I love mountains. My mom always told me that it didn’t matter where I lived as long as I lived right. I could never agree with her. I love the family I grew up in, indeed there are times when I desperately wish to be closer in proximity to them.

However, in January 2002, with the help of my mother I moved in my little blue Toyota Corrolla. I left the Wellsville Mountains and traveled to Idaho where the Tetons “almost” reside. Then a couple of days after Christmas I left for Johnson City, Tennessee.

We traveled down to Interstate 40 and then cross country until we reached Tennessee. I remember passing through the western states where the tall mountains loom off in the distance. At times we’d respectfully travel up, up, up into the high mountain passes.

Then there was Texas and Oklahoma where the land lay flat. There was a fierce snowstorm during our travels, but we drove on, getting through about one state every day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Our muffler broke at the top of one mountain near the beginning and after that we had to yell in order to be heard over the racket it was making.

When we got across the Mississippi River at Memphis, I knew we were in a different place. The land had already been changing. There began to be trees on either side of the road. Not pine trees or aspen, but deciduous trees. As long as these trees are green you can’t see anything hidden behind them.

Also, the land began to roll. It went up and down not like my mountains that I loved so well back home, but just enough to make you know you weren’t on flat land anymore.

I was interested in these mountains. After my mom left Tennessee I started school and in my spare time I began to get to investigate them up close. They smelled different. At first I didn’t appreciate that. But a friend told me that these eastern Appalachian Mountains were like a sweet old grandma who takes you in and loves you, enfolding you in her arms.

He also said the Western Mountains, which he’d visited, where like a young stripling warrior proud and standing tall. I liked that assessment.

Eventually, I married and for three years Mike and I lived in a home in Jonesborough, TN. While I loved many things about that place, I did not love the mountains I saw every morning out my front windows. They did not communicate with me except on rare occasions.

I remember being in Logan, Utah and watching the first snow storm of the season descend upon the valley. The clouds were broken up and hung upon the mountain changing it from blue to white. They stood there all day. If it wasn’t so cold I could have watched their dance all day.

The clouds in Jonesborough didn’t talk to their mountains. Each fall season the leaves left them and I finally could see their outline, but then in the summer season they seemed to be green, content to soak up the sun and live a small life.

I suppose that is what I should not have expected more from them, but I continually wished them to communicate with me more. I was asking them to be something different than they were. I thought I was lost to the magnificence of mountain grandeur.

Then I moved to West Virginia.

Because these mountains are also low I did not expect much from them, but I determined to take what they offered. And they surprised me.

They speak to me. I have once again found Mountain Bliss. I see frost on them. I see the clouds rolling in to have a private conversation. I see the sunlight fade upon their stark tree tops. I’m not sure what summer will bring. But the winter has brought a wonderful, magical connection that I thought was lost to me.

I’ve decided that West Virginia deserves its title as “The Mountain State.”