I never really notice my house till I clean it. You know, all the furniture, the colors, how dirty it actually is, etc. And then, above it all, I notice the mountains rising up behind the windows and suddenly all the mismatched colors, the eccentric arrangement of chairs and tables strugglig to give definition to the rambling living room, seem strangely congruent with the view. With a bank of dormer windows stretching out to meet the blunted blue peaks, their domes become as much a fixture of the house as the stone fire-place. They, more than anything else, seem to allow for the irony of grandma’s hand-crocheted afghans clashing loudly with the new couch. And maybe, in their benevolent presence, it is a little more reasonable for me to listen to Pandora radio piping from my shiny white macbook while I scrub a wind-up victrola.
Mountains smile at incongruity. They invented the word to excuse their broken ridges and the weird mixture of hippies and Evangelicals squashed together in their shadow. I don’t want to live in the pages of Southern Living with gracious plantation porches. I want to enjoy all the weird tradition of antique meat saws hanging in the kitchen, old moonshine bottles above the mantel rubbing shoulders with the chinese tea-pot. These are the mountains. They are too old to care for convention.
