I left Charlottesville this morning, a cool and rainy morning - to arrive home to abundant sunshine, heat and humidity - and to learn on the news tonight that we've received 13 inches less rain in 2007 than the average amount for this time of year. The garden told me this already - the leaf tips of the chaste tree are curled, the hydrangeas are drooping, and even the mexican sunflowers (the ones that reseed each year outside of the front gate) are about half of their normal height. But this time of year one is hesitant to wish for a good rain - with tropical systems roaming the Atlantic. Fortunately, Hurricane Dean spared our tagged corals located off the southern coast of Puerto Rico. Other reefs (and people and places) have probably not been so lucky.
There's an interesting consequence of challenging events in one's life, side benefits that you must acknowledge amidst the troubling times. My brother and I have been traveling back to our parent's home more often in the past six months than in any time in the recent past - making short visits as often as we can to check-in on our Mom and Dad. We alternate the trips for the most part, but we both try to show up together at times as well, knowing how our parents enjoy having us both under their roof at the same time. This weekend we were both there - to attend with our parents two social gatherings that they enjoy. Saturday was difficult: Mom wasn't feeling well and spent most of the day in bed, still feeling the effects of last Monday's chemotherapy session. I spent the day in my mother's kitchen making just about everything that either my mom or dad would like that could be frozen for later on. When my brother arrived on Saturday evening he and I went for a walk - down the roads that I've spoken of before - and for this trip, I found myself reconnecting with the rock walls of my childhood, stopping for awhile to really look at the rock wall at the entrance to a group of homes that were built on my mother's family farm. Homes that are now built on land that I ran around on as a child - remembering the creek that ran behind my grandparent's home that has since been used to make a five acre lake, and seeing the bearded irises along the bank of the lake that had been planted on the one side of their home. Now I sit and stare at the rock wall - rocks that used to be in the foundation of my grandparents home that have been resurrected as an entrance to a development of new homes with large lots filled with trees that I remember. My brother and I stopping to really look at the wall, and how it was constructed, and being reminded of how connected we are to this part of the landscape that has been my parents home for all of their lives.
After our walk, my brother, father and I drove up to the mountains, on winding roads with wonderful views that we could drive blind-folded if we needed to. Driving along these roads we passed the Wright family home, where every year more rocks are used to line the drive, some simply piled on top of each other (like a snowman), some now taking the form of a precariously-built wall. The three of us spent this Saturday evening at a relative's home on the side of a mountain - a small mountain just off the Blue Ridge parkway topped with a home containing a room filled with the heads of most every mammal found on the planet, a home that overlooks a smaller mountain, one that my brother used to claim as 'his' throughout our childhood. The gathering was an annual event held by a distant relative on my father's side who used the event to thank his co-workers, friends and family for anything and everything over the past year. There was every age of person there, and they had a golf cart to help the older guests make it up from where everyone parked to where the people were gathered. There was a crazy amount of food (and my brother and I guessed that a cardiologist wasn't anywhere in site, or if he was, he'd of had a heart attack), a decent-sized stage with every bluegrass performer in the area sitting or standing on it, and there were several hundred people present, of which about half were vaguely familiar, some very familiar, and some pleasant surprises. During the evening I learned a little known fact (which is perhaps a very good thing): a four-person spa tub can hold thirty cases of beer and a whole lotta ice (just in case the ocassion ever arises where you need to cool that much beer and a hot tub is the only thing around). One of the pleasant surprises? My childhood friend's brother, Warren, who lived in the house behind our home. Warren and my brother were friends, and Warren's sister Barbara was my friend. I will never forget the day in second grade when someone came into the classroom to get Barbara and we found out it was because her father had just died of a heart attack. Being seven years old and trying to help a best-friend through losing her father was a serious (and very early taught) lesson in inadequacy.
We were all glad to see that mom felt better on Sunday morning, since that afternoon was the annual reunion for her mother's side of the family. My mom started this tradition about twenty years ago, and she showed me the notebook where everyone who attended each year had signed their names and addresses, with the first page in the book dated August 1985. Neither my brother or I had ever signed that book before - and mom was happy to have us sign the book this year. Driving to the church where the reunion was held (in their fellowship hall), we passed another newly developed area - probably another family farm that was sold - and as we drove in to take a look, there was yet another rock wall framing the entrance, and I couldn't help but wonder if those rocks represented another family's home and history - and whether there were people like myself walking down those roads remembering the trees and the open fields. My brother and I smiled as we saw the real estate signs posted on all of the lots: the realtor was either Warren, who we had just seen the night before, or Warren's daughter, Christy.
