In my childhood bedroom I had a map of the Appalachian trail. The trail starts a few hours north, but I liked the map because it included Atlanta. I could even see my street on the map, and trace the trail with my finger as it wound up through those magic misty mountains. It was a long skinny map that in my memory was mostly green.

But in my mind those mountains were grey, and foggy, almost always enveloped in puffy, wispy clouds that made my visits there feel more like dreams than road trips.

The Appalachian Mountains are among the oldest mountain ranges on earth. They began to rise up even before trees first started growing on earth, and before the Atlantic Ocean too — almost 500 million years ago.

Even the name — Appalachian — is old, found on maps dating back to Spanish exploration of what is now America in 1528. The Spanish named the mountains after the Native American village, Apalachen.

We’d often drive up from Atlanta to visit my Grandma Maggie who lived near Asheville nestled in the Appalachian Mountains in a town aptly named, Black Mountain.

In my memories, these drives felt treacherous, like we were leaving the real world and entering into a mountain world that only slightly resembled the world I knew, the one down closer to earth.

The Black Mountains of Appalachia are part of the Blue Ridge Province of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and their name comes from the dark look of the spruce and fir forests in the winter. These forests are rare, an endangered ecosystem, but they grow and survive in harsh climates like Black Mountain, where other trees cannot stand the strong winds and deep cold winters. Before the mountain was named Black Mountain, it was called Grey Eagle by the Cherokee and Catawba who lived there. It seemed grey colored to me too.

I remember looking out the window at these dark forests in the winter as we drove, peering at the tight turns on the edge of huge rocky drop offs, my ears popping. The Black Mountains include among them the highest peak in Appalachia, and the highest on the East Coast. I didn’t know that back then, but it felt like we were driving up into the sky, passing into clouds on those windy mountain roads.

At my Grandma Maggie’s house, we often arrived to find her trailer hidden in clouds. It was, and still is, situated on the edge of a mountain. You turn off the paved road, and bounce up a dirt road to her home on the side of Black Mountain.

Her trailer felt cozy and homey to me, with pictures of all my uncles and aunts, and my parents, and some cousins covering one wall. While I recognized all their faces — the photos contributed to the other worldly feeling. My Grandma Maggie loved old photos like me I guess, and as such had everyone do one of those faux vintage portrait photoshoots with old western outfits, fake guns, and sepia toned, not totally crisp — like you were looking through time and smoke when you were looking at your family.

My uncle, the youngest of my dad’s brothers, and his wife and kids lived with Grandma Maggie up there in the mountains and helped take care of her. Around their trailer are hiking trails and lookout points, green wildflower hills and windy wooded paths with rocky creeks and rivers.

When Hurricane Helene smashed through that area in 2024, we prayed for them up there on that hill, water washing so many of their friends’ homes and cars away. The road down their mountain washed out and they had to drive through a prison grounds that opened up their gates to be able to get food and supplies. My aunt told me she went out in the yard and lit a fire to cook food for their neighbors in a big silver pot.

They’re like that, my mountain Uncle and Aunt. Loving and generous. For a while when I was young my uncle worked nearby at a psychiatric facility for people who were institutionalized after committing crimes or otherwise unable to live in society. The government sent them up to live high in the mountains and deep in the forests of the Appalachians. My uncle spoke lovingly about some of the people he worked with there, they’re like children he said, stuck as children forever.

Others of ‘em he said were real strong and mean. Sometimes my uncle had to wrestle ‘em to protect the nurses or other staff. He’s a big strong guy himself, with a sweet loving heart. He had to quit after all the wrestling became too hard on his back he said — although I imagine it was too hard on his heart too.

The magic in the mountains scared me most of the time. I could feel the love, but the clouds and darkness and the otherworldly feeling I got up there in the Appalachians was a lot for my childhood imagination.

Even the beautiful places would sometimes freak me out as a kid, give me nightmares even.

We’d sometimes visit the Biltmore Estate when we were up in Black Mountain. It’s a huge historic home on 8,000 acres overlooking incredible mountains, where the sun peeks through the clouds and grapes are grown for the estate’s winery.

