Chapter and Verse

       The sky is overcast and mostly gray as I drive into the Catskills, winding my way toward the rural handful of streets that will become my new home. Clouds hang in the mountains like motionless wisps of smoke. This place is so beautiful the beauty disrupts my train of thought. Words with "m" come to mind: majestic, momentous, magnificent.
       I remember how German friends used to sneer at what we Americans call mountains, but Europeans sneering at all things American is the default setting, even as they watch our movies, buy our jeans, and drink our Coke. Thus the sneer, especially in this case, is perhaps not to be taken so seriously. To me, these are major mountains, sloping arrays of green peaks framed against the dirty white of storm clouds beyond the ridge. Monumental, marvelous. Every bit as worthy as the Alpen foothills beyond Bad Woerishofen where my former mother-in-law, Baerbel, spent her last years.
       I plan to spend my last years here as well. Of course, I hope I still have a good deal of them left. This is a new chapter, a sudden one in my many-chaptered life, and I intend for this one to go well. More than well; this is to be my writer's house, and I am to finally fulfill my dream. Too, I am leaving behind a greater measure of pain and sadness and anger than I would have wished--there were good things too, over the last four years, a certain man chief among them--but there was just too much of the bad for reasons I still don't completely understand. Maybe I will spend time here working on understanding why, how things could have gone so wrong. But maybe not. Maybe I'll just focus on proving to myself that they need not go that way again.
       Another way to see this, of course, is that all these events conspired to bring me here. To get me here, to exactly this place at this point in my life.  I deeply believe, without knowing how to explain why, that this is exactly where I should be.
       I have told friends repeatedly over the last several months: I am never moving again. I want to die here (though not for a long while). This is my first afternoon in this new home, my Writer's House, and as I write, the sun shines through the door, the Gandalf pine stands as protecter in the backyard, the wind rustles in the neighboring trees--or is that the creek, bubbling in the distance?--and it is so peaceful I never want to leave.
       I have no claim on this place, except for the job that brought me here, but I already feel as though I belong. Want to belong. Will do my best to belong. And this, for reasons far greater than, but also because, I spent last week driving past row after solid row of midwestern strip malls, witnessing once again, firsthand, the complete devastation that this capitalist system of ours with its single-minded focus on ever-greater consumption has wrought upon the verdant cornfields of my youth--driving past temple after temple to the acquisition of Stuff and seeing the complete and utter conquest of Profit, the triumph of money.  But here, you can still see the world as it must have been a thousand years ago--or at least still close enough to what it was to be able to imagine the rest.
       There is no place I'd rather be, I think as I make the final turn towards home, even if there's someone I'd rather be here with, than in this space of beauty and peace. If it weren't for the roadkill and the cops--both of which, it seems, are in plentiful supply--this place would be close to paradise.

--August, 2015