Happy New Year! So sorry to have been missing in action,
but I’ve been just a tad busy. . . .
I do solemnly promise to get you back to Beantown one
of these days—you wouldn’t want to miss
wonders like flying lobsters, a clean Boston Bay, and
a heavenly Cuban beverage called “To die dreaming.”
But I think that a little homecoming is in order first.
I finally returned to DC while the sniper was still
holding sway. That didn’t particularly bother
me, because the odds of dying on the highway were better
than the odds of getting hit by an apparently random
bullet. I’d lived through the crack years, after
all, and was still urbane enough to be fatalistic about
random violence.
But the city was truly different, and I felt it. It
hit me when one suburban friend told me that her younger
daughter didn’t want her to leave home and run
errands on the weekends, and when I thought twice about
sitting on a park bench on Capitol Hill to eat a pastry
and read the Sunday Washington Post. (In the
end, of course, I did.)
It was wonderful to be back, and I totally relaxed
for two-and-a-half weeks in the flat of a friend who
had (most conveniently) cleared out to visit his family
in Ireland. Even though I had long ago reconsidered
a permanent return to DC, I’d also wondered if
being back would change my mind. Obviously it didn’t.
I felt free enough—and rooted enough in DC—to
leave again, sure that the nation’s capital would
always be mine whenever I wanted it to be.
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Where Was Home?
Thus liberated to pursue my country dream, I drove
and drove and drove through Pennsylvania, West Virginia,
and Virginia in search of a home. I suffered sticker
shock in West Virginia: At as much as $15,000 per acre
for land adjoining national forest, redneck heaven made
upstate New York’s $8,000-per-acre land seem like
a bargain. When I mentioned this to a DC lawyer friend,
he remarked that his dentist recently had bought a place
in West Virginia. I wondered: If I can’t compete
with DC dentists, what’s the woman working at
7-11 supposed to do?
After many complications and one near-purchase close
enough to home to have my mother salivating, I headed
south again. Eventually I found myself at Central Virginia’s
Forks of Buffalo, a place I had discovered in May shortly
after embarking on the Odyssey. When I first saw it
on an idyllic, sunny May day, I thought that the old
house that was for sale looked like the perfect home,
but never dreamed that one day I’d live there.
But here I am. At 19.3 acres, the survey definitely
came out in my favor, and the house is a rambling, spacious
delight. Every time I start to pinch myself to see if
I’m just dreaming, I inevitably hit a spot of
paint or a bruise that makes it all real again. All
my life I’ve adored old houses and hoped to own
one; this house and land is everything I had ever dreamed
of. It was enough to make this Yankee sacrifice her
beloved snow and Northern ways to settle in. Against
my will, almost, the South had claimed me.
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Southern Comfort
The house is situated between the North and South Forks
of the Buffalo River, which drains the surrounding mountains.
North Fork Road is a one-lane beauty between Fletcher
and Panther Mountains; it runs for a mere four miles
before dead-ending in the George Washington National
Forest. My dad said this may be the prettiest little
valley he’s seen—high praise indeed from
a well-traveled gentleman who had a vested interest
in me not settling in so far from where I was
born and raised. North of the road, I’ve heard,
one can still find native trout in the North Fork; other
natives abound, too, so the wise wanderer is always
on the lookout for mountain rattlers or copperheads.
There are endless attractions: The Appalachian Trail
and the Blue Ridge Parkway pass through a few miles
to the west, and Long Mountain is a driver’s dream.
Cold Mountain lies just to the northwest. It is not
the Cold Mountain featured in Charles Frazier’s
superb 1997 novel—and 2003 movie—of that
name about the Civil War, but it’s a beautiful
little mountain offering excellent views. Walton Mountain,
made famous by the ‘70s TV show about the Walton
family, lies to the northeast. And, as a friend was
delighted to discover, vineyards line the route from
DC on down.
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Life Is Change
This house, and the land before it, belonged to the
Myers family. I bought from Hal Jr., who’s closing
in on 80 and beating the odds after surviving an aneurysm
and months-long coma. Hal Wilson (the third) told me
that there exists a photo documenting the long-ago time
his dad brought a pony into the kitchen; you know I’ve
got to get a copy to hang at the scene of the crime.
