This Place

When we first came here to visit, I thought, This place is not beautiful. There were awkward juxtapositions of forests and fields next to new construction neighborhoods lined with cookie cutter homes. There were cows in one field, and a few horses in another field, and every place looked the same: boring.

It was not love at first sight, or even second sight. It was an unavoidable fact, that we would pack up the first house we ever bought and move here, to this place. We came weeping. I did not want to come.

It has been five years now, and on the way to church we drive past the tobacco fields and I see that it is a sea of dark green, and I think of last winter when it was a field of dirt, and I know that in a few months as the fields ripen we will see the bug-like sprayers rolling across the fields, and then the heavy machinery will arrive and the tobacco will be picked and the cycle will begin again. I like that we have lived in this place long enough to know that the rhythms of these f…