I’m heading south to the heart of Appalachia in an old car with an old dog and a trunk full of my husband Bob’s bow ties, shirts, and boxer shorts. I’m on a mission to find a quilter who will stitch these remnants of a life into a quilt for our daughter, fully grown and sorely missing her father, who died nine months ago. It is my hope that on cold winter nights, when she wraps herself into the folds of bright patchwork, she’ll be in a semblance of his embrace.
My cargo consists of floral prints, pastel stripes, Oxford-cloth blues, a frivolous pink and white dress shirt we bought in a moment of mania in Venice, when that city made us fall in love with it and life and each other.
The morning ritual. “Will you help me pick out a tie?” We’d peruse the rack of some 100 cotton prints sewn by my mother for this man she had come to love. Every Christmas brought their shared delight as he opened the box holding three or four or six, each brighter and gayer than the last. Lavender violets, blush-red peonies, daisies.
Out he would go into the morning and the day’s work, looking, I always thought, like the most handsome man in the world.
“You look so handsome.”
“You just say that because you love me.”
We were both right.
I still find it hard to believe that the home I’m leaving is one to which Bob will never return. How stubborn love is. How greedily it holds to itself, believes in itself, and waits. Just the other afternoon, the wind blew a door closed and the sound made me think, for a fraction of a second, “Oh, there he is, coming home.”
I’m en route to Floyd, Virginia, a speck on the map of Appalachia where I spent the first two years of my life, and from which I carry dreamlike memories. Quilts hanging from clotheslines, crocks of sweet butter, and bottles of thick, yellow cream from a springhouse. Rows of Mason jars filled with green beans, beets, apple butter. Steaming baskets of biscuits. Food that might ease the pain of mourning.
I’ve elected to travel on back roads and have spent the past two hours driving through Pennsylvania on a lonely, two-lane stretch of the Lincoln Highway, America’s first transcontinental motor route. Gabriel, my large, black, 15-year-old standard poodle, sighs. “We’ll stop soon,” I reassure him, and continue south toward Virginia.
My guide to bed-and-breakfasts has an attractive photograph of Smithfield Farm, a 350-acre beef-cattle farm near Berryville. That’s where we’ll spend the night.
The approach is strictly Gone with the Wind. A long dirt road leading uphill takes me through an apple orchard to a Federal-style brick house with green shutters, two chimneys, and two small cottages on either side. Perfect symmetry. Perfect sleep.
The next morning, a gray sky is held aloft by darker gray hills. I enter the dining room with its view to the east and southwest. The pale light of early August is captured in crystal glassware and a sterling-silver tea set and candlesticks, family heirlooms that have been here since the house was built, in 1824. Betsy Pritchard, the seventh generation to farm here, arrives bearing peach crisp with vanilla ice cream. A girl after my own heart. I’m of the opinion that fruit buckles, Bettys, cobblers, and crisps with ice cream are ideal breakfast foods.
She suggests a side trip. Holy Cross Abbey, just a ten-minute drive away along a gravel road, makes wonderful fruitcake. Wonderful fruitcake?
Oh, I have a fine time gossiping with Father Vincent about the importance of butter and eggs and, for heaven’s sake, using lard when making piecrusts. Here, he says, try some fruitcake. He pries open a tin, takes out a knife, slices through the fruit-thick confection, and passes me a piece. Yes, well, I have to admit that it’s better than your average fruitcake. Take the rest on your journey, says he. And how about a trip to Oak Grove Meadows, in Middleburg, Virginia, where they make organic butter and cheese?
Why not? This journey is to be stitched together like a quilt, incorporating the serendipitous.
I leave via Route 340 and turn onto Route 50, which takes me across the Shenandoah River. It winds through countryside abandoned long ago in favor of easier accessibility. This is the sort of road I prefer, a lonely, sparsely traveled route reflecting my mood.
When I find Oak Grove and knock on the farmhouse door, I am invited in for tea and lessons on the importance of organic farming. The best lesson comes in the flavors of butter and ricotta spread on crusty bread. I can taste the grass.
Out of Fauquier and Loudoun counties, with their rich soil, toward a less forgiving land of mountains, switchback roads, and an isolation that preserves both poverty and tradition. I stop for the night at Stoneridge Bed & Breakfast, an antebellum plantation house on 32 hilltop acres in Lexington, Virginia.
The proprietors offer me Sherry to ward off the mountain chill, and after a sound sleep followed by homemade bread for breakfast, I depart for Floyd.
But wait! What’s this? I screech to a halt in front of a Pepto-Bismol-pink diner with turquoise trim and a sign that says, “Elvis Fans Parking. Violators Will Be All Shook Up.” I park as a fan and, upon entering, regret my large breakfast. The Pink Cadillac Diner offers meatloaf and chili against a backdrop of 1950s movie posters, a plush, pink rug sporting Elvis’s likeness, and a 1938 flathead Harley- Davidson propped in the corner.
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