With a View
by Danielle Buynak Horner
Danielle Buynak Horner, views are not my own, digital photograph, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
With a View
Danielle Buynak Horner
AUG 2026 | Issue 54
FLASH
When we first bought a house in the country, we could walk to the end of the street and catch an unencumbered view of the sun going down behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. Without any developed land in sight, it felt preserved in time. Sunset reflecting off our quintessential country road. Clouds lit from beneath. Silhouettes of power lines. The sound of evening birds, making sight a song. And then, just me and the ancient before me.
Within the first year, the people who own the land planted thousands of pine trees for timber. Soon the trees were teenagers and towering, and like a tall guy at a concert, standing between me and the eternal.
If the mountains are still there now, I can’t see them. But I hope the pines pause, thankful as I’d be for every orange and pink slipping behind the Blues.
To catch that view these days, I get in my car and pull off into the gravel at the edge of 200 recently-cleared acres waiting to be born again as McMansions. I park and I fill my chest with the colors. I even got out of the car once and cracked a beer. Drank half. I didn’t stay long—afraid to suffer the consequences of stealing someone else’s sunset.
Further down Thomas Jefferson Parkway, beyond the confederate flag and past the s-curves, there's another huge wound of trees pulled from the earth. Red clay truck tracks fan out both ways from it, stretching down the asphalt like a bloodstain.
You wanna know what they put there, once they paid someone to remove the rootballs and skeletons?
A forest of solar panels with a mountain view. A farm to grow money from the sun. A thousand mirrored faces reflecting the heavens back to god, and yes—noticing the sunset. Communing with the ancient—but only to ask how to make money once it’s night.
Long before we bought this house, for more than a century straddling the Civil War, this land was 600+ acres of the largest black-owned farm in the county. And here I sit, fifty years after it was auctioned off, whining, cause I can’t own a view.
Danielle Buynak Horner lives, writes, and cuts her fingers making stained glass in Central Virginia. Her work has previously appeared in pacificREVIEW, Railtown Almanac, How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All, and Challenge into Change.