On the Familiar - A Review

I feel as if I never flew into the Carolinas during spring.

Coming in now and seeing Charleston's sprawling expanse of rivers that split like fingers strangling their way across the marshy green landscape seems off to me. I don't remember it being this wet and is water ever this blue?

I guess I never came in right after a rain storm. Whose remnants live on in the dark clouds that the plane's wing cuts through as it yawns and makes a lazy turn toward the airport. The green of South Carolina always baffles me. Before it was because I was leaving a town on the edge of a desert, now it's because I'm escaping a perpetual winter. Instead of buildings in the distance, I just see trees. There is no horizon, only forests filled with trees that are polluted with Spanish moss and then suddenly missing in wide swathes to combat fires or to hang electrical lines. There's a romance to the nature of South Carolina. Landing here makes me remember how beautiful it is. But soon I'll be on the interstate. I'll see the trash and roadkill. I'll smell the paper mills. I'll remember how the forest is impassable. How the roads are collapsing. And how different the world is. But for now, from the inside of the plane on a tarmac, it's gorgeous.