the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

64 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance:
I’m in a culture shock I don’t expect. My body is
conditioned to hunker down to urban sensations: tight spaces,
canyons of buildings, and stimulating streets. Here in the Pacific
Northwest my body is assailed by the expansiveness of the space:
broad valleys, chains of mountains, wide skies, and quieter towns.
My body feels small, unbalanced in this scale.
Rhododendrons grow lush and rampant, unlike the delicate laurel, its
relative in the East. Fir trees soar higher than I’ve ever seen. The mystical
and the magical seem alive in this landscape: rocks, trees, birds flying across
the sky. Its palpable magic whispers to me of the older indigenous culture
suffusing the air and earth.
The place feels like Greece, where my daughter and I traveled to
celebrate her graduation from college. There the land and the sky seemed
stark and portentous, mythic in scope. We walked in the cave of the god Zeus,
saw ruins of temples in ordinary backyards. I stood on a stone rampart one
afternoon and felt like Odysseus reading portents in the hawk silhouette that
rode high into the pallid sky. I noticed a bird skating off a ledge below me,
and it felt fraught with meaning.
Now here in the Pacific Northwest the land speaks in softer tones, more
nuanced voices than Greece. But as there, I listen and watch.
I’ve found an apartment in a little harbor town on Puget Sound. I can
see a brilliant slice of the glacial top of Mt. Rainier from its balcony. Down the
hill three blocks, I sit after work with my feet up on a wooden porch railing
behind a restaurant and watch the harbor traffic. Sailboats, working boats,
rowboats ply from one side to the other, in and out of the harbor, reminding
me of summer vacations in Maine. There as here, I glimpse the social mores of
small town life. It is high summer, late afternoon, and the slanting, glistening
light brings everything into sharp relief. I am not on vacation.
I turn a bedroom into my first art studio here in this apartment—unheard