AT LONG LAST . . . HOME

This is a photograph taken from a boat in the middle of the Rappahannock River.  Somewhere on that far shore is the house where my grandparents lived when I was a child.  It has nearly doubled in size since the time I knew it.  I cannot recognize it.  And, until the day I took this picture, in 2009, I had never viewed it from the river.  As a four and five-year-old, I used to stand on the steep bank at the end of their lawn and gaze toward the opposite shore.  I used to watch boats chug up and down the waterway from my high vantage point where the Rappahannock stretches a mile from one side to the other.  In those days, my brother lay in a hospital bed in Philadelphia and then Baltimore and then Philadelphia again, struggling with a mysterious illness which no one ever really diagnosed.  He was not expected to live.  And so, I was sent to stay with my father’s parents in this historic Tidewater town while my mother stayed with my brother in the hospital and my father looked for a house in Birmingham, Alabama where he had just been transferred for his job. Is it any wonder that this tiny place lies so deeply embedded in my memory?  It was a place of refuge during a period of chaos at home.  Years later, I would learn that my father was not my brother’s biological father.  My mother had been married before and her first husband had died.  In many ways this changed nothing.  In other ways, it changed everything.  No wonder my grandmother was so solicitous of me.  No wonder she brought me a kitten in a picnic basket after I returned home, despite the well-known fact that my mother detested cats.  I had talked endlessly of how much I wanted one and so, my grandmother made sure I got one.
 Tappahannock is the oldest town in Essex County.  John Smith landed there in 1608, but was driven off by Native American people.  In those days, when I was feeling so unsettled, when my mother was unavailable, my father was a traveling salesman and we were in between a rented house in Wilmington, Delaware and a new home in Birmingham, Alabama, I lived for a few months with my grandparents in one of the oldest towns in America.  It felt solid and permanent.  And I did not really want to leave.
 So now, decades later, I find myself moving into a house that is only 60 miles from the place where my grandparents lived.  And yes, even though our furniture is not here yet, already it feels permanent.  For the first time in . . . too many years to count, I feel like I am coming home.  And it feels good, I can tell you.  It feels absolutely and perfectly fine.