The Land Remembers

I have always believed that places remember.

Not necessarily in a way that needs to be explained or proven. More like the feeling you get when you walk into an old family home and know that lives were lived there before yours.

A worn path through the woods tells you someone walked there before you arrived. An old barn carries the marks of the hands that built it. A creek stone has been shaped by water moving over it for longer than any of us will ever know.

I live in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, and the older I get, the more I find myself paying attention to those things.

The creek behind our home was flowing long before I was born. The stones in its bed have watched generations come and go. The trees have stood through storms and seasons, while lives were being lived all around them.

I think about that when I sit beside the water.

I think about it when I find an old piece of glass in the woods or pick up a stone from the creek. I think about the people who walked this land before me and the things they left behind, intentionally or otherwise.

Maybe that’s why I photograph the things I do.

An old tree. A piece of driftwood shaped by water. A place most people would walk right past. Something worn, weathered, or changed by time.

I’m rarely interested in something because it is perfect.

I’m interested because it has a story.

The land carries evidence of what has happened to it. Water changes stone. Wind changes trees. Seasons leave their marks. Things disappear beneath the earth and sometimes, years later, find their way back to the surface.

So do pieces of our own lives.

Maybe that’s part of what keeps pulling me back to the creek with a camera in my hand. I never quite know what I’m going to find, and I don’t always understand why something catches my attention when it does.

I’ve learned not to worry too much about that.

I stop.

I look.

Sometimes I pick it up.

Sometimes I photograph it.

Sometimes I simply stand there for a while and wonder what happened in that exact place before I arrived.

There are stories I will never know. Names that have been forgotten. Footsteps that disappeared a very long time ago.

But the evidence of lives, seasons, storms, and time is still everywhere.

You just have to notice it.

Because the land remembers.

And sometimes all we have to do is slow down long enough to hear what it has to say.