LOOKING GLASS (a Personal Essay) by Jennifer McGaha

LOOKING GLASS 

    As  you sit down to write these pages, you close your eyes tightly,  

you hear a dulcimer playing in the distance, and you feel cool river water 

pulsing against your ankles. You smell winter approaching and hear the 

silence of snow filling the creek beds and coating the evergreens until 

the limbs begin to snap and popping sounds ring like gunshots over the 

mountains. You see the trails of Pisgah National Forest winding 
through the hills, your shaggy terrier bounding ahead on a path, 
trampling patches of pink trilliums on his way to the creek bed. You see 
a patch of May Apples scraping the forest floor, the crackle of a campfire, 
the seared edges of a marshmallow bulging from the end of a stick, its 
glossy whiteness oozing over the melting chocolate as you press the 
graham crackers together. 

    You feel Looking Glass Rock hard and cold beneath your back, 

and you are dizzy and intoxicated by the wildness of the forests below. 

You see the wheel of the corn mill spinning slowly around, and you suck 

the end of a sugar cane until the heavy syrup rolls over your tongue and 

slowly down your eager throat. You hear “Amazing Grace” a hundred 

different ways—bagpipes and choirs and trumpets and fiddles, a medley 

of voices rising over the years. You smell the sweetness of honeysuckle 

growing wild in a pasture, and you hear a soft whistle as you bite the 
end off a blossom, holding the green stem in your teeth and breathing 
in the honey. You see your great-grandmother, her long, gray hair 
pinned in a bun, stooping over the quilting loom by the black wood 
stove in her cabin, and you see her strolling in her garden, her brown, 
crinkled hands pulling a green bean fresh from the vine and poking it 
into your open mouth. 

    You see a young girl at camp, lying on the top bunk in her cabin, 

writing letters home and listening to the creek gurgling outside the 

window, to the mice running across the rafters overhead. You hear 
“Taps” rising clearly and mournfully over the hills, and you are homesick 
and at home all at once and all over again. You feel glorious, icy lake 
water hit your sunburned legs as you leap from the lifeguard stand. 
You smell the musty scent of the barn, and you are tall and wild on the 
back of a horse. You see your dad floating down the French Broad River 
on a raft, his strong arms pulling the oars through the dark water while 
lightening streaks the dark sky. You scramble together up the riverbank 
and duck into a cow pasture, and you feel that quiet moment just before 
the bull charges you. Gray and angry, he stomps his feet, and his nostrils 
flare. You turn and see your dad, stopped solidly between you and the 
bull, waving you on, toward the fence at the edge of the pasture, and you 
feel the earth hot beneath your feet and the sting of the rising wind as 
you run to safety. 

    You see the clearing at the top of Sam’s Knob and the outline of 

Devil’s Courthouse. You see a family of deer along Graveyard Fields, the 

mother’s head tilted high in the air, frozen in time. You see a skinny 

teenage boy sitting on a rock beside you at the base of Looking Glass 
Falls, the water spraying your hair and swallowing your words. He is 
eighteen, you are sixteen, and neither of you knows you’ll end up 
together. 

    You feel summer slipping reluctantly out of the air and autumn 

moving stealthily in. You see patches of yellow and purple and blue 

dotting the fields and the first bursts of colors across the green hills. 

And, then, there is an explosion of color—the reds and oranges and 

yellows and golds—through which you can see a chestnut-haired girl 

running down a wooded path toward her bold father, her young soul as 

much a part of the mountains as the leaves and the trees and the deer 

and the air. 

by Jennifer McGaha

Originally published in Smoky Mountain Living

in a slightly different form, And featured in

in the Autumn section of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge

A native of Transylvania in western North Carolina, Jennifer McGaha writes nonfiction and literary nonfiction with an edge. Sometimes humorous and sometimes quirky, but always informed by her Appalachian upbringing, McGaha's writing has appeared in numerous  regional and national magazines and literary journals. 


She teaches composition at both Blue Ridge Community College and Brevard College, where she serves as the nonfiction editor for Pisgah Review. 


More recently this month, on Nov. 18, 2010, Jennifer McGaha was the featured reader at Poets and Writers Reading Poems and Stories at John C. Campbell Folk School.


Samples of her work and a complete list of her publications are available at her website: jennifer-mcgaha.wordpress.com.