There And Back Again

Leaving the Shire to Find It

Hotel Floyd: at the end of the hallway, first floor, a 24 x 36 photo of HeresHome. Surprised the heck out of me. This image was the cover of Slow Road Home. My name had been Photoshopped onto the mailbox.

RECAP: I would be able to visit southwest Virginia again--home for almost 40 years, and the place I wrote about as if I would never leave it. But we did leave, because Floyd could not provide the health and housing we would eventually need for Ann. That need was satisfied, mid-May, so I got my tickets and made plans to return to Floyd County for three full--and I do mean FULL--days in late June. This is a partial personal debriefing and glimpse ahead to what comes next.

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It must be one of Murphy's laws: If you get a window seat, you will be sitting over the wing. Yep. Even so, as we finally descended through the clouds a few hundred miles north of Roanoke, it was a joy to see straight roads and rectangular fields yield to the orogeny of land rucked up into the ridges and valleys I had lived among for almost 40 years.

I mentally hugged my mountains and they hugged back. First, Mill Mountain--a tame city mountain, it's true, with a star on it--a landmark I was delighted to see a few hundred feet below as we descended toward the runway that rose to meet us.

Then Tinker Mountain and tree with the lights in it, thank you Annie Dillard.

From the rental car down the Great Valley of Western Migration, mountains: Fort Lewis, Poor Mountain, and those known but nameless but not quite home. Then, from Shawsville, the valley ascent winding up Allegheny Springs onto the plateau of Floyd County.

Mountains of home: The Buffalo; Alum Ridge, Wills Ridge, Haycock, Panther Knob, The Saddle. There they were. I could confirm that these sentinel peaks had remained in place in my absence, after all.

THE SPREADSHEET

But of course, it was not the mountains but the people I had come to see. And like the mountains themselves, we were eroding and wearing down, bit by bit. A handful of Floyd expats like me had moved away had come back for this brief reunion among high places, with friends who had once been prominent landmarks on our shared and now fading map of life.

My daughter's family, including my two rarely-seen grand daughters were central to this trip, staying like me, at at VRBO in town. The expats had planned meals and social events I wanted to attend. Friends outside of these groups were equally important to see. I was almost overwhelmed by obligation and opportunity.

To keep track of the who-where-and-when I created a table: date, time, person, event, comments.

I met my good friend Charlie here on “the Saddle” in the cool of the morning of my first full day in town. So many stories are held in this and every frame.

And when the allocated 45 minutes was up, I excused myself promptly, difficult as it was, to get to my next visit. This rigid itinerary was obsessively detail-oriented, perhaps; but it worked.

And now I am back at "home" in Columbia again, my Floyd-June spreadsheet serves as an aide for fleshing out details of so many conversations and times together -- a framework for binding memories to faces and places in the once-ness of time. I will enjoy the reliving of it all for some while.

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGETY JOG

The getting there and back again in heated metal tubes was a necessary evil. I am weirdly not happy when I am jostled, compressed, immobilized and over-heated. That's just me.

I may drive to Virginia in three days if I ever go back. But honestly, I think I have had my going home. As much as I wanted to do it, I had to do it, and looking back now, I am seeing what I have gained. It was not an easy going-back but a necessary one.

So many times, there arose the lump poised at the very edge of tears, confronting places familiar, known, remembered; changed, gone, just the same. Friends with laughter and language I knew so well, less agile now, with more gray hair and a tremor.

We visited Goose Creek briefly. My youngest grand daughter "remembered it all" and that made me happy. The lump insisted but I said no.

THE SO WHAT

What would it be like to return but leave yet again, probably for the last time? Would I be broken by it? Would my nostalgia overwhelm me again with the immensity of separation, leaving a place I had always thought of and written about as the place I would live until I die?

I now see that these revisited ghosts of my long past in place has given me a kind of closure I did not know I needed or could find by going back.

I can now get on with living where life has brought me and become content and settled here, without bereavement over all that was good in my past but gone from my present.

I can accept the absence of my Virginia friends and neighbors from my life in the Shire without forgetting them. The loss is simply a necessary part of life--a costly ticket to the next stop along the journey. We are where we must be.

THE HIGHWAY AHEAD

Now the tale will be: what do I make of my time to come, with freedom to travel; to write; to make friends; to learn the backroads, the birds and the botany of a place I now must think about as home?

Ann is in good hands. And mine are free to explore the next thing.

All who wander are not lost. ~ JRR Tolkien

Rakes Mill Pond | Blue Ridge Parkway—once a crow mile from home, the spring-fed waters, even now, passing down the Mississippi River, not very far to the east of us here in Columbia Missouri.

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