Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece, Fallingwater, is truly one of the great gems of Western Pennsylvania.  Built in the 1930s by the Kaufman Family--of the now-defunct Kaufman Department Stores--it is tucked away in a quiet wooded valley in the Laurel Highlands, just south of Pittsburgh.  This was their weekend home, which they used all year round.  I'm still a few years south of 50, but I remember the Kaufman's Department Stores around this region, especially the flagship store downtown Pittsburgh.  It later became The May Company, and then it became Macy's, and we all knew that Macy's had no allegiance to this region.  They pulled out a few years back, and now I think the building is being turned into urban loft apartments.  The Kaufmans had only one child, Edgar, who never married, but who used to give tours of Fallingwater until his death in the late 1980s.

Fallingwater is well worth an hour and a half drive from Pittsburgh.  Unfortunately, no photography is permitted inside the building, but the interior is spectacular with dark little rooms, lots of large windows, low-lying furniture, and everything made to look like it grew organically from the rocks from which the house is built.  The place is meant to give a person the impression of living inside a waterfall, and the sound of the stream can be heard throughout the house.  Reservations are required, and the place gets crowded.  But the grounds include hundreds of acres of wooded land with trails and even some overnight backpacking.  In fact, my REI Camp Dome 2 tent (that I love so much) saw its first use just across the road at the Bear Run Nature Reserve--which is a part of the old Fallingwater estate.

The Joy of the Forest

I went to the forest today with an old, old ache in my heart.  It's a frequent visitor, a thing I've learned to live with.  I told it to the trees, muttered it to the air in sighs and weary sentence fragments.  After just two hours, I returned to my car with a joy just as old, but so often overlooked.  The summer woods are bright green and golden in the sunlight.  This is the usually-barren place of my winter treks.  It was almost magical to see the gray old trees where I wander all winter newly decked out in full leaf, lovely and shaded.  This ancient hickory is one of my favorite trees in all the world; I must have photographed it a dozen times in all its seasonal states.  It looks like a dendrite or a nerve ending, seen beneath a microscope.  Look at the wild branches that strike off into the forest canopy in the shape of lightning rods.  Then this little box turtle happened along to assuage my sorrows, too.  As did the birds with their songs, and the silence, and the subtle beauty, and the solitude, and the thoughts that only come to me in such places as this...thoughts that act more like a...prayer.  There is a turning that waits in our hearts, a place and a time to push past all that is false and reach for the things that matter.  And though the sadness returns too, it cannot last forever.  No season is forever.  It sounds wistful, but it's not.  There are times when I believe that change and impermanence are our best hope.  The forest is a healing place.