Green Forests

I returned to New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago for a week-long visit. It was rainy at first, and then cold, humid, bright, and sunny. I was happy to hear thunder, watch many sunsets, and feel the humidity. I caught up with friends and family, traditions and memories, and enjoyed a really restful time. 

I've heard of being homesick for two places at once, and I've felt that this year. In California this spring and early summer, I missed the green landscape, humidity, summer warmth and unspoiled emptiness of New Hampshire. While experiencing New Hampshire's summer rain and chill, I missed the predictability and warmth and the mountains and landscape of California. 

After the first couple of days back east, I noticed the news that the poet Donald Hall who lived about 20 miles away, had passed away. I first learned about him while studying in Scotland and recalled that I was excited to learn from so far away that he had been a U.S. poet laureate, wrote with the great poets of the 20th century, and happened to live in New Hampshire.

After reading his long obituary filled with his poetry and how he made a happy home and life in NH, I thought then and in the coming days on the quiet roads and forest paths of how Hall lived and wrote and died in a beautiful place that once again, I was happy to have roots in.

From the essay, Why We Live Here by Donald Hall about his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire

Late spring and early summer, the whip-poor-will wakes us at four-thirty. Gray light starts over the hills; thrushes sing from every branch; clouds snag like lamb's wool on blue Mount Kearsarge. Down by Eagle Pond, just west of us, pickerel leap for blackflies and when they splat on the still water wake frogs and turtles. It is a good hour for waking; we keep the green universe alone. But late September is the most beautiful time, and early at the road. Sugar maples flare a Chinese red; they combine with tweed on hills in the middle distance. I grant that winter causes pain -- in cold January sometimes I lie abed until six -- but even winter is gorgeous; when the moon is high, I wake at midnight and wantder through the farmhouse in gray, spooky light that illuminates every corner, the ceilings luminous with reflections from snowy hayfields.