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.
A Platters record slips into place on an antique jukebox. “Deep in the dark your kiss will thrill me, like days of old ...” Time to leave. How to explain the tears?
We continue south on Route 11 (that’s what’s nice about traveling with a dog: you think in the first person plural), and within five hours we arrive in Floyd and head for the Blue Ridge Restaurant, across from a redbrick courthouse and a statue of a Confederate soldier.
I take a seat at one of the 20 or so tables and eavesdrop on the conversation between the waitress, Iris Yeatts, and some elderly men in bib overalls.
“Hi, Bill? How you?”
“Storm’s a-comin’.”
“I heard tell.”
Lyrical language that resonates with the Scotch-Irish lilt of the area’s early settlers.
I order the special of the day—a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. For $3.50. The sandwich arrives on white bread grilled in butter. (Want to be laughed out of town? Order whole-grain bread.) The soup is warm and delicious. As good as, maybe even better than, the Campbell’s Mom used to serve. “Well, now, honey, that’s exactly what it is,” Mrs. Yeatts announces. “With a lot of butter and cream added.”
The cuisine of grief: High in fat, low on pretension.
After lunch we head for Schoolhouse Fabrics, a turn-of-the century grammar school turned pilgrimage site for southern quilters. Mrs. Yeatts has informed me that the women who work there can provide the names of local quilters.
I start by examining a display of quilts bearing their creators’ names. They look like they’ve been made on sewing machines; too perfect, too store-bought. That is not what I want. I want a quilt like the one my grandmother would make if she were still alive. Like the one she hand-stitched from fabrics of my childhood and presented to me on my wedding day.
A conference among the sales clerks results in a name. “Uldine Duncan up on Alum Ridge Road. Only one does it by hand anymore.”
A soft voice answers my call. I explain my project. Mrs. Duncan suggests I come over. She gives directions. “If you pass the power line across the road, you’ve passed my house.”
The two-lane road winds around a mountain, then back on itself. A sign in a pasture reads “Are You Prepared to Meet God?” just before the road makes an abrupt 180-degree about-face.
Uldine Duncan lives in a five-room house as tiny and neat as its occupant. We sit and talk. She rocks in her chair to the rhythm of the conversation. Her feet don’t touch the floor. “Them that makes quilts on machines…I ain’t got nothin’ against them, but you might as well just go to the store and buy yourself one.”
Holding up gnarled, arthritic fingers to make her point, she tells me she fears she won’t be able to practice her craft for much longer.
“Well, lemme see what you’ve got.”
I open the trunk. She reaches for a bow tie and eyes it professionally. I’m relieved by her cold appraisal. She’s seen husbands come and go. Perhaps children as well. These mountains are hard on the very young and the elderly. What’s one more dead husband? It puts things in perspective. I begin to see the clothing for what it is and what it will become rather than as a reminder of all I’ve lost.
Yes, she’ll give it a try.
I take my leave and follow Shooting Creek Road, an old moonshine route so narrow, twisting, and desolate that I wonder if my body would ever be found were my car to careen into the deep gully falling from the side of the road. There are no guardrails.
Twenty minutes later I’m at Old Spring Farm, where I bed down for the night and awake to scrambled eggs with red peppers and a chutney (or “mountain jam,” as they call it) unlike any I’ve tasted.
We leave ahead of the storm blowing in. My mission is accomplished—I’ve found a quilter—but I dread returning home to Bob’s empty closet and bureau drawers. So I head deeper into the mountains. Like the Cistercian monks at Holy Cross Abbey, who seek God in solitude, I believe that revelation finds its way into the solitary life. I elect two more days of silence within the confines of my car.
With a few exceptions. I stop in Vesta, Virginia, at Poor Farmer’s Farm, for a fried apple pie. “We make it in a big old pan,” the saleswoman tells me. “The ole-timey way, fried slowly in the skillet. You get more of the ole-timey greasy taste, which is great.” I buy two extra for the road.
