I wrote the following personal essay during my junior year of high school. As I reread my words from four years past and 16-year-old self's musings, I am overcome with nostalgia's crippling melancholy and sweet sentimentality. As I leave my home on the mountain and the United States itself for a 4-month sojourn in Bath, England, I hold dear now what I did then: the American South's quiet calmness and Sewanee's easy days and nights.
Give yourself five seconds. That's all you need. Close your eyes and listen. You'll hear the whistling wind dancing through the new, green growth of the trees in the spring; the wild, incessant, roaring hum of the cicadas in the summer; the crunch of the fallen leaves as deer and foxes and squirrels shuffle through the woods in the autumn; and the resigned, distant hooting of an owl in the winter. Breathe deeply, and you'll inhale the crispest, purest air in the entire southeast. Open your eyes. From the porch, you look down upon Lost Cove, an expanse of blue-green and scarlet trees that spreads itself out in a blanket over miles and miles of land; you cast your gaze upward toward the night sky, speckled with more twinkling stars than you thought existed; you experience my sylvan paradise.
My porch is simple and wooden, and years of exposure have weathered the mahogany planks of its surface, which scorches my feet on steamy July afternoons and numbs them on frigid December nights. Over it hang the branches of evergreens laced with pinecones, and brown, fallen needles cover it year round. My porch itself hangs precipitously, dangerously near the bluff. On my porch, I am not even five feet from the Sewanee house's interior, yet nature surrounds me, instilling within me a serenity that I can find nowhere else.
My mother and father purchased the house during Sewanee's homecoming weekend in October of 1997. With the house, majestic, though dwarfed, among the towering pines and oaks sprinkled along the cliff-side, came my porch. With my porch came the bee stings and mosquito bites and sticky, purple mouth and hands enjoying one-too-many grape popsicles on the lazy spring and summer Saturdays of my childhood. With it came the forest green, upholstered, wooden folding chair where my father sat, engrossed in grading a chicken-scratched bar exam, whose white pages blew in the whistling wind and blinded him in the sun. With my porch comes a flood of memories, each one clear as the water coursing through the stream a quarter of a mile away, each one vibrant as the autumn leaves peppering the trees and the yard, each one beckoning me back into the easy days of my youth.
It's a mild, slightly overcast morning in early spring: a profusion of twittering birds alight on the sturdy, coniferous branches overhanging the porch; the earth smells like last night's storm; from its meander, the stream becomes a waterfall, whose heedless rushing is audible from the house. I am three, and I pay no attention to the magnificent calm of the utopian woods surrounding me. I am presently devoting all of my focus to the scrutiny of my father's collar and the salt-and-pepper hairs that peak out from it. He allows me to pluck the gray hairs one by one while he stares off into the cove, which is shrouded by a dense fog, no doubt wishing he could turn back time. This untroubled spot, surrounded by slow-moving wildlife, quells any and all worries of my father's fast-paced life. I am three, yet I notice that his usually-furrowed forehead is smooth and his shoulders relaxed. Nature's serenity must work miracles. I close my eyes and let the crisp breeze flutter my hair, as I hold tightly to my daddy, a smile on my face.
The stars comprising Orion's belt have never been more pronounced: they emanate a glittering, white light so brilliant that I must close my eyes after a few minutes of looking up at them. Even then, three dots glisten behind my eyelids. The heat of the June afternoon has abated, and Sewanee has welcomed another mild, cloudless night. A brazen twelve-year-old, I am practically on the brink of adulthood. Even so, I still love to look at stars, taking into account the constellations whose patterns I have learned in school, while also searching for new formations that the scientists may have missed. I trace what is so obviously a cat with my juvenile eyes. Despite my pre-teen maturity, the undulating hum of the cicadas, punctuated by the occasional belch of a bullfrog, lures me into peaceful sleep as it has since I can remember. Enveloped within an old sleeping bag, I have claimed a small corner of the porch, long, wide, and wrapping around the front of the house. How tiny I am compared to the porch; how insignificant compared to the sky, stretching infinitely in all directions over my head. How magical the nighttime natural world, with its prowling animals deep within the woods around me and its lofty trees with leaves that quiver in the wind, must be to remind a presumptuous youth of her earlier years and to replace her daily concerns with quietness and bliss.
You tell me to think of a place where I feel a strong connection to nature, and my porch comes to mind before you even finish your statement. I am in the midst of nature's sweeping presence: its multitude of sounds, sights, and smells, and there I leave, if only for a short while, the tumult of my increasingly taxing daily life. The furrows of my brow soften; my body and mind reach a state of contentment and peace. Seated on the weather-beaten, wooden chair upon my porch, I abandon the past and disregard the future. Instead, I allow blessed nature to take me into her arms, and I focus only upon the whistling wind, the humming cicadas, the crunching leaves, the owl's far-off screeching.
