One of the things that feels alien about South Carolina is the lack of visible mountains on the horizon. Growing up in the Shenandoah Valley and attending college in the New River Valley, I always felt protected by the rolling blue mountains, so remniscent of giants who stopped to rest and ended up sleeping for hundreds of years. That's how I thought of them when I was a little girl, how they still seem now when I really stop to study them.

A few times since I've moved here, I've found myself out on Alligator Road, walking quickly past the development so I can reach the gravel road in the middle of a flat, yellowing field where one day they will put up more houses, more roads. On those days I plug my headphones into my phone, turn up my music, and dance over the shifting gravel, leaping over fallen branches, spinning from the undeveloped road into the empty cul de sac under the huge white clouds. I sing and dance until I'm panting, until I've made my way into the houses at the end of that road and down another.

There, at the edge of a lake that used to be a forest, where you can still see the tops of once tall trees where birds still roost, I sit on a concrete boat launch. On still days the clouds are mirrored in the water that I watch closely for gators. I like to sit with my knees drawn up, arms wrapped around my shins, and enjoy the sun, the breeze. Sometimes when I'm there I miss the mountains. But everything is an exchange in one way or another and when I'm dancing over the dirt and gravel, when the water stirs with mysterious ripples, I think that this is a good one. One day I'll have the salty air near Bodega or the hills where Gramps used to show me deer in the mornings. I will still miss my mountains then, and the wide river that flows under the train tracks the boys climbed last summer, but it will be a good exchange too and how lucky am I to have had all of it?