Etchings on the Heart
Author with grandmother, mother, uncle (behind), and father. Spruce Pine, NC, circa 1973.
Yesterday, as I was driving home from having lunch out, I came around the bend and there, opening up before me like some gentle goliath sentinel, was the Black Mountain range, which is a part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the haze of the mid-afternoon heat, they loomed, and I marveled at their ancient beauty, just as I have for most of my life.
I started coming here on summer vacation when I was just a baby. Each summer, my family (including extended), would rent a large place in different parts of western Carolina, where we would all congregate for two weeks. We had fun – simple fun; fun that came in the form of swimming in rivers, eating ice cold watermelon that had been cooled in those rivers, playing poker late into the night (for pennies, mind you, not big bucks), eating peach or blueberry cobblers, going to local tourist attractions like Tweetsie Railroad, or Maggie Valley’s Ghost Town in the Sky, and taking long walks on beautiful mountain paths. At the ski resorts, the lifts would carry summer visitors up the mountain, riding over lush green grass to the summit. At the top, we’d either eat in the restaurant – if there was one – or ride the contraption back down and then go to some local eatery like Louise’s Rock House, or the Tartan. Without fail, I’d order a hamburger with fries and a Coke. Parents weren’t too worried about making sure their kids had carrot sticks and a juice drink for lunch, and somehow, we survived.
Right after I was done at FSU, my parents bought a cabin in Little Switzerland, which is just the next mountain over from my house (about 15 minutes away.) It was named Little Switzerland because it looks like a lower version of the Swiss Alps. My parents’ cottage was a sweet little place, tucked back into the woods. It wasn’t fancy and didn’t have a wonderful mountain view, but they loved it nevertheless. It was their special haven; a place that symbolized their years of hard work and the end to their expensive child-rearing days when disposable income was unheard of. Back in ’93, Daddy suffered a major heart attack and died in his recliner there. It was unexpected and we were devastated, but I knew that if he had to go, that’s exactly where and how we would have wanted to go.
Yesterday, I was back in Little Switzerland to celebrate a good friend’s birthday. We ate at the Chalet, which is a restaurant in the hundred-plus-year-old inn. As we walked through one of the dining rooms, we passed a table where my family had gathered nearly thirteen years ago for my mother’s memorial service. And just two years ago, we sat at that same table with a number of our friends to celebrate my husband’s 60th birthday. I mentioned such to my friend, and she said that she and her mother sat at the table next to it several years back at Thanksgiving. It had been her mother’s last.
Just through the window, I could see Geneva Hall, where I used to square dance as a kid during those summer vacations. My sister and I used to be shy about getting out on the dance floor, dancing to music that wasn’t as familiar to our ears as The Beatles’, or the Monkees’ songs were. But, inevitably, a couple of the local boys would pull us out of the shadows and onto the floor where we would Doe-See-Doe until late in the evening. As teenagers, we would never admit it, but we had a ball. In that same building, we celebrated my mother’s 70th birthday back in 2001. It came just ten days after the attack on the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon, but my sister and I boarded planes in Florida without giving it a second thought in order to be there for Mama’s big day. There wasn’t a terrorist in the world who was going to scare us into missing it.
The little church next to Geneva Hall holds my mother’s remains in its little memorial garden. My great-niece, who was born prematurely, is buried next to her, and several of us have bought plots there. Somehow, this place has laid claimed to us, and we have decided that when it’s our time to go, she shall lay claim to us permanently.
As I looked up at the Black Mountains on my drive home, Eric Clapton’s song, “Can’t Find My Way Home,” was playing on the radio. I thought to myself how odd it was that I was raised in Miami, as my mother was, and her mother before her, and, yet, the majority of my family now lives in North Carolina, or at least has a vacation home here. Somehow, those memories of my childhood pulled me back here again, just as it did them. All things considered, it’s not necessarily the places we grow up in that are home to us in the long run. It’s those places that call us back to them again; places where small moments in time become some of the most meaningful, leaving the deepest impressions that create etchings on our hearts; etchings that never let us stray too far from a place, or for too very long.