We returned yesterday from our Thanksgiving week with my brother and his wife just outside Asheville, North Carolina. While there we counted up the years, and with the exception of a gap when my parents were too debilitated to travel, my family has rented the same house in the mountains for the last 17 years. As always, it was a great time. On the way down we stopped to visit my new friend Leah at her farm in Tennessee and got to meet her daughter as well as goats, horses, a dog and a cat, and Captain Jack Sparrow, the mini donkey.
We didn't travel with Miss Hazel this year as she never seemed to enjoy being there, spending most of her time holed up under the dresser. Instead, we brought Zora (our new kitten-friend who showed up in our lives over the summer) but I think Miss Hazel must have left her instructions because she rarely left the toasty spot next to the radiator under a nightstand.
We went on walks, worked on a puzzle, read books by the fireplace, cooked delicious meals (my brother's lasagna!), hot tubbed on the deck, and made the yearly trip to Malaprops, one of my favorite book shops. Best of all, we were together.
It's been my brother's dream to find land on this mountain and build the house that my father designed for him years ago. He and his wife have been searching for the right spot in much the same way that John and I have been in Vermont. While our journeys aren’t intentionally similar, they nonetheless feel connected by the roots of our family history— time spent here in Asheville at Thanksgivings, and for us in Vermont, the "coincidence" of finding land in the little town where my parents honored their own dreams by buying a tiny piece of property before I was even born.
I love that my brother and I are both on a search to find "home" on land that is meaningful to us. There is something about the idea of putting down roots in a place that has already grown into your bones, as though it's been part of your future long before you knew it would be.
