2010-07-28 - 4:17 p.m.

Of course it's true that you don't know what you've got until it's gone and what this means to me is that I went home this weekend. Driving along those valleys up there, it feels like being held by long, rolling hills made of broccoli. The hills are close in, and low, and gentle, and old. They're beautiful and though I live in a flat place now, I know them deeply, without thinking about them, like how you might know your mom's voice or the smell of summer rain on concrete.

And all this is by way of saying that, when I lived up there, I did not care one bit for mountains or little brown creeks or for ladies in old Ford pickups who say hello to you in parking lots. They were all I knew, those mountains, and so I didn't know that not all the world has hills so green, so nice, so friendly. A dude got stabbed a hundred times not far from where I live now and he was about to start medical school at one of the best medical schools in the world and that kind of thing doesn't happen much where I grew up. That kid died in one of those city-sidewalk planters, where they've cut out the concrete enough for a spindly gingko to grow, for a few leafy flowering things to eke out a sooty life.

I understand, is what I'm saying, why it is that people seek out the quiet, the green, the gentle. I understand what it means to not know what you've got until it's gone.

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