Arriving at the two-lane Blue Ridge Parkway, which will take us through North Carolina to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, I tell Gabriel, “This is perfect.” During the hour’s drive to Fancy Gap, we don’t pass another car. The rain falls into the deep green arms of rhododendrons. The air is still and warm. The only sound is of the tires moving along the wet pavement.
We drive nine hours to Knoxville, spend the night in a motel, then leave the next day for Walland and Blackberry Farm, where we settle into a cottage discreetly set in the woods among other cottages that look as though they’ve been there forever. My room has a fireplace stoked by a staff member whose sole job seems to be to keep me warm. The bathroom is marble, with a whirlpool bath and separate shower. And dinner has a great deal to recommend it—not least the wines, carefully selected from the inn’s extensive cellar and served by the owner’s handsome son, who starts me off with Champagne, “because it’s underrated as a wine with which to start a meal, and it goes particularly well with foie gras.” Oh, yes, it does.
And then I’m ready to begin the homeward journey. As I steer the car along a slow, meandering, mostly northeasterly route, I begin to sense that without Bob’s clothes in the back, something has shifted to make room for something else. Some ten hours later, as I cross the Mason-Dixon Line, I recall a fragment from a Mary Oliver poem—something to the effect that if the heart’s doors shut down, you might as well be dead. As tightly as I had been clinging to Bob’s clothing, pressing my nose into his shirts for any remaining scent of the man I adored, so grief had laid claim to my heart. It had put up a “No Trespassing” sign and bolted the door with three locks. Now one of those locks has been loosened and released. A window has been opened, and I, grief’s prisoner, venture to peek at the light.
Where It’s Happening In Appalachia
Staying There
Smithfield Farm (568 Smithfield Lane, Berryville, VA; 877-955-4389; from $145, including full breakfast), an elegant, 19th-century brick manor house set on 350 verdant acres, has been in the same family for nearly 200 years. Ask the proprietors to direct you on scenic and historic tours, or simply explore the property and the lovely country roads. For a warm welcome and a comfortable bed, pull into Stoneridge Bed & Breakfast (Stoneridge Lane, Lexington, VA; 800-491-2930; from $115, including full breakfast), an 1829 plantation house about five miles from historic downtown Lexington. Breakfast here is a family affair: Evelyn Stallard bakes the breadthat accompanies her son John’s fluffy omelets.
Appaloosa horse breeder Suzanne Pabst has done up Old Spring Farm (7629 Charity Highway, Woolwine, VA; 276-930-3404; from $100, including full breakfast) in show ribbons, plaques, and horse photos. (The Calamity Jane room comes complete with fringed red leather jacket and cowboy boots.) Breakfast at the rustic 1883 house means eggs from Pabst’s chickens, vegetables from her garden, jams from her fruit trees, and spicy chutney, or “mountain jam,” from the nearby Mountain Rose Inn. Located on 2,500 acres in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, Blackberry Farm (1471 West Millers Cove Road, Walland, TN; 800-273-6004; blackberryfarm.com; from $495, including all meals) may well be one of the nicest hotels in North America. The guest cottages are intensely romantic, the morning coffee is deep and rich, and the biscuits and sorghum butter will have you in a swoon until lunchtime. After spending the afternoon hiking, fly-fishing, horseback riding, or being pampered in the Aveda spa, sit down to a five-course dinner paired with wines from the vast cellar.
Eating There
The Pink Cadillac Diner (4347 South Lee Highway, Natural Bridge, VA; 540-291-2378) serves up chili and meatloaf in a room filled with 1950s movie posters.
Stop by the Blue Ridge Restaurant (113 East Main Street, Floyd, VA; 540-745-2147) for a buttery grilled cheese sandwich and lots of local gossip.
Being There
McLeod’s organic butter, bread, and cheese, made at Oak Grove Meadows, in Middleburg, Virginia, is available in Washington, D.C., at Dean & DeLuca and the farmers market just off Dupont Circle.
You can order the brandy-laced fruitcakes made by the monks of Holy Cross Abbey by fax (540-955-4006) or via the Web site (monasteryfruitcake.org).