They say you don't get to choose the landscape of your childhood, but if you're lucky, it chooses you.
For us, that landscape was the mountain. It wasn't just a place on a map or a ridge of rock rising out of the Northwest Alabama dirt. It was a living, breathing character in our lives. The steep, winding gravel roads that tested your tires, the heavy, suffocating humidity of July, and the thick evening air that always seemed to smell of charcoal, honeysuckles, and distant river water. The mountain held our secrets, tracked our growth, and anchored our family to the earth in a way that no deed or property line ever could.
When you grow up eleven years behind your big sister, your entire childhood is spent looking up. You live in the wake of her timeline, seeing the world through the gravel dust kicked up by her truck tires, listening to the echo of her laughter from rooms you aren't quite big enough to enter yet. You spend your days stretching on tiptoe, trying to close the gap between her adulthood and your youth. What you don't understand when you're small is that while you are busy trying to catch up, the universe is quietly weaving your lives together. It tangles your roots so deeply into the same soil that no amount of time, no distance, and no sudden, violent storm could ever hope to unravel you.
Or so you believe.
We lived in a quiet hole cradled by rising hills on both sides at the bottom of the mountain. When the heavy spring storms rolled in and turned the southern sky a deep, bruised purple, making the high walnut trees lean and shudder, the worst of the wind passed right over us. Down between the hills, tucked into our own pocket of the world, we never really had to worry. The thunder would rattle the horizon, wild and furious, and we would sit safely below it all, watching the sky rage from a place it could not quite reach.
I know now that no hollow is deep enough to shelter you from everything. Some storms don't pass over. Some of them find you anyway, no matter how far down into the earth you think you've tucked yourself.
This is the story of my big sister Tonya. It is a story about that mountain; the place we always came back to when the world got too loud; and about a bond that began on the worn fabric bench seat of a Ford Ranger and never once let go. It is a story about a woman who wore headlamps in the dark and camo in the summer, who baked cakes at midnight and carried people through their worst storms without ever once being asked twice. A woman who was fiercer, funnier, and more stubbornly alive than anyone I have ever known.
I am writing it down because she deserves to be remembered exactly as she was.
I am writing it down because in October of 2025, the mountain went quiet in a way it had never gone quiet before.
And I am writing it down because she was my big sister, and she was the safest place I ever knew, and now I am learning, one impossible day at a time, how to stand in the open without her.