Asheville mountains are soft and peaceful. The Blue Ridge Mountains look like static ocean waves in the distance, in various shades of blue. Driving into them always triggers a response in my body that feels at once activated and soft, something like being cradled by Mother Earth herself, an energy much different from other ranges (like the masculine intensity of the Rockies, for instance). It feels like a piece of my heart is reunited with itself each time I come back here.
I lived here for four years as a student at Warren Wilson College. This week, I’ve been doing my freelance writing and editing from my laptop in the college library, where I worked for three years at the circulation desk. Only now, it’s completely quiet. Empty. And I am much older. The doors close at 4:30 p.m. each day—all but one front room, which is lined with windows along one wall that overlook the rest of campus. This is where I work for hours, until 8 or 9 or 10 at night, until I get hungry enough to leave.
Walking along these little campus sidewalks and paths, past old classrooms, the dining hall, all the dorms where I lived … it’s a funny thing. It’s like walking through a former life, a younger version of myself. This place was so influential in shaping my identity in ways I didn’t even realize until years later. I’ll probably never realize all the ways it’s shaped me.
Today, I hiked to Dogwood, a cow pasture that sits high up in the sun and breeze on campus, thinking back to the first time I was there, as a senior at North Hagerstown High School, visiting the college with friends.
All of this place is so saturated in memories, the land and buildings themselves feel like a part of my physical body, not just my psyche—like it’s ingrained in my entire being. It makes sense that I would be revisiting these places of my interior and exterior world while Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto are retrograde (and soon, Neptune and Mercury will be, too—we’re gonna go *way* back in July, revisiting all sorts of loose ends from our past).
A longtime friend from back home has plans to take a short road trip this summer to revisit each place he lived growing up—mostly places in Maryland, but each with their distinctions, each appearing in his life at different stages.
A place so often defines a passage of time, even if we don’t give credence to it. I wonder what that means for a life lived on the road, how the constant change will affect me.