I was on my way home to Indiana when I was shocked by how
beautiful the sky was. It had a clear blue background with ranks of puffy white
clouds. I laughed at myself aloud. I hadn’t seen the sky for four days.
In the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee the earth had a
very odd second layer of skin called “the canopy”. Trees looked like sticks
growing straight up out if the ground. There were no branches on the tree until
at least sixty feet up. Back home in Indiana that would never happen. Each tree
is silhouette perfect in a corn field.
But in the mountains branch touched branch, tree touched
tree until a green skin covered the mountain and the next mountain. I saw
enormous smooth green bumps creating a series of horizon lines no less than
seven deep. Indiana has one horizon line of corn or no horizon line if you are
in the city.
In Tennessee everything stopped much closer to my eye
because of these mountains of green. What blue sky I saw was thick with plump dark
rain clouds that poured themselves out on the heights but only sprinkled the
valley. The Great Smokey Mountains were everything the internet pictures
portray them to be. I was so struck with wonder at how different things were
from back home in Indiana. I laughed at
myself a great deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment