The Wonder of the Atmosphere

It’s a day like today that I moved here for.  Forgive the split proposition.  I’ve been reading too many Lee Child novels and am appropriating Jack Reacher’s terse verse.  But, never fear – I’ll certainly gravitate back to those customary, long, lilting, Latin lines of mine.  I guess that’s because I’m who I am and we’re all who we are, though God knows how many decades it took me to find some sort of center in that mind of mine.  One part of acquiring that sense of self I believe came from becoming sensitive or conscious of what I liked and didn’t and gravitated toward and didn’t.  Growing up an Army brat and then ending my Dad’s corporate drifting in Chicagoland (there’s a weird moniker), I was turned off by the sameness of every commercial artery and all the same lollipop signs.  Could be Baltimore, Chicago, Suburban California – how would you know – all the streets look the same with all the same stores and signs?  That didn’t bring me to Boone, NC.  But when I saw the uniqueness – the lack of uniformity and all permeated by the ubiquitous mountain breeze – I stayed.  And I’ve never looked back.  I just walked outside and the balmy 60° moist mountain breeze blew by my cheek and I was stunned with its esoteric beauty and thought I’d steal a moment from mountain real estate and tell you about it.  It’s so cool!  Skies are about a thousand feet with vagrant, roaming, blotchy, low cumuli coloring the land with such an air of friendliness.  I don’t know – I know it sounds weird but you come here and before you know it you begin to cultivate relationships with inanimate entities (I was gonna say people but refrained you know – “out of a decent respect to the opinion of mankind…” like the air, the rain, the trees.  I walk out on my deck at night because it’s more fun than the interior facilities and I like the ceiling better.  And at 58 it takes longer out on the deck so it’s an unfettered encounter with nature – mostly the night sky – which in the mountains is often in fine fettle.  The interplay at night between the white clouds of such magnificent variety and form with the black velvety nightdrop and scramble of glittering stars is simply incomprehensibly beautiful.  But it’s the small, quick unanticipated, daily moments like just now walking out of my office and encountering the glorious graze of moist breeze on my cheek that simply stop you in your tracks and you’re paralyzed in revery.  I’ll never carefully or clearly enough capture this experience in words but I hope to convey occasionally the profound effect the environment here has on me enough perhaps to cause you to question whether you should come confirm.  Something’s happening in the mountains – pure magic – there’s something in the air…