Visiting
I spent most of my formative years bouncing back and forth between two states, California and Virginia, with intermediate stops in Louisiana and Texas. Eventually, I ended up in Texas, but that’s another story. The bottom line is this. I have lots of sweet memories in states where I no longer live but only get to visit.
Luckily, my daughter moved to Virginia and now I have a good excuse to go there. So, here I am in Virginia, the state of seemingly perpetual green with rivers cutting through the woods at every turn, and trees so thick at times it makes you wonder how those first settlers 400 plus years ago ever thought they could tame this wilderness, especially when they discovered people already lived here.
But they did it and the telling of the tales is compelling, and no matter how I feel about the right or wrong of their actions I have to look, because denying the past is denying myself, and I want to know what happened with clear eyes. Jamestown, Yorktown, Colonial Williamsburg, Harper’s Ferry, Bull Run, Richmond, Chesapeake Bay, wars won and lost, conquering and being conquered. Sometimes the story is clear and sometime opaque, but it’s all there, good and evil, a tapestry woven by thousands of hands from thousands of threads waiting for me to follow the threads.