Funny - it reminds me of California. Specifically, the pictures Kristin linked to from her drive down the coast.

Oh, Aimee, how lovely and ghosty.

If I had to guess where it actually is, I'd say Oregon or Washington, by the number of trees and the angles of the hills. But it still pinged my rural Pennsylvania brainspace somehow--probably because that's one of the places I'm intermittently homesick for.

I feel the same way about northern Michigan.

Oh, beautiful drabbles.

This drabble topic is going to break me.

We'll hold you up.

The thing is, the only picture that was really singing to me to be written about was number four, and I've done it.

I suspect I'm going to write a few that aren't connected to the photos.

Home

Photograph One:

Uncut grass tickles my ankles and the dankness radiating from the cut stone, shadowed at the wall's foot, chills the backs of my calves. Behind me the view stretches for vertiginous miles, and I know when I turn to look at it I'll feel I could lift my arms and let the wind fill imaginary wings. I could soar on the dense blue mist, track my way across familiar landscape below. My lungs fill with the smell of pine and grass and stone; my heart feeds on the blue distance, my roots go deep.

“If you miss us, why do you live there?” is the most common question I get from friends back home.

The reasons I give vary. The weather. My career. Learning to stand on my own two feet, away from the pressures of family and friends. Finding out who I am.

I never tell them the real reason.

He is loving, honest. He challenges me. He makes me be me - Not some watered down version of the me I think he wants. In Michigan, in California, in Antarctica. Where he is, I am.

He is my home.

As soon as I saw "home" I knew exactly what I was going to write. I just have to get home so I can start physically writing it. I thought it was independent of the pictures, but it could sort of be attached to #3. Sort of. There's a beach in the picture but it's the wrong kind of beach.