I've pretty much lived most of my life along the east coast--Baltimore, DC, and North Carolina. What I notice from one place to the next is trees and hills. All of the locations where I've lived have been in the piedmont or along the fall line, and I really notice the difference in the types of trees and the relative flatness of the landscape when I head towards the coast. And I always found visiting my midwestern relatives disorienting--all that wide open flat space just feels wrong to me.

When I was in college I took a photography course and it happened that I was out in Illinois for a funeral that semester, so I took some pictures of the farms and fields there. I enlarged one photo for my class and my professor really panned it--hated the composition and how featureless it was. My mother adored it and had it framed because it captured her home landscape (which she misses a lot) so well.

And one final thought--I never realized how wonderful spring could be until I lived in North Carolina. Growing up in Maryland, spring was generally chilly and wet. Beautiful blossoming trees and flowers, but you wouldn't want to hang around outside admiring them too much, and spring came and went in about two weeks here. In North Carolina spring started in February and hung around until May and it was glorious. If I were independently wealthy, I'd spend my springs in North Carolina, my autumns in Maryland, and my summers and winters in the mountains somewhere.

Sarah