Geography

 

I was a geography major in college and if you let me, I will talk your ear off about it forever and you will absolutely wish you hadn’t asked. I changed my major 4 times (!!!) in college so arriving at geography was quite a process and it was honestly somewhat random. What made me fall in love with the subject was not the maps or the spatial analysis of disease (don’t get me wrong, I will nerd out over that stuff any day of the week), but the human connections that are present within geography and how location influences them. One of my very favorite professors in college lectured about the subject on the first day of my final semester. He had us all consider our hometowns and our connections to and within them. We made homemade maps of our old stomping grounds as they existed in our heads and discussed everything from sweet family memories to our first heartbreaks, all of which were connected to specific locations. The very reason we study geography is to better understand the human race. It’s our memories of various places that make the physical locations feel special. It’s how a dim parking lot outside of your high school turns forever more into the place where you had your very first kiss. We all have places that are special to us in ways that are hard to explain. I have come to know this “special but hard to explain” feeling as nostalgia. 

The idea of nostalgia reminds me of a warm light. The kind of warm light I’m thinking of feels like a million tiny kisses on your skin and paints the whole world a glowing, delicious gold color. It feels like meeting your best friends for ice cream on a sticky, humid summer night and talking for hours about everything and nothing. Nostalgia in my head is only good. It makes me want to sing songs from summer camp when I was a kid and bask in all my soulful glory. Nostalgia in my real life is...different. I’ve come to realize it can be a pretty toxic emotion for me. Instead of making me feel warm and glowy, it often makes me feel nothing short of aggressively sad. I do want to sing songs from summer camp and reminisce about the past, but I want to cry about it. It brings the realest, rawest emotions to the surface and sometimes that doesn’t feel anything close to warm and glowy. Nostalgia for me is both profoundly sad and so, so happy. As I previously mentioned, this feeling is very connected to place for many people, but for me especially. The place that evokes such intense feelings for me is the mountains, specifically the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

I have done an awful lot of growing up in the mountains of Virginia. My very earliest memory of the mountains is apple-picking with my grandparents (otherwise known as Boo-Boo and Papa), my sisters, and our cousin Max. We were all little and we got all the way to the top of the mountain, someone threw up from car sickness (probably me), and our adventure was over. This doesn’t sound like it would be a good memory, but it made an impact on me and set the stage for future memory-making. Apple-picking in later years would always feel like a journey and the beginning of something new. Fast forward to my tween years, and I learned to love the mountains in a new, powerful way. I went to summer camp in the most charming little mountain town by the name of Orkney Springs and found pure, untouched mountain magic. Summer camp honestly sounds pretty stupid to people who never went to summer camp, but if you were lucky enough to go, you know. I felt loved, accepted, and supported just as I was and for a painfully awkward 12-year-old, that was priceless. I still know all the words to my favorite songs and the opening chords of some of them still make me teary-eyed. Finally, and perhaps the most important of my mountain memories, is college. Southwest Virginia is the most beautiful place and so much happened there. Some of the worst things in my life thus far happened in Blacksburg and for a long time, I thought moving away would make it all sting less. What I realize now is that I survived all those terrible things in that environment and most importantly, I found home. Over the years, the mountains became my home and became the place where I found peace and solace. Even through horribly difficult things, I learned to lean on the amazing people around me and I learned that it’s okay (and often wonderful and cathartic) to cry on top of a mountain while you watch the most spectacular sunset and think about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I am so incredibly lucky to have seen so much of this world at such a young age. Sometimes I feel like I’ve left pieces of my heart all over the earth, but an especially big piece is planted permanently in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Even though it hurts so bad to leave, I realize those feelings simply come from love. The memories that connect me to the mountains from even hundreds of miles away are made of all kinds of fuzzy, warm love that has simply changed form. Love changes form because we’re humans and how we express and interpret love switches by the minute. I know it’s not always going to feel warm and fuzzy and that can be very confusing. Families become disconnected, summer camp ends for the year, you move on from your college days, and the place you found your home is no longer where you live. The disgustingly cheesy, beautiful thing is that all that love will always exist in our world, no matter our geographical location. We will always have those memories to warm our chilly little hearts. Lean into it; let the memories sweep you away and give you butterflies. Allow yourself to feel all those nostalgic feelings, whether they make you smile, cry, or a whole lot of both. 

Cheers to the last 99 days, and on we go to the next.