Shannon Dauphin

On The Roan

I'm sitting on the balcony on the second floor. The French doors are open behind me and I can hear the men moving furniture around in the rooms, the heavy armoires and long davenports making secret swishes across the hardwood. The children are laughing hard from the yard below me. I can't see them, but I can hear them. Water slowly drips from the roof every now and then, the last of the storms giving up, plinking on the top of my foot there on the railing, and every time a drop plinks I have that ticklish feeling down in my calf. So I push against the railing and stretch myself out and make this old chair rock. It creaks loudly in the way of a chair that has been out in the elements for years.

When the kids hear it, they yell, "I love you, Momma."

The trees rise above me and below me, a contradiction that either makes me feel smaller than a speck or the queen of all I survey, depending on the way the wind blows. The mountain rises in from of me, the cliffs almost obscured by the mist that hangs here year-round. Our plane came through that this morning, banking tight over the ridge. There was nothing up there between the puffs of fog, only that space where the trees give up the fight and the air itself takes over. In places between that were bursts of color, flowers that ran rampant across the mountain, governed by nothing. The engines droned in my ears and the landing gear thumped under my seat and then the wheels whined the way they do when they prostest against the runway like a bird who would rather be in flight. I had never felt so protected in my life, with that vision of the line drawn between the air and the color and the trees in my head.

This morning in the twilight dawn a mountain lion howled. It went on forever, the wild sound carried on the wind but right there in my ears at the same time, and I went onto the balcony to look out at trees that were just waking up, hoping to catch a glimpse of tan and brown and black. There was an eagle who cocked his head and looked at me as though I was not ever there.

As I sit here rocking in this old chair on the side of Roan Mountain, I can hear the Doe River rushing hard beneath us. The irony: I'm sitting here with technology on my lap while looking at land that hasn't changed for thousands of years. This is Carter County, the place known as the first permanent settlement outside the thirteen original colonies. That fact was with me as I walked the wide floorboards and opened the shutters for the first time, letting the sunlight flood in, steeped in the sudden memory of him doing that very thing, the time we were first falling in love spilling across the yellow wood, and I laughed out loud at how sometimes things come full circle.

This is a place known for new starts. Not that we need one, but it feels good to know we're in the right place regardless.

Leaves skitter across the porch, red and yellow, left over from last year. This mountain will soon be aflame. Then the snow will come and the winter will be hard, as it always is hard up here in the mountains where snow chains on tires eventually give way to four-wheeled vehicles with more nimble suspensions, then the whine of snowmobiles that sound like avalanches. Through the snow there will be green, the cedar and pine and the land that withstands the change and remains the same, forever and ever, amen.

Water drips from the roof and the kids holler now from within the wide walls of this big house and the sound of water rushing eliminate4s the sound of cars thousands of feet below. Up here it is my own little world, one that fits me like an old pair of favorite jeans, well worn and comfortable.

Now the children are running in and out of the house and ignoring my admonitions of don't you dare get that mud on my clean floors and I don't care, not really, because those footprints are just that---footprints, here one moment and gone the next, and I need to be worried more about the things that are permanent than the things that are not.

The eagle is still out there and it still hasn't noticed me, not even when I adamantly called to it, as if it could understand or care wha I had to say. Who knows what it says about my psyche or my self-esteem or my sanity, even, but I simply love that fact that it ignores me.

A leaf drifts down from the trees, one pulled from its moorings long before its time, and it fits into the palm of my hand, comfortable and easy, like a long-forgotten prayer.

For the first time in my life, I can breathe.

Shannon Dauphin is a novelist, trained researcher and owner of a booming freelance business. Under the pseudonym of Gwen Masters, she has written a handful of novels and unleashed hundreds of short stories on the world. "On The Roan" is one of her most personal and favorite pieces of writing. Visit her online at www.dauphinfreelance.com