Submitted by Amy Butcher, an author and professor at Denison University
This summer was woods and dappled light, the mountains of West Virginia and Washington, New Hampshire and Alaska. Nine months out of the year, I am a proud Ohioan, but come summer, I flee for former lands I love that are not so immediately accessible to Ohio.
Family takes up residence along the coast, and friends who feel like family spread across southeastern Alaska. Together, we traipse the Tongass National Forest, backpack along the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway—a trail my father tends to after storms and winter’s worst—and eat macaroni and cheese with pepperoni from a blue hammock swinging gently between two pines at the top of Mt. Lovewell in southern New Hampshire.
My body is lean and taut and tan and I feel more like myself than I ever do. In August, I return, just as Ohio summer is winding down, and find I am relieved at once to plug back into a more sedentary life, where the woods are mostly local and full of trails and trees I know.
My students are fresh-faced and vibrant, humming and high-fiving in the hallways. Soon, the leaves, they’re falling, and all those warm meals and nights to come—the chili and porch suppers, friends talking at my dinner table beneath the glow of warm twinkling lights.
I scan for small reminders, and when the postal service releases their seasonal collection, I seize the the opportunity—a stamp nerd, through and through—and imagine myself on a not-so-distant Sunday, slicking stickers onto holiday cards I’ll mail as the weather turns, grateful for this reminder: the woods and all their magic, the leaves and lichen and mossy trails. All that beauty, and all that friendship, the flickering forest in unfettered daylight.
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