"Where thou art - that - is Home." ~Emily Dickinson
Happy Presidents' Day!
Hubby and I spent the weekend at a Bed and Breakfast in Vermont - very charming, and very in the middle of nowhere! It's ski season here (even though there's much less snow than, say, in DC or Maryland) - and I always find it interesting the way people grow up influenced by their surroundings. We were shopping in one of the small towns nearby, and people were walking literally off the mountain in full ski gear for lunch/a break/to warm up. I used to have long conversations with a friend in grad school about this: how we're so shaped by where in the country we grow up: mountains, ocean, warmth, cold... In fact, I actually worked this notion into One Night in Napa, my upcoming release with Samhain (May 2010):
Kira took a long, satisfying drag on her cigarette and wondered how living near a certain landscape might shape you, growing up. Did children who lived in the shadows of a mountain range spend their earliest days looking up, dreaming, watching the clouds make shapes? If you moved those same children to a seaside home, would they lose that distant vision? Would they start looking out rather than up, or develop a rhythmic gait that matched the waves they slept and woke to? Did growing up inside a city of skyscrapers create tunnel vision from the day you were born? Or did living your earliest years inside gated walls mean you looked at the world in fragments, in sliced-up pieces, so that you could never see the whole of something for what it truly was?
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In other news, have you been watching the Olympics? Talk about being influenced by your surroundings - so many of these atheletes were on skates/skis on their frozen ponds in the back yard almost before they could walk!
Any favorite events?
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