I have been coming up to the North Georgia mountains to my Family's land all of my life. I knew about how my great-great grandfather bought the land here adjoining his brother's land, since before I even understood the words. And yet, when I began writing about the McKennas, I never realized what I was writing about.
I wrote about two brothers who bought adjoining tracts of land in the North Georgia mountains and I never thought of the parallel with my own Family. It was only last year that it clicked. I guess I'm a slow study when it comes to insight into my own actions.
I know that I feel about this place up here, with its wide fields and its undisturbed forests, like many of the members of the McKenna family feels. To wake in the morning and lean out the window to that new sunlight streaking through the trees, or to lie in bed with the moonlight tiptoeing into the room and hear the whippoorwill echoing, is an overwhelming feeling. It's as if you can't see it, or hear it, or smell it enough. You can't take it in enough to last you until the next time.
The land here, like the McKennas' land, has deep woods that has been encroached upon very little. We pretty much leave the woods alone, leaving them to the critters. When a tree falls and shakes the ground on impact, we know we'll leave it for a year or so before we take the chainsaw and cut it up to restock the woodpile. There're plenty of other fallen trees for this year; that one will be for next year. Or the next.
We hunt deer every now and then in those woods, but there are always plenty more. Last year, there were six...count 'em, six...bucks coming out of the woods into our field. There are lots of deer. There is a few bear, too, and a mountain lion has been spotted. What else do those undisturbed woods hold?
The McKennas are cattle farmers, for the most part. Despite hard times and hard work, they wouldn't have it any other way. The fields that dip and roll with the lay of the land smell like baking bread in the heat of summer; like vanilla when the hay gets cut; like dewy kisses in Springtime. The color of Spring grass is so outrageously bright green, no one would believe it if a photograph could actually capture it, and then suddenly, yellow flowers carpet it effortlessly from fence line to fence line. Mornings bring mist rising; evening brings slashes of sunlight that fade into shadow. And then, as the cicadas begin their song in the trees and frogs begin theirs at the creek, the lightning bugs begin flashing.
And then, there're the mountains. We can see them, layer on layer, from the porch of the Big House. Sunrise comes moseying and then suddenly whirling with cloud; sunset paints the sky sometimes in baby-soft mauves and pinks, sometimes in gold and flame-thrower red and, once ahead of a streaming rain-cloud, green and iridescent purple. I'm not exaggerating.
In between sunrise and sunset, they are patterned with shadow, blazing with autumn color and then bare brown all bristling with naked trees so far away, they seem like blades of grass. When rain is coming, they are outlandish blue; when heat is thick, they disappear as we wish we could. But, they always reappear. Look, see that bite I took out of Tray; my Cousin John's father used to tell my mother when she was little. She believed him. The mountains are stoically unchanging. The dip in the top of Tray Mountain is still there.
I could never, ever see them enough when I would come to visit. Just as I couldn't breathe in the air enough.
Now, after living here ten years on our own piece of Family land that adjoins my brother's land that adjoins my cousin's land that adjoins the Big House land that is also ours, I feel completely satiated with the atmosphere of this place. Not that I have had enough of it, but that at least I can absorb the next assault on my senses that it gives as the seasons change. The sensory overload is alleviated.
The McKennas don't experience it in quite the same way, I don't think. They have never been away from it; they almost take it for granted. Boone was always stopped in his tracks at the sight of the new, pinky-gold day beginning over the pastures, Morgan would stand for an hour at a time "land watching", as he called it, and Jordan will lean on the fence to admire the sweep of tall hay grass in the wind, but it doesn't sock them as it does the ones of us who weren't raised here. Even those of us who came every summer still would get enveloped by the high, wide space of it.
This land. Wow. The wind coming into your face from the river. The stars swept across the sky on a winter's night. The thunder coming over Tray Mountain ahead of a storm. The coyotes yammering far down in the woods.
No wonder Morgan and Kevin came here.
No wonder my great-great grandfather did.