beautiful places || down the lane

Our house is perched atop a little grassy hill that’s yellow and mown in the summer and clovered and green in the spring. From an upstairs window you can see a majestic Mount Hood rising from behind the trees and the highway and the train tracks, bordered by horizon clouds. Around us are the scattered homes and churches, close yet distanced, that make our little country town of Warren.  

Down the lane is the little white church where my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother walked down the aisle, each in their own space of history. The short road that goes past it is quiet, lined with a few small homes and rustic barns. Cows dot open fields between houses, and red-winged black birds always sit chattering upon the telephone poles that line the road. 

In the summer, the kids are out shrieking in the sprinklers or swinging on tire swings beneath the age-old oak trees which have been here for a hundred years. These old trees know Warren thoroughly; they've been climbed by children in suspenders and children in Nike baseball caps, they have swung wooden seats, war-patched tires, and brand-new ropes. 

It's a beautiful place, Warren is. The neighborhood can’t quite be called a neighborhood, and the town can’t quite be called a town, but we love it how it is--the quiet roads and the wildflowers blooming along them, the tractors lumbering slowly along and stopping traffic, the tumble-down sheds and the garden mailboxes. 

It's all a part of who we are as a community. 

..Warren is not ideal, it is not utterly perfect; it is not "left behind," but it's also never going to catch up. Warren is simply the place no one has ever heard of, the place that you couldn't find on a map if you scoured it inch-by-inch--and it's the place I am proud to call “home.”

What is your "beautiful place?"

-lucia