It was built by the Vanderbilt family in 1895 and is known as the largest private home in America. It has 250 rooms, 43 bathrooms, and a huge indoor pool that haunted my childhood dreams. I remember we took a tour and went down to the basement of this unbelievably huge mansion and saw this enormous cream tile deep empty pool. For years afterwards I had dreams of houses with endless rooms, opening doors that went on and on, and then frighteningly encountering this giant pool.

Since my dad’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s last year, and his retirement, he’s been recording his stories. Reading through his mountain stories, I’ve realized that my dad, an island guy at his heart, also shares both my fear and awe of the Appalachian Mountains.

For us, these mountains hold a misty sort of natural beauty, that feels not quite real, not quite ours. Belonging to something we can’t fully see, but can feel enough to have both fear and awe.

My dad’s one sister, my Aunt C lived deep and high in the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina for many years. The drives to her house were even wilder and more foreign to me than driving to Black Mountain to visit Grandma Maggie.

Where Aunt C lived was beautiful, she was perched on a meadow hillside in a little valley more than an hour from the closest store. That includes gas station. It was a cute, roomy prefab home that she had decorated with chicken decor and Bible verses.

I remember using her landline phone to try and call my friends back in the city, cause our cell phones stopped working about an hour out from her house too as we passed that last gas station, along with the Garmin GPS screen we had plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car.

It added to the feeling we were leaving this world, and headed somewhere else above the clouds, just out of reach. No cell phones or GPS, just picturesque mountain views, thick dark forests, sparkly icy creeks, and of course houses and trailers dotting the hollers, with dirty toys, or old cars or both left outside, for the foxes or fairies to play with.

My Aunt C had a little chicken house down the hill from her house, wooden with a cute door and metal roof. I loved to walk down there with her and get eggs and see the chickens. One time we visited though and there were no chickens. A fox had run through the little chicken house and killed every single one of the chickens. Aunt C said it was really awful and terrifying finding those feathers and blood and a quiet hen house.

The animals up in those mountains are main characters. As a child, I felt like they could almost talk. My Aunt C, like my mom, is a horse girl. She has two beautiful mountain horses and she would sometimes let me ride one with her through the trails and fields around her house. Somehow I wasn’t as scared of the mountains up on one of her horses, like I had a guide that could see through the mountain fog and clouds. I was safe up there riding that horse.

I loved this story I found that my dad tells about witnessing the magic in the Appalachian Mountains at my Aunt C’s house.

My dad told me before that he was a bit freaked out at Aunt C’s mountain church because the preacher preached fire and brimstone, and they had a snake. We don’t like snakes, and always steer clear. You’re not gonna catch me or my dad grabbing a snake and playing Steve Irwin at church.

But despite all that, my dad witnessed the divine there in the mountains with his sister and her friends from church. He felt that real magic that God will sometime let us see on the mountains, light that peeks through the clouds and mists and fog.

OK, let’s see something that I witnessed at C’s home when she was married to R. She invited her church, a lot of people from her church, over to her house, R’s house.

And it was getting almost ready to start getting dark, and then there were lightning bugs. There were literally, there were probably 1 million lightning bugs, and I’m not exaggerating. It was insanely picturesque, and the lightning bugs started down in the grass, right at the top of your shoe or something, and then the bugs just kept populating higher and higher until they were up to like chest high, seeing all these lightning bugs and circling people and everything.

It was really, really amazing to me, and I’ve never seen anything like it since. And I’ve even tried to get it out of C a few times, but I don’t know if the mountain people just really take that for granted, but that blew me away.

My dad loves his sister, his one baby sister. Throughout his stories about her, you can feel the love, and the admiration. She sings gospel music. And has a voice that cuts through the clouds too, transports you closer to God, makes you feel like you have a guide through the darkness — a bit like how I felt up on the back of her horse riding those mountain trails.

Reading the way my dad talks about his sister’s singing, I can tell he feels the same way.

You know, my family, I think a lot of them are extremely talented. They’re very, very bright, and God gave them unbelievable gifts. And I have to say, C, and she was a bit of a hellion when she was young, and a young teenager and everything like that, but God gifted her to sing and play music.

