Memory.

Sometimes I miss New Hampshire. It always sneaks up on me. I will be away from the city and the trees will smell familiar. I will be walking someplace and hear the call of a mourning dove. Or sometimes, like tonight, I will read the words New Hampshire and be flooded with a warm feeling that is something like nostalgia, something like homesickness, but neither.



The New Hampshire that makes me the pleasant sort of sick to my stomach, is not one that I've shared with many people. I have experienced it with my sister in our youth, when playing in the woods, then later as teenagers, driving home late at night and jumping into Lake Winnepesaukee on hot days with our clothes on because we weren't wearing bathing suits and there were people everywhere. I shared this New Hampshire with my neighbors, who knew it well. Then as an adult, with a friend as we wandered through corn fields, and later, with a boyfriend who waited with me patiently for sunset on Halls Hill, because I told him the sky there was unlike any other place (and I meant it, and it was worth it).



This all started a few days ago, when I was eating a piece of strawberry rhubarb pie, and it made me miss my grandparents, and peach trees, and picking blackberries, and smelling lilacs through my bedroom window.

My relationship with the state is complicated. But I wouldn't have the same fondness for nature had I not lived there. I remember the first time I ever saw a deer, a barn owl, a pack of coyotes, a hummingbird moth. It's why I love and can identify small birds. There was a whole lot of beautiful things in there, and when I get all wistful and daydream about hiding away in a cabin for a week in the north, this is exactly why.



The above photos: by me, years ago, and all I really have, despite the time I had there. They are simple, but I cherish them.