My eyes linger on the train window, the landscape a blur that brings the promise of the unknown, the possibility that something hidden might be found. It’s the waterfall, spotted in a moving car, a brief break between trees revealing a vista. A blink or you’ll miss it. Something out there even when all signs point to bleakness.
This landscape that was my home once long ago is a place of barren hills and golden grass. Dry with open skies, the same folds of land for miles and miles. Unbreaking for hours, leaving me grateful that these visits are brief because even the luster of gold becomes dull when you spend enough time in its presence. It’s the same empty terrain that brightens and falls away with the seasons, beautiful to others, but desolate to me. I met a girl from the islands of paradise itself who said she saw something here that had been lost upon me after a lifetime of seeing scenery unchanged by the years. “A different kind of beauty.”
Now I exist in a place where evergreens frame the sky and mountains are clear and sharp in the coldness of winter. I live my ordinary life in the most remarkable place, the one I chose for the impression it left within me. A feeling that found its way into my bones, rooted in me, and grew until certainty spilled out of me that this was the place I was meant to go.
Where I live now, I’ve seen the impossibility of snow in the spring--groves where cherry blossom petals hover in the air, and tufts of cotton drifting in the wind--I've heard so many crows that the sound becomes singular, felt the freshness of a rain-washed breeze on my skin, cleaner and clearer than I’ve ever known anywhere else. There’s something in the air here. I don’t know what it is but if I knew, it wouldn’t have the same effect. It's not magic if we can explain it, is it?
It is only when I have given up looking that I find that the train is no longer on land but on water, the tracks skimming across it and we are surrounded by a still mirror, stretching for miles. And it is the most unexpected thing.
Even when the nature of the place I left behind exposes everything, laying it bare, there might still be some secrets left uncovered.
Inglenook is a community resource for magic in both literature and life.
