Home is where my hills are

A few weeks ago I spent a few wonderful relaxing days with a friend who lives a few hundred miles west of my home. I have never traveled very much; I don't really enjoy the traveling part, but I do love being elsewhere for a change, particularly with B, who pampers me and who knows the value of companionable silence as well as good conversation.

On my way home, I was driving, driving. I was thinking about conversations B and I had enjoyed and how much I love her nice calm dog and how comfortable I am in her cozy home. Where I am pampered. I began to realize that I could see a long, long way in every direction. I felt . . . different, once I noticed that wide open landscape. The flatness of the western part of New York State is something that had, until that moment, escaped my consciousness.

(I never knew that it's part of the Lower Great Lakes Plain; somebody told me that when I related the rest of this story to him.)

So.

I'm driving . . . and driving . . . and driving . . . across this big flat plain, all exposed to the heavens and every living thing within fifty miles and with nothing much to entertain me except the wonder of why the driver of the black Jaguar in front of me would not move over so I could pass him . . . and later, the challenge of the roughly-paved diverted lanes established, apparently semi-permanently, by the state's department of transportation to allow work on the real road. Nobody was working on the highway, but the signs threatening extra fines for speeding in work zones went on for flat mile after flat mile.

A hundred miles from home, what is that . . . what did I see? There, in the distance...?

I don't know why this picture won't enlarge when clicked upon!

A rise in the landscape, blued by the humid distance. I smiled. With each homeward mile more hills rose around me. I sighed. My skin loosened.

My shoulders relaxed and my breathing became deeper. The closer I got to home the more I felt welcomed by and nestled among my hills.

I think there are hill people and valley people. Valley people come to my house and exclaim with awe over the view, and in the next breath wonder how we manage in the winter, "so far out here!" Maybe there are plains people too, who like seeing everything for miles around. I have a friend who has a breathtaking home in another part of the country. Gorgeous home, beautiful pool . . . and flat all around for a hundred miles.

I like seeing my neighbors over there.

I walk up to the top of the field and look across and there they are. I silently greet them, two miles away in crow distance. I know they're there; they know I'm here. We just don't have to look at each other all the time.