Conversation that leads me through childhood landscapes of chaparral, and
Giant ferns and firs are actual touchstones of a recent past in my beloved Northwest
Faded gold, orange and auburn vines
root me to the present
Skin of the earth – rolling,
undulating, on the edges of valleys:
holding them in, holding us in,
containing and safely ensconcing us
Road curving,
twisting, looping, switching back, climbing up then down
Ending at a
lodge and a general store:
The lodge: ordinary in the shocking
suddenness of remembering that I have
been here.
Had a milestone, then-crisis, here.
Have carried a round, well-worn pebble of
bitterness from this precise location
for
twenty years and three weeks…
Until
today when it crumbled into dust in a deep hidden pocket of my heart
Confirmed by the only journal entries
that escaped my ritual fire:
A
travelogue – part natural history tour,
part dream and reverie,
part diary,
part children’s stories,
part poetry, but
wholly inner-landscape-in-dialogue-with-the-outer-one,
as we bicycled
camped
hiked
wrote
for sixteenhundredmiles of coastline.
The general store: the place from
which we were retrieved, hitching a ride with
one stranger in the driver's seat,
two bikes,
two worn out explorers,
eight panniers,
four months of grime,
and a lifetime of aspirations.
Three weeks and
twenty years ago, I traveled from west to east on that exact stretch of
meandering road to the ending of a
trip and the opening up of another two decades
of taken journeys,
Until today when
I traveled east to west on that exact stretch of meandering road to the
beginning of this new place in life.
Early adulthood
to middle age.
In the place of
dust are gold heartflecks of promise:
Become quiet and the land will speak
words of healing.
All blog images created and/or photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