I enjoyed the reunion. Many of the people I didn't know, or perhaps had met years and years ago or simply remembered through stories told by my mother. All except one of my mother's family was there - all of her sisters, even those that generally don't come to this reunion, showed up this year. My aunt and uncle with the large farm in southeastern Virginia showed up with coolers filled with watermelons for all of us, reminding me of our visits to their farm when we were young, sitting on the back of a truck picking out the watermelons and canteloupes that we wanted to take home. They brought tomatoes and a ton of other stuff too, and when I laughed at my aunt as I was helping her get stuff from her car, she just smiled and said 'Well, I am your mother's sister' which did explain everything. She also told me later in the afternoon, when she was asking about how mom was doing, that their mother used to take eggs and milk and mix them and bake them in the oven - a plain quiche more or less - when they didn't feel well. It explains why my mother gravitates towards quiches when she isn't feeling well. I made two for her while I was home - one that we all shared on Sunday, and another for the freezer for a day when she craves the comfort food of her childhood. Later in the afternoon my brother and I talked about all of the people that pulled us aside, telling us about how sorry they were that our mother was facing cancer, and how wonderful she had been to them during difficult times. One woman said 'She was the first to my home after my husband died' and others told similar stories. Two cousins cried as they hugged me, and told me how sad they were to hear of her diagnosis. My mom has been a rock in the family - a neutral country in a continent that has had a family's share of disagreements. They all, in their own way, recognize that she has been both the force and the glue that has kept them all together, for all of these years. My mother's younger sister took her home towards the end of the gathering, so she could take a nap, while my brother and I helped clean up, which mostly involved talking to people that we hadn't spent much time with in a long, long while. My brother and I were silly and a cousin looked at her two kids who didn't know us all that well and said 'See, they're still really funny' and they just shook their head. My brother and I played a quick game of PIG (which morphed into PIGGY which I tried, unsuccessfully, to morph into PIGGYNACIOUS) in the church basketball court outside, and went home. It was nice to hear the kind words and hear the sadness in people's voices, but we needed to go home - our mother was still very, very much alive.
When we got home, mom was still napping so my brother and I took off, because I was still obsessed with rocks and he drove me around Earlysville to see what else we could find. At one point I said to my brother 'You're being unusually patient with me' which was true - as we stopped at another rock wall, another one down the road from my parents that framed the entrance of Fray's Grant. The entrance is new - just a year or two old, and lined in red cedars. Oddly enough, I took photographs in quiet, with my brother sitting patiently in the car - not once yelling for me to hurry up (a small miracle which even surprised him).
We drove on into Earlysville, where we stopped at the Buck Mountain Episcopal Church which was established in 1747 - in another location further up in the mountains, but was moved into Earlysville sometime in the early 1800's. All along the front of the church property, right along the road, is a rock wall, that seems to be more mortar than wall, but that has been there as long as I can remember - and I'm guessing that it's been there alot longer than my memory goes back. As I was standing there, photographing a wall in the town that my family is such a big part of, I thought that it was highly likely that half of the people driving by were relatives.
And I was right. After stopping by at the local grocery, stocking up on Virginia wine (from Barboursville), we drove to the Earlysville Union Church - and my brother dropped me off at the road while he drove around to an entrance up the road where he proceded to back-up in the field in front of the church. I was thinking how odd we must have looked, my brother backing up through this field off the road while I was sitting on the ground, photographing the side of the two-stair rock staircase that lead to one of the front doors of the church - when a car blew it's horn at us and out comes my cousin and her daughter making a smart ass comment about how we looked like tourists in a town that we're actually from - and in that moment, standing there by the church that is the center of my parents town, photographing stairs while my cousin is laughing at me - in that moment I realized how connected my brother and I are to this place, virtually every crevice of it, and how my mother's illness is making us slow down and re-examine it, and our place in it, and realizing that even though my brother lives on a lake in Vermont and I live near the coastal marshes of the South Carolina coast, that there is this place that we need and that needs us and that our future, no matter where it takes us, revolves around the rocks and the walls and the roads and the people that reside there.
We are a part of it's walls.
When I was up in Virginia last weekend - the chicory was in bloom - lining the roadsides, a flower and a color that I've wondered before why we don't try and encourage more (seed can be purchased though - and it could handle my zone - so there's an idea for something else to grow outside of my front fence/gate!). Perhaps it's because we don't need to, and the fact that it thrives on roadsides, happily, easily - is enough. What an interesting (and historical) Genus it is - Cichorium sp. - and what a wonderful color, tiny splashes of almost-blue lining the roads.
Today I juggled.
It's been a stormy night. I spent most of it with a group of friends, an evening spent celebrating and 'breaking in' a friend's new home - good food, good conversation - as always. This group of women always make me laugh - and the conversations are unpredictable, passionate, and enjoyable. I never know quite what to expect. I'm the only one in the group that didn't go to law school - and at some point during the evening, I always end up saying 'does anyone know a good lawyer?' because it just makes me laugh. 
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