Perhaps identifying "my" geological features feels so daunting because I'm so rootless. Geological features are anything but rootless. They're the go-to metaphor for immovability ("solid as a rock," "like moving a mountain"). So how to choose when movability is so much a bigger part of my identity than immovability?

I've chosen to choose based on the idea of me belonging to the features, rather than them belonging to me. Ownership
seems inappropriate for places I've spent so little time in. But I can grapple with the idea that the places own me, at least insofar as my contact with them has left a residual mark on who I am now.

I am someone who loves the woods, especially when the trees are dripping, and the sky is overcast, and the ground has a slope to it for running down. I belong to the forest that separates Langenbach from Herschweiler Pettersheim.


I am someone who flourishes in and around water, even when it's destructive, because that's better than the dry, dusty, distant-horizoned alternative. I belong to cities that flood, like Memphis and Boston.


I love high ceilings, uneven wood floors, pocket doors, narrow staircases, and curtained, white dormer windows. Although I only ever lived there two years, I belong to my parents' house in Montgomery, AL.


Green living things and creepy crawlies and birds, bees, and butterflies all make me feel hopeful and deeply human in my ability to appreciate life. That love played no small part in bringing me here, to Tampa, FL, where I can watch the Hillsborough river through the oak limbs shading my backyard.

Unfortunately, almost all the places I belong to are far from me now, so all but the last of these photographs I didn't take. This task has me thinking about a number of things, not least of which is how little I document my own life unless prompted.