i enjoy this aspect of appalachia. it is so easy to go from intense population density in a genuine metro area to being nowhere with nobody around. i'm helping a friend rescue an old trailer whose previous resident passed away so that some younger adults we know can live there. i do the outdoors while he does the indoors, for the most part. i'm learning that that holler is the brambles and vines spawn location. i keep having to fight the greenery back to keep it from swallowing the place up entirely.

my friend keeps reminding me that i've moved to a rainforest climate. the place where i learned to do yardwork earlier in my adulthood was desert-lite. now i'm learning to do the same work in a place that seems to be entirely comprised of water and clay and vines and bugs that want my blood.

there are leeches and plants that burn you and creatures that lay eggs in human skin and shit. so i have to fully cover my body while doing manual labor in a place so humid that water just sort of condenses on the ground out of the air, but so hot that it immediately evaporates back up as steam. it's not really fog. it's just sort of like a hot steamy bathroom, but everywhere. i could not have ever imagined a place like this could exhist in my past lives.

when i had visitors the past few days, they complained of the humidity. they never even left the city, though, so they don't really know the half of it.