Strange as this Weather Has Been

By then I’d decided I was newer than all this here. Here was fine for Mom, Dad, Sheila—you could take one look at them and see how they fit—but only outside of here would I, Lace See, live real life. Ages one to eighteen were just a waiting for that. Nothing on TV, nothing in books, nothing in magazines looked much like our place or much like us, and it’s interesting, how you can believe what’s on TV is realer than what you feel under your feet. Growing up here, you get the message very early on that your place is more backwards than anywhere in America and anybody worth much will get out as soon as they can, and that doesn’t come only from outside.” 

This quote comes from Lace and explains why she always dreamt of leaving her hometown. When she was young, she internalized the message that people who lived in the mountains of West Virginia were inherently less than other Americans—a message that came both from the outside through media and from the attitudes of her neighbors. Lace thought the only way to become more like what she envisioned for herself was to leave.  

“Truth was, though, after a month away, I was feeling a kind of lonesomeness I’d never known there was. I’d start drinking in my dorm room most evenings, stretched out on my window ledge on the eighth floor of Tower Two, a rum and coke between my legs, or a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20, and if anybody asked, I’d say I was just warming up for that night’s party, but really I’d be watching the ridges in the distance. It was like I was all the time feeling like I wasn’t touching nothing, and wasn’t nothing touching me back, and yeah, they had hills in Morgantown, but not backhome hills, and not the same feel backhome hills wrap you in.” 

After desiring to leave her hometown all her life, Lace finally goes away to college. However, she feels homesick for the very place she struggled against. This is the first time she misses her hometown and family, and the time when she realizes how deeply connected to the landscape of the mountains she has become. Once she moves back, she realizes that the sense of nostalgia she felt for Yellowroot was actually the dawning awareness that her hometown hills were part of her. Specifically, as the novel progresses, she realizes that she gets her identity from the land, and that when she’s off the land, she loses herself.