Although you might not think it, there are hills around here, inclines that push walkers and cyclists into overdrive. These are not the hills of Seattle rising like cartoon mountains, making a hazard of rolling suitcases and winding the faint-hearted in just one block. These are more subtle gradients, but gradients just the same.

It dawned on me lately while walking up a steep rise that it’s the piedmont at work. The land we inhabit here on the western edge of Fairfax County is just past the fall line of the Potomac. Virginia hunt country lies nearby. 

We live in the northern Piedmont region, literally at the foot of the mountains, those mountains being the Blue Ridge, which you can see rising like gray ghosts a quarter mile from here if the weather is clear. 

It’s comforting to think, as I chug up a steep grade, that I’m not just out of shape … I’m hiking the Piedmont.