle that just fell from the eaves.

Outside, the trees are bare and even though our winter has been mild, I'm already itching for spring.  I'm not the type to stay cooped up like this only observing nature from behind the panes of glass that barely know how to keep the cold out.  I fold my blanket back over my toes that still tingle with the after burn of my little chase this morning and plead with the dog to just shut up already.  Haven't you caused enough problems for one day, Miss Sadie, Lady of the House and Bitch of the backyard?