My Avalon

I have to admit I have a pretty negative outlook when it comes to industry and development.  I hate seeing beautiful fields being plowed under or forests being logged so that businesses or subdivisions can replace them.  In fact, the way I feel about it ends up being a theme in the life of one of my characters -- Alice -- who grows up wading in creeks and climbing trees only to return home later in life and find strip malls and subdivisions in her neighborhood.  To me, and many people I know, that's just tragic.

I was recently telling a dear friend of mine about Melanie Griffith's Avalon.  Basically, it is a tranquil place you create in your mind and go to in your imagination when you need it.

My Avalon tends to change, but there is one place in the world that, in my memory, is still perfect.  It is down a gravel road that you only know about if you live there, with rolling fields that dip down to creeks and fresh springs, piney woods that have a blanket of soft needles on the ground instead of underbrush, where animals aren't sure whether to be afraid or curious -- the place where both sides of my family lived, where my great-grandmothers were young wives and my grandparents were children.  That's where I come from and where I grew up, and my heart breaks at the thought of never being able to go there again -- the thought of returning to find everything changed.  I drove through there a couple of weeks ago and I cried.

Avalon ended up being a recurring theme, though I didn't realize it until today.

My computer crashed big time this week, and in the process of rescuing my files I ran across several of my iTunes songs with Avalon themes.

Then, today we drove north for a weekend wedding.  On our way, we passed through Indianapolis.  In general, Indianapolis is a wonderful city and most people who visit really like it.  You don't really get a very good idea of how nice Indianapolis can be when you just pass through on the interstate.  Today, I mostly saw rush-hour traffic, quick glimpses of various neighborhoods (including subdivisions with expensive homes surrounded by corn fields), and lots of industry.

As we passed by one business, the name on the side of the building flashed by.

Avalon.

Outside this building, next to the highway, there was a small man-made pond with a fountain in the middle.  As we zoomed by in the car, the afternoon sun shined through the spraying water in just such a way that for a brief instant I saw a rainbow in it.

For one brief instant, as development and industrial parks flashed passed me, I saw a piece of my own Avalon.

It occurred to me as we continued that even though I sometimes feel like the world is going to end up being, as my mother says, "parking lots and cemeteries," there is still so much beauty in it.  Sometimes it is man-made and sometimes it is natural, but my perspective on it is what makes it beautiful or unattractive.  I just have to watch for the beauty instead of expecting the ugly.

I took the pictures in this post at the wedding site.  It was lovely.  The world keeps turning and people keep loving and living and finding or creating beauty -- their own Avalon.