Place as Touchstone

Blogger and blog reader, Kass, issued a challenge to write about a place that is a touchstone for us. The wooded path and creek above might be many places but it is in a state park near Versailles, Indiana. For several years I've been walking that particular little trail nearly every time I visit family in Indiana. I was born across a gravel road from an outer edge of that state park so it was a part of my life from the beginning although I was not a trail walker until later in life. It's a gentle kind of woodland, now there are many deer although they have come only in the past 30 years or so and were not there when I was young.

I choose it, especially, because that trail recurs twice in the novel I am writing. The novel is set mostly in that very rural part of Southern Indiana. The story is entirely fictional but the countryside, the nearby towns, the dialect of the older people, and a funeral are all true to my experience. I am second drafting it right now and so living in this landscape a few hours nearly every day. If I go visit this summer, as I am thinking of doing, I will take a great many more pictures because I have very few. I notice that I take a lot of photos of places I travel and expect to visit only once, but take for granted the places that I know well and don't think to photograph them.