> I dunno. Anybody else feel this way, especially about the place they grew up in?
>
> -- Dave

Well, Dave, you got me to thinking. (a strange sensation) I lived in the mountains of Kentucky which ranged from beautiful to super ugly depending on factors like weather, time of year, point of view, etc. There is nothing uglier than a pile of smoldering mine spoil. They would dump slate and coal dust in big piles that would catch fire and burn for years, mostly underground. Foul smelling smoke would come up all over the surface. That would combine with sulfur dioxide laden smoke from steam trains and fireplaces and furnaces creating a worst-case-senario smog that ruined peoples' health and turned everything from houses to trees a grimmy grey. If I climbed a tree, I came down with my hands and clothes black. Even snow was specked with soot.

Then spring came along and the mountains bloomed with dogwood and redbud. Some of the smog blew away at times and the trees took on that pale green of new leaves. I remember iris and buttercups along our sidewalk. A few houses in the neighborhood would get painted and rain would wash away a little of the grime. Between floods, it was fairly nice.

Then at age 15, we moved to Florida and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. We were terribly poor, but living was easy and fishing was cheap. The beach was free, and I went three years without having a cold. I guess I got the coal soot out of my lungs. I loved palm trees and breaking waves and land so flat you could ride a bicycle for miles without getting tired. Nobody seem to mind if you picked an orange from a roadside grove, and there were flowers blooming all year around. Even now, I still have dreams about sitting on the jetty with a fishing pole in my hand. The beach was on one side and the shipping channel on the other. I can almost feel the trade winds. Then I wake up, and I'm an old man in Tennessee again.

Tomorrow, I think I'll just get up, jump in the car, and drive to Florida. But that's another story.
Continued on next post. . . .
Howard