Among Ghosts

You may have noticed from the map box over there on the right side of the page that we haven’t moved around much in the last week or so. It’s because we’re at my Mom’s house as the family deals with a few things that have come up. Julie’s been wonderfully understanding of the situation and we hope to be back on the road by the end of this week.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped producing new stories. Coming up this week you’ll see pieces about a hidden landmark that rivals New Hampshire’s now-defunct Old Man in the Mountain. We’re also working on two pieces about a very interesting program that’s helping Southwestern Virginia tobacco farmers transition to organic vegetable production. And Julie may very well blog about seeing the self-proclaimed “World’s Strongest Redneck.” Stay tuned.

We’re in my hometown. Jonesville, Virginia. It’s beautiful, friendly and small. Something like a thousand people live within the town limits. Amazingly, the Google Street View van seems to have made a trip through here, so you can see Jonesville for yourself to the right.

I haven’t spent a great deal of time here since I graduated from high school nearly twenty years ago. I’m more accustomed to living elsewhere, in cities I barely knew, places where I had no roots. Among locals I was always the outsider, the newbie with no sense of what came before.

“A sense of place and of history.”
But here it’s been different. For once I have a sense of place and of history. I’m a local, a townie. I know what roads used to be called, who used to live in that house and where we used to buy groceries before the Wal-Mart came to town. I reminisced with an old friend recently about long-dead members of the local Methodist church and later confirmed driving directions by saying “we’ll turn there where Roller’s Chapel used to be, right?” My Appalachian accent comes out when I say such things.

As we drive, I remember the back roads we used to take when skipping class, the curve where I heard on the radio that the first Gulf War had started, and the spot called the “joy bump,” which, hit at just the right speed, will send your stomach into your chest and nearly launch your vehicle off the road. It’s like living in a house that’s been in the family for generations. The ghosts of your own past don’t haunt you; they’re just good company.

“The casual comfort of home”
For most people this revelation may sound like I’m astonished at the discovery my own navel. Feeling at home isn’t exactly novel. Despite America being having the most mobile and restless population in the developed world, most people, if they don’t live near their birthplace, have at least put down enough roots to feel grounded in their surroundings. They’re lucky. While I’ve always been energized by the idea of moving to a new city where I knew no one, I’ve discovered this week that the casual comfort of home has its own appeal.

And about that new Wal-Mart I mentioned. It opened a couple of years ago and I was getting my hair cut last week at the facility’s convenient and inexpensive in-store salon. The young hairdresser told me she’d recently graduated from nearby Lee High School. With my newly found sense of hometown connectedness, I proudly told her I’d attended Lee High the year it opened. I figured I’d just started another conversation about the good ol’ days where I could again play the knowledgeable local talking hometown history. That’s when she replied that she didn’t know much about that. She happened to have been born the year Lee High School opened. I suppose the understood bargain is that a sense of history come as the expense of one’s youth.