I wear a felted brim hat, the color of evergreens, as I walk these woods. From skyrise high oaks, it is raining acorns- one of the many signs that a cold winter is before us. Prairie Rose accompanies me. She is half Great Pyrenees, half Border Collie. She is Border Collie with my husband, Great Pyrenees with me. I fear not with her loping in front of me through thick leaves and roots that I think I know. A trip down ancestry remembers that my bones know this place. My people came from this place and all across the Appalachians they called home. My memories in dreams remember the water here, the hills, the land, and the songs.

“What were your family names?” I am often asked. McCoy, Cobb, McIntosh, Taylor…too many to name. As far back as four-hundred years when they came from Britain and Scotland to make a new way. Longer back for my Native peoples. Only gone a few generations now.

I try to hear the trees and recognize the plants, to sing to the birds, and laugh with the squirrels, but they only speak in whispers, for I am a stranger in this place and my blood still smells of desert sand and cacti. They do not remember me, for it was long ago.

I was born and raised in the west. I have half-jokingly told people for decades that I was misplaced. Never feeling like I was from there, though I was…and am…and I am a long way from kin.

Here beneath the falling acorns- that I made into flour- and tiny spotted fawns who dance by whilst I enjoy my morning coffee, of rivers rushing and trees that remember the war, I sit quietly as student and listen to the Earth and the ripples of stories that circle through the dense trees and try to remember, as if I were at my grandmother’s knee, her apron around her and tales from these lands to tell me-to teach me. I listen in quiet wonder and find myself humming her tunes.