And I remember distinctly, B was practicing in one of the rooms in the trailer, and I was in there too, and I was like plucking away at a guitar. I’ve never been worth a hoot at a guitar. And then C came in there, got the guitar, and she sang a song.

And I don’t know if you get into a setting where the acoustics are like perfect and everything just sort of, it’s like the sound is surrounding you. And I had to experience that with C.

I just could not get over how beautiful her voice was, and how well she performed the song.

And you know, not just the mechanics of the song, but the overall feeling of when you hear that type of music, and you hear somebody really, really, really sing a song.

C just blew it away. And she was, she was a pretty, young girl too when she was doing it.

C is exceptional in a lot of ways. She’s made her mistakes in her days, but she’s also done a ton of wonderful, great things for her friends, her church, her family, her siblings. You know, C is just, I think a fantastic human being, and I’m glad to be her brother.

There’s magic and music in those mountains.

The first time I witnessed a true miracle was up in the Appalachian Mountains too. It was after my Grandma Maggie died and we drove up into the mountains from Emerald Isle with our coastal family, up past the clouds — past where I feel at home, where my feet feel planted on the ground.

My phone wasn’t working, the GPS said no signal, but all my dad’s family was there at his sister’s house.

It was cloudy and rainy, dark and misty all day. The whole day before too, and the whole day after. Just up in the dark mountains and grey mountain skies. As a family, we trudged up the mountain trail near my aunt C’s house into the woods where a little mountain creek runs.

There in the dark and mist we all held hands in a circle, my dad and his brothers and his sister, me with my cousins and brother, linked together and prayed for the matriarch of the family, flawed and loving and mama.

It was there, in that moment the clouds cleared, but only in one tiny spot in the sky, in a circle right above our circle holding hands there on the mountain side in the woods. Suddenly, just over our family was a circle of sunshine and blue sky, and a beam of light coming right through all the bare dark branches above us. Just in that one small circle spot. It lasted only for a few moments, but we all saw it, that glimpse of heaven.

We spread her ashes there in that mountainside stream.

And we drove back down through those windy mountain roads, through those grey clouds and hollers, back down home to Georgia, this time though, not so afraid of the misty Appalachian Mountains.

Oh and these northern nights are dreary
And my southern eyes are teary
Don't I wonder how the old folks are back home
But I'll keep leanin' on my Jesus
I know he'll love and guide and lead us
Appalachian memories keep me strong

I'll keep lookin' to the Father
Keep our heads above the water
Appalachian memories keep me strong

— Dolly Parton, Appalachian Memories 1983

I was inspired to share this story for another Appalachian mountain sister whose beautiful voice cut through the clouds too, Dolly Parton.

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I regret that now.

She was there to watch the timber be harvested. Giant log harvesting machines were felling pines in the woods behind the fields on the farm she grew up on. I heard what I assumed were woodchippers. I barely looked around. 

I didn’t ask her about our trees that day, and she didn’t tell me.

I try to picture her now, what was she doing as I sat in the car? Who was she talking to? From going through her papers, retracing her steps now that she’s gone from this realm, maybe she was talking to the forester.

Or maybe the farmer who leases our land.

Or maybe the guys with the timber company.

Or maybe she was just out there watching the huge machines thin the trees, cut off the branches, place them into piles to be turned into telephone poles or toilet paper. 

The trees on our farm, like most of the timber stands in Eastern North Carolina are loblolly pines. They’re tall, beautiful, and fast growing — making them commercially popular for timber.

The pine is the state tree of North Carolina, and they’re ubiquitous there. But not all pines are the same. The pines that used to grow and cover most of the Coastal Plains of North Carolina for centuries are called the longleaf pines. Only about 3% of the original longleaf pine forests remain. Cut and replaced by farms, homes, towns, hardwoods, and of course - loblolly pines.