Wonder what his mother, Ruth Myers, had to say about
that?!
It clearly pained the family to part with the place;
I understood. It had hurt me to see my maternal grandfather’s
family farm leave the clan after one century, and the
Myerses were surrendering theirs after two. But a neighbor
from up North Fork Road pointed out that once this had
all been Monacan Indian land, which helped put things
in perspective. The times they keep a changin’,
and people move on, willingly or not. Fortunately, Hal
Wilson still has 25 acres on my north side, and we’ve
made each other welcome on our respective plots.
And so I find myself tied to the Myerses and Forks
of Buffalo and Amherst County (founded in 1761). A new
chapter begins, but it feels like a seamless continuation
of the Odyssey. I’ve learned to trust that home
is always waiting for me, even if I don’t know
where it will be.
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Country Living
It hasn’t been difficult to re-adjust to country
life, but it has been an adjustment. I am reminded that
country people never call; they just drop by. While
I was growing up this drove me crazy, but now that I’m
the curiosity du jour and people drop by with tasty
things like homemade vegetable soup and pecan pie and
rolls, I find that I don’t mind. The local folks
are already finding my rhythm and respecting it, and
I’m not fighting them, so we’re doing fine.
I could not have asked for a warmer welcome to the area.
I still haven’t gotten a satellite dish (no cable,
of course) and don’t know when I’ll get
around to it, so I continue to be hopelessly out of
the loop. For the most part, I don’t miss TV a
bit. But I do crave “Charlie Rose” and “The
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” and always am aware
that I’m missing something good when “Meet
the Press,” “The West Wing,” and “Law
and Order” are on, so I imagine I will rejoin
the TV nation one of these days.
It even was a couple of weeks before this former news
junkie was interested in procuring the Washington
Post, but one Saturday afternoon I found myself
asking some visiting neighbors if a copy could be found
in Amherst. They said they assumed so, and the conversation
moved on. An hour later, Rosa Bradley kindly called
to say that they had been passing through and stopped
to ask, and that I could indeed get one at the Exxon
on the traffic circle.
So the next day, full of anticipation for a lazy afternoon
spent in pursuit of informed citizenship and fascinating
trivia, I headed into town and strode into the Exxon,
only to find that if I wanted a Sunday Washington
Post, I would have to reserve one in advance. I
fared no better at the Chevron across the road, so settled
for a New York Times. At the counter, the teenaged
cashier rang up the $4.25 price and exclaimed, “Good
lord! No newspaper is worth that.” He didn’t
mean it unkindly and I laughed and took no offense;
but I also thought that this was one of the dangers
of never leaving the country. One might never truly
learn that there was a big, wide, wonderful world out
there, some part of which could be found in the papers
like the New York Times and the Washington
Post. By small-town newspaper standards, the Lynchburg
News & Advance is quite good—but
it doesn’t regularly take the reader to faraway
places or cultural events. I may need to be rooted in
a peaceful place, but I also need faraway places and
a bit of stimulation. Needless to say, Par-Bill’s
Exxon has me on their Post-reserve list.
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Putting Down Roots
Now that I have found my home, I’m reveling in
the sheer joy of taking clothes out of drawers instead
of plastic bags (for awhile, I felt like the poster
child for upscale bag ladies). It’s also been
surprisingly refreshing to have phone conversations
that don’t begin with “Where are you?”
And I’m enjoying some of my favorite meals again,
humble fare that is rare only in that it starts with
a sausage or some such thing that one can only get at
some tiny country store in western PA or at the DC Farmers’
Market. Such are the things that make a house a home.
A home also is made of something more prosaic, though:
what my maternal grandfather called “elbow grease”
(in other words, muscle power). Between cleaning and
unpacking and painting and cleaning up after work that’s
being done, I’m actually burning up all of those
delicious donated calories. The lessons of my forefathers
are coming in handy, too, as usual. Papa Batik always
said, “Measure twice, cut once.” Grandpa
Coalmer constantly reminded me, “If you want to
be able to stand up tomorrow, don’t bend—squat
or kneel.” And of course my foremothers set a
good example by working hard and not even bothering
to talk about it.
In a song called “Can’t Help but Wonder
Where I’m Bound,” Tom Paxton said:
