To see the photos here is the link to the album:
https://picasaweb.google.com/109521495831425700363/MarylandAPhotoTribute?authkey=Gv1sRgCOqasZvLx6SY7gE
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Maryland did me a favor growing up; I learned to love the outdoors. Every spring the forest by my home came to life with singing trees. First it was the spring peepers; they would hum their way into the growing twilight of late March. Then the lavender evenings would arrive and there would be a din of chattering, warbling and hammering in every tree in my neighborhood.
April would take away the frost and the rivers wouldn’t dam up with ice and flood like they do, every year it seems, in the Red River Valley of Manitoba up here in Canada. One after another, the trees would bloom and it was like a sweeter, softer version of that famous New England canvas you have heard about. Only these colors weren’t a sign that things were dying; life was renewing itself in color here in Maryland.
By May it was all green; a pristine color that means the soil is good. The sun might shine hotly now but there was shade and you could cool your heals in the tall grass.
The Chesapeake Bay to the East, the Catoctin Mountains to the North, the Appalachians to the West and horse country, beaches and whispering pines too on the Eastern Shore. Everywhere I turned there seemed to be some new but kind face to Nature.
Maryland seems to me now to be a kind state. Few things came in extremes. Even when it snowed most times the snow seemed gentle; it was never the dry powder that falls when the dew point is far below freezing. In fact, if it snowed and you were of school age, you just hoped that rain/snow line didn’t creep its way northward because so few snowstorms could keep it together so close to the warm waters of the Bay.
I grew up with the gentleness of Nature. True, I was not raised on a farm and never had to plant or harvest, much less break the soil. Farming in Maryland was yet another part of the charm of where I grew up. My county has an agricultural reserve and thankfully you can drive just a little ways away from the hi-tech, research corridor along I-270 and find horse farms, organic farms, corn and wheat and fruits and vegetables. We have fruit trees and pumpkin patches and it all backs up onto two historic rivers: the Potomac and the Patuxent. I don’t remember ever hearing about clouds of locusts blotting out the sun or frosts in August that killed the wheat crop.
Even our mountains are so old they have been worn down like a worker’s shoulders and never present the jagged, forbidding face in whose shadows I lived, years ago, in Colorado. Our mountains are like Sugarloaf; green, undulating and easy to climb.
When I was a teenager I discovered Sugarloaf for myself. I could drive and when the car was in my possession, out I went into the foothills. The way that mountain seemed to appear out of nowhere gave it a magnetism that groups of mountains somehow could not compete with. And when you climbed it (or drove most of the way up, as the case might have been) you came upon a view of everything around you from the Blue Ridge all the way down the Potomac to, on a clear day, Washington D.C. I could survey my whole life from up there and I wondered what the world would be like if everyone had a nearby, friendly mountain.
Jeremy Nathan Marks
