Going Home

If there's a place I would have to identify as the home of my heart, it is the Hill Country of central Texas. I spent this past week there visiting my family. My kids and I enjoyed the sun and cool temperatures, though I don't think they were as smitten with the land as I am. They have grown up in central New York, where the well-watered land is dense with a variety of trees and other vegetation.


There is beauty in this arid region, but you have to look closely to appreciate it. Central Texas is a place of subtle colors. Limestone--yellow-white and pockmarked with shells from a long-vanished sea and small depressions carved by eons of scarce raindrops--is the bedrock of the region.


Ancient rocks, such as the pink Valley Spring gneiss that is more than a billion years old, emerge in surprising places, a result of a fault line that lifted the oldest rocks above the younger limestone.


Drought-resistant evergreen trees such as live oak, juniper, and mountain laurel thrive in the thin soil. Foliose lichen cover their branches like crocheted sleeves.


Vernal pools carved out of boulders host a surprising diversity of moss and other delicate plant life.



Prickly pear cactus and other succulents add a surprising reminder that this land would be desert without the rivers that carve deep beds into the limestone and the Edwards Aquifer and its dwindling reservoir of ancient water.



The visit home fed my soul.