Ohio and I turned 32

32 years ago yesterday, I opened my eyes and Ohio blinked into existence. What had been dark thin void before became blue and vast and full, strange and deep.

I opened my lungs and screamed and the wind blew in from a new northern sea, and the sea overflowed into the hills and became rivers and the rivers became valleys. Rocks pushed out of hills with violence and purpose. Wind turbines grew up from the water table, giant white willows, feeding off the raw minerals sitting in my chest sleeping, waiting to be discovered.

My fingers flexed and learned to grasp, and the concrete castles crackled across the landscape electric. They bowed molten and then solidified in the rains, hard and fast, permanent as first impressions. The granite sparkled and sighed.

I splashed my new limbs in the water and waves created a perpetual motion machine, back and forth, the heartbeat. Boats rose up from the depths of the dark glacial afterbirth, and birds came into the new land from all corners of the void to eat and swim and fly and fight and scream. The fresh air unwrapped itself from the vortex, and everything was filled with sound.

I learned to walk and jump and drive and the Ohio territory stretched like play doh, always pushing out and in all directions except North, rolling out before my outstretched eyes so that the horizon exploded. I tried to find the end of all things, but always it was just beyond my line of sight.

Into this playground we ran and built and traveled around, purposeless fools, soaking in the green and blue, which were my favorite colors before I was born, were genetically programmed into my brain, a memory of the land my ancestors came from - the paleolithic caves and fields of Southern France, the trek across cold northern continents, the softness and richness of the peat Islands. The leaves and hard ground and smell of grass came from a dream I had, the dream of what my cells had touched and breathed. Somewhere out there is also a house, and we will sit on the porch and feel the breath of the deep underground leaking into the sunshine.