I once knew a boy from Saskatchewan. His hair was the corn and his skin the sun. One night as we lay side by side, he told me of how he missed his home. The flat. When you walked home at night you could see the lights of the next town over. And how in the winter, it all turned bright white. And the sky. It was bigger than everything else. Some days it was storms, and others cotton clouds. Sometimes inky black with stars spilt everywhere. The best days though, the sky was just blue. In the dark it was so quiet. The loudest sounds were those you made yourself.
And I couldn’t help think about how terrible it all sounded. I couldn’t stand to live without my mountains. So tall and strong. Cradling me in their valleys. The song of the ocean always singing to me, never quieting enough to allow me to hear sounds in the night. How the word green could never contain all the facets of the forest. The trees. Some big and some small. How they grew together in groves. Coniferous families, roots deep into the ground branches reaching to the heavens. How they obscured the sky, and let light shine through their arms and form pools of sun in the dirt.
I loved how my world made me feel small, made me feel protected. And he loved how his made him feel huge. How it made him feel powerful. To him storms were lightening and snow, to me they were warm wind and rain.
