W here’s home for you?” If I had a nickel for every time I field that inquiry in a month’s time. Must be the way Virginia’s still in my voice—fermented like a glass of Sweet Mountain Laurel unpredictably spilling and pooling around cadences that warrant a double take on this side of the continent.
“I’m a desert dweller by way of the Blue Ridge Mountains, if that’s what you mean,” I tell them. Where magnolia trees blossom fragrant in spring, and mid-summer dog days pant and trod past tangy blackberries sun-ripening on their vines all the way down to the road between the vistas, canopied by lush grandfatherly oaks and verdant maples whose leaves take a nostalgic, kaleidoscopic turn in their own season…
That’s home for me, in the deepest sense; the true north of my wayfaring heart.
I ’ve been prone to wander for as long as I’ve known myself—a road dog with a chronic itch pestering the underside of my right foot as though it were part of my breeding. (In part, I blame my father for even introducing me to the thrill of hours-long encounters between rubber and road. Many an occasion found us piling into the family car, bound for Bluefield, West Virginia, or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee—and if Dad didn’t like what the latter had to offer upon our arrival, we turned south toward Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We’ve followed maps and our own predilections to New England and central Florida with less than a day’s notice, and to Arizona twice because who knew when we embarked on the first cross-country roadtrip there’d be déjà vu less than 60 days later?)
But there’s something about Virginia that pulls at me like a set of wheels with shoddy alignment, and the slightest hint of honeysuckle in a wayward breeze has me bound for the Blues (or the nearest comparable mountain range I can find in southern California when airfare requires more pennies than I can scrape together in a moment’s notice) with a bag full of camera lenses and whatever snacks I thought to grab on my way out the door, propelled onward by the rhythmic shake-rattle-and-roll and open-windowed whir of the road.
Our bond runs deep, Virginia’s, the Blue Ridges’ and mine; forged many, many suns and moons ago in rust-red dirt and sprawling fields full of hay bales and wildflowers, deep as the roots of a dogwood tree. The state slogan proclaims that “Virginia is for lovers”—and I fell head over heels long ago, so long ago I wonder if it’s in my blood, ‘cause my heart’s shaped just like a mountain-dotted skyline and secretly beats to the tune of homemade folk songs and Old Crow Medicine Show on someone’s front porch.
My friends, they know this about me like I know their middle names and the adolescent secrets they still keep from their mothers, and nearly all of them have served as willing accomplices to my endless whims: “Want to skip class and watch the winter sun rise between the peaks?”
“Let’s go hiking and replenish ourselves with a bushel of fresh-picked peaches.”
“Hop in my passenger’s seat, control the auxiliary cord and let’s drive ‘til we’re spent—the mountains, the road, adventure is beckoning like a siren’s call, and if I decline I might implode.”
M
y feet were bare—my year-round custom—and my heart was swooning as golden hour, that sweet, sweet spot between late afternoon and twilight, spilled onto verdant knolls of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s Twenty Minute Cliff. I later wrote: “It was one of the most beautiful and breathtaking golden hours I’ve ever witnessed, perhaps because in the moment I implicitly knew the sands of time were running thin.” It was September 2019; summer’s last golden days were waning and so were my own, though I didn’t explicitly know it yet. I could feel it in my bones—the rhythm of change, a bittersweet shift of seasons. In a month I’d be settling on the West Coast, unpacking boxes and hanging technicolor still frames on empty beige walls and memorizing yet another new address.
I sensed all summer long that this would be the last I shared with Virginia for some time and resolved to make the very most of it, logging countless miles between the Shenandoah Valley and Yorktown’s colonial shores and Dogtown Roadhouse’s wood-fired meat lover’s pizza (the secret ingredient is prosciutto) and the porch swing where time stands still and floral fragrances waft from my mother’s garden to flirt with fresh-cut grass.
