A Place

            They’re tearing down the hill by building it up- backhoe the road and foundation, test the well, pour the gravel.  Mountains of discarded soil mark the edges of a long scar covered by the clean gauze of winter. When I walk over the scabbed, sloping earth, I feel like a parasite, expecting the sudden slap of my unwelcome host to rebuke me.

            The hill never made me feel this way before. Half a mile and up the ridge was a circle of short grass, mowed in the middle of a two-foot high field of “weeds”. That six acre field was home of the meadow voles I tracked in winter, the nesting grounds of the red-winged blackbirds, and was filled with the spit bugs who were so much fun to expose, tiny and green and naked.

            Once, in the middle of a rainstorm, I met a fawn who was just as wet as I was. I knelt beside her, the grass shielding both of us from view. Slowly I pet the soft baby fur on her forehead, her nervous eyes fixed on my arm. After she left me, I found a swallowtail butterfly, hanging underneath a blade of grass to shield its delicate wings from plummeting raindrops.

            In the circle at the top of the hill, with trees on two sides, you can see the blindingly bright ski slope, the hops farm down the road to the south, the next door neighbor training his prize-winning barrel-racing quarter horses. Small fallow deer always dot the backyard hillside next to the horse corral, surrounded by a tall metal fence and freedom. If I walk up the hill during the day, my dog anxiously waits underneath the locust tree at the bottom of the trail, hoping I come back home soon.

            But the hill is most alive at night. When the horses and dogs are asleep, the field and woods simmer with energy. Owls are the strangest to hear- they’re only supposed to make appearances in movies. Wild deer make soft footsteps along the edge of the trail, the coyotes yelp and howl during every season, and the crickets never shut up in summertime.

            In the night, during the moon’s dream show, everything on earth swims and gives light in return with each undulation. The moon tenderly asks the gentle night breeze to cool feverish minds, if you go looking for escape when everyone else is sleeping. On the hill in that softness, you can believe all good ideas and dreams will come true, no matter what strange noises are coming from the woods. Moonlight in early summer… that was unpolluted.

            And now the moon doesn’t matter to me. Neither do the blackbirds and their grass perches, or the vole tunnels. I let myself imagine it will all be gone now, I am obsessed with the scar snaking up the hill, the pits and mountains that have replaced the mowed circle. It will still be there, alive, but that house will be grinning through the windows, daring the moon to give more light than its 60 watt bulbs. The furnace will know that no meadow mouse tunnel could be quite this cozy, and no blade of grass could be as rain-proof as the roof on this house. The hill won’t die, the moon won’t stop bathing the earth, and the snow won’t give up healing bruises. But that house will always be laughing at all of them. 

*Photos by Caleb C., dear brother*