World

World

Beauty on Thanksgiving
I was about to take a friend up to my beloved house in Highlands, North Carolina. However I reconsidered, because I could not come up with anything we could do. My house is the last house on the top of the mountain. While looking off the balcony, everything below seems like little pieces of a doll house, and empty in comparison to the busy city of DC. Looking straight ahead from the white cracked wood of the balcony, all in sight is the luscious green mountains. Silence would be not the right word to describe the atmosphere, the sounds of hummingbirds crept upon you. Bee’s buzzed, mesmerized by the flowers placed around the balcony in hazel flowerpots that my father worked on for hours. The empty town of Highlands is populated with low to the ground occupants that are seen regularly: spiders, garden snakes, lizards, and ladybugs. An endless amount of birds are seen in trees and in the sky, and even bears sometimes make an appearance! These mountains seem to be sublime.
An attribute to the high altitude is the energy of the thunderstorms that come around regularly. Racing through the house, unplugging every electrical cord in sight, and then finally settling down once all the shutters are closed and the rain is not pouring into the house. My sister and I sit in the living room looking through the glass windows of the door staring at the never-ending sky and flashes of bolts that seem to be so close upon the horizon. We would count in between the thunder and the lightning to see how far away the lightning hit. Despite the viewing of the landscape, there is a small town off the main road, where little shops reside. You walk in the town and see all familiar faces of the day before; the girl playing on the nearby swing set, the wrinkly couple sitting on a bench next to the communal grocery store.
Every Thanksgiving, my aunts and uncles, cousins, second cousins, and best of all my brother, whom I am very close with and lives in New Jersey,...