Coming home again is like making love. The pleasure is so intense and so real that it is almost painful to succumb to it.
I have missed this Appalachian culture. I have come back for a wedding, and it will be as beautiful as the mountains gently pressing the sky around me.
This is the home of my college, of my two friends that will keep until we die, of friendships that bonded in Latin classes and college rooms laced with transition.
Next week, I make the journey to the home of my early history--my parents, my friends of youth and last-page adventures. There are no mountains pressing beautifully into the sky there, but there are plains enough to lay my body full under the sky.
Coming home is like making love, and love is sometimes the hardest thing to survive.