Happy new year

I walked, and when I stopped I chose a place that I already seemed to know. When the wind blew, it sounded not like the hearty, deep thrush of Eastern oaks, spruces, and maples, nor quite like the sweeping rustle of grasses on an open plain. I was surrounded by the canopies of eucalyptuses (I was at the top of a hill, and their trunks reached up from its side), and their sound was freer, lighter, higher. As each drooping cluster of leaves crackled, the vibrations were cast out into open space and bounced off of hundreds of other clusters before reaching my ears. The shadows they cast, too, were full of gaps that shifted around in the wind, allowing the sun to pass through and warm parts of my skin, but then shading those spots again just before they started to burn.

I did know this place. I had grown up with forests like these. Even the smell was exactly the same. Of course, to realize the connection was to admit that no amount of pretty description could ever clarify whether I liked the place because of what it is, or because of what it made me remember. I believed it to be beautiful, I really did, and it saddened me not to be able to know that I was right.