This Is My Home (2) / by sam taylor

this is my home

Good Wednesday Afternoon!

I forgot to post yesterday, haha. I got done at work, and was ready for my bike ride, and that was that.

So, a day late, the next installment of images that I’ve made this year that remind me of home - and how I am incredibly fortunate to call this place home.

The forests in Appalachia are some of the most diverse and unique in the world, with plants and animals here that have intermixed since the last ice age, full of little micro-climate hollows and mountaintops. They also have been hammered by human development in the last 200 years - timbering, mining, dam building. Sometimes I wonder what it might have looked like before. Before all of that development. It makes me wistful for something I’ve never seen, and can only imagine, as I look at forests that have been clear cut since I was a child - and now are thickets of thin trees and blackberry and multi-flora rose brambles.

So, I tend to prize the patches that have been left - like this one. Maybe not “virgin”, but untouched for many decades, with all the shades of green in the world in the same little patch of forest. Dense, beautiful, and hinting at what it might have been like.

Hope folks have a good rest of their week.