Naturally on this particular afternoon we headed for the Blue Ridges, my soul-sister-college-roommate-friend Hannah and I, not stopping ‘til our arms were full of Golden Delicious apples at the top of Carter Mountain. Perched on a veranda overlooking the heart of Central Virginia, we sipped fresh-pressed cider by the glassfuls, raising a toast to roots and the ways in which they stretch and bend and sometimes break and without fail entangle themselves with home, that one sure and steady tether that reminds us who we are when our fortitude becomes misplaced and leaves the light on just in case we’d like to “take our shoes off and stay awhile.”
I’m not sure whether Hannah proposed the idea or I did—we’re both women of the mountains, most at home where the ridges meet the sky—but next thing I knew we were weaving through the familiar twists and turns of the Blue Ridge Parkway doused in golden hour sunlight and bittersweet ballads crooned by Shakey Graves and The Head and The Heart, stunned a little bit further beyond belief with each break in the trees. Vistas we’d passed, paused or picnicked by a hundred times before, now imbued with a pure and sincere sense of wonderment as though this time were the very first.
That’s when we saw it: Twenty Minute Cliff, painted with all the solar brushstrokes on the palette of the Divine. The car was barely in park before I was jumping out, Canon in hand (we were inseparable that summer) to capture every square inch of the present moment before it slipped away, fading into the scrapbook pages of my memory.
Hannah has a knack for vocalizing exactly what I’m thinking, a strange sort of telepathy refined by twenty-three years of friendship and sisterhood. That moment was no different, another echo of that summer’s refrain: “Wherever I live, I think I’m always going to miss this place.”
I
f it were a museum, this heart of mine, all its alcoves would be lined bottom-to-top with portraits of home—places and persons who, near and far, mean something dear to me. Who’ve shaped me, nurtured, cultivated me in some way or another, whether I recognized and embraced it in the moment or after it was long past. A series of tributes to my college town, my family’s coastal vacation spot and the ones who got away.
Amid the sea of mementos and nostalgia, an entire gallery would be devoted to Sweet Virginia, conveying in vivid, emotion-rich imagery and shades of Blue-Ridge-indigos and forest-greens and meadow-flower-yellows what I still struggle to convey with words. There’s something about “the one” that’s just like that—you each know one another better than your own selves, like the back of your hand or the name of every sunlit, timber-lined backroad. And you’re not “you” without them. Sometimes when you’re together you can hardly stand one another and the ways you’ve changed since you first met, but when you’re apart, that adage about absence and the heart growing fonder rings so true you can hear it like the whippoorwills’ refrain.
Virginia is for lovers, after all.
There’d be a framed Polaroid of summer-y front porch evenings, painted with acoustic Americana ballads and skies of firefly-flecked vintage blue; small-batch coffee and my mother’s smooth-and-thick-as-molasses drawl, a song of the South through and through.
There’d be an ode to sweet iced tea—the equivalent of house wine ‘round those parts—and gravy-smothered biscuits, fresh from the oven and almost gluttonously devoured by diners who know the power of home-cooked comfort food. And my mother’s chicken and dumplings, lest I forget. I requested them almost every time I came home from college, savoring bites between loads of laundry and rounds of art projects.
And at the heart of it all, the Blue Ridge Mountains—those gentle giants with their verdant vistas open wide like a maternal embrace that always seems to say, “Welcome home.”
Rosie PeñA | June 9, 2021
|
Rachel, I’ve only known your written work as a stellar education reporter, but this essay is poetry, plain and simple. It was an absolute pleasure to read and get to more know more about You, and about the place that calls you home at the end of the long, wandering day. Thank you for sharing.
Bruce Wyrwitzke | July 13, 2022
|
Yes, Rosie, “poetry, plain and simple.” If I could write I’d hope that it could be just a bit as beautifully done. Chicken and dumplings. It was 1969 and there was a cook at a fire-support base in s.e.a. Chicken and dumplings was his specialty. Once a week, if I was flying in his vIcinity We’d stop in for a “real” home coOked meal. Good memories. Thanks, Rachel.