Nature Blog Post 1

            "West Virginia, Mountain Momma, take me home."

            My girlfriend and I sing these lyrics loudly in the kitchen of our new Morgantown apartment. We mean it as a joke, as a way to differentiate ourselves from West Virginians, from the land. Our hometowns and our landscapes are so much – sleepier? What does this place feel like, the land alive with so much character it seems like a caricature?

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            I wake to our dog's accosting bark. Jenna and I have placed the laundry bin upside-down so he can see out the window ­­­­­­­­– he simply loves seeing. I yell at him to stop; Jenna rolls over and sighs. He's really leaning into it. I get up to see what he sees, what's making his posture so alarming.

            And what the hell is it? A dog? It looks like it might be a dog, a lean behemoth, running out of sight, looking back briefly with crooked smile.

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            In deciding how to write my nature blog, and what space to limit my perceptions to, I was blessed by a stroke of luck: a picturesque location right outside my apartment, which I know nothing about, having just moved here.

            What I have learned so far has come from the detritus of what has come before: the deer poop Nikki rolls in, a behavior I've recently come to learn is instinctual in hunting dogs. Looking at him, a curly, black-haired cutie, you wouldn't think hunting was in his genes, especially because his fur seems to trap everything within it. Or the fallen leaf I picked up, in hopes to learn more about the trees here.

            And what about the cooing chirp I hear up in a thickly leaved tree? I'm stripped to my untuned ears. Head down, nostrils flared, Nikki misses the calico cat I see tucked neatly on the neighbor's porch. I trust his other senses more than my own, but I'm constantly having to cut the hair in front of his eyes so he can see past his own paws. We're an unlikely pair, but I'm grateful to have a companion on my otherwise unguided walks. We fill in the holes in each other's perceptions, and we are limited by them; I can only imagine what world he understands through the smell of that weed.

            The impulse is to call him away, to continue the walk and tear him away from smelling every shrub and mud clump. But this relationship is one-sided enough, and it teaches me to pay attention.

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            Most of the windows in the apartment look out over dull, pedestrian views. However, above the kitchen sink is a 3 by 3 framed look out over a breathtaking landscape. How strange it is, then, to be doing the dull, pedestrian thing, while seeing several hillsides: cemetery, whose gravestones make up one hill's teeth; sun, making this or that hill disappear; lone home, embedded in the foliage.

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            As it turns out, the leaf I picked up is a black maple leaf, from what I can discern. Its droopy three-to-five lobed ears sag on the branches; I wonder what type of hearing the tree is tuned to. The leaves, when they have five lobes, look like our symbol for stars, stars that must always skip leg day at the gym, bottom lobes always less developed than their beefy counterparts. These trees stop growing east past West Virginia, continuing only upward, toward Canada, smirking back at the land, then disappearing.