Even before my ancestors first arrived in Eastern North Carolina in the early 1700s, the forests were not untouched by people - not “unmanaged” so to say. The Native Americans including the Tuscarora and Algonquin used fire for both hunting and forest management. They’d light the forests on fire, to catch the animals that lived there as they fled. The pines and the people exist hand in hand, in symbiosis. The longleaf pine requires fire to grow - without it their seedlings cannot sprout up from the undergrowth.

In the years since my grandmother passed, I’ve researched more about timber harvesting, staying up late watching videos of the big machines that were out on our land that day.

Feller-Bunchers are huge machines with claws that grab, cut, and stack trees. Skidders are the vehicles that drag the trees from the woods out to where they are loaded onto timber trucks.

You might have seen timber trucks driving down the highway, eighteen wheelers carrying all the trees laying there on top of each other like Lincoln logs still in the box, scooting by.

That day, that last day, maybe my grandma visited the farmhouse where she grew up, white with a screened in front porch and a side door that opened into the garden. It was still standing there right next to where her mother, my great grandmother planted daffodils and orange lilies.

Maybe she met up with her sister who lives nearby, or maybe she walked the fields, saw the peach tree in the ditch, and remembered playing in these fields as a girl. 

Maybe she was thinking back to the local boys she dated here, the star filled night skies they kissed beneath – before she left Eastern North Carolina, to see the world. 

I sat in her red Mercedes, (a car first gifted by an admirer to my great Aunt Addie), nursing my broken heart. The pain physically manifested itself with my leg in a cast and a wasp sting that had swollen up one of my hands to twice its size – hence the pain killers.

It was the early 2010s so doctors still prescribed opioid pain killers for bug bites and barely broken bones. Nowadays I would have known to ask for steroids or taken some antihistamines for the obvious swelling and allergic reaction, but back then we didn’t have doctor Google the way we do now. Instead, I read Seventeen magazine back-to-back and cried in the waiting room of the urgent care in Cedar Point.

On the farm, I blinked hazily out the window. It was my first big heartbreak. I try to forgive my teenage self for not getting out of the car. The first heartbreak is really incomparably painful. That’s what he condescendingly yelled up to me at least, after I climbed a tree in his mom’s front yard and bawled. “It only hurts so much, because I’m your first love.”

We used to read poetry together out of this big literature textbook we had in high school. We’d pick out poems and read them aloud. I remember he found one about a girl from Winston-Salem, about a tobacco girl and had me read it – it was about me. You’re trying to know who you are at that age, 18, young, freckled, and insecure as hell.

While writing this essay, I searched for this poem as I remembered it; but I couldn’t find that the one I remembered ever existed, much less in a literature textbook. Instead, I found this poem by Langston Hughes called Theme for English B. A poem decidedly not about a girl, especially a white girl.

But how perfectly representative of being a teenager though – everything is about you. Every poem. 

I was born in Winston-Salem and I was a student, and I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. So clearly this was about me like he said. All mine.

I don’t know who my grandmother’s first love was. In her scrapbook from when she was a teenager, I found photos of a number of other teenage boys hidden in the back.

There’s one boy who she has a few photos of, Herman. One is signed, “Love, Herman.” On the back, he wrote something a bit flirty, or maybe it’s just rude. “I don’t know why you want this.”

There’s another collection of photos a different boy smiling on the farm - in one he’s relaxing by a tree, laughing. In another he pretends to read the newspaper in a chair, with a smirk. In a third, he’s laying in the grass, his head resting on the roots of a tree.

I also found a photo of my grandma, smiling next to an old pick-up truck. If you look close, there’s a shotgun leaned up in front of the truck. I wonder if maybe some farm boy, young love took this photo. Or perhaps, judging by its date — it was taken by my grandfather. Maybe when she brought him to visit the farm.

No longer a teenager. But still in love.

I know she had experience with young love heartbreak though.

The pines of her heart had been thinned, by fire and feller-bunchers no doubt.

Maybe by some farm boy young love; or by the brief marriage I learned she had when she was 19 to a local teenage guy.

That was before she left the farm, went to university, and met my grandfather. She never told me about it directly. But a relative once sent me this photo of her beaming at her teenage wedding.

I remember she would give me advice on love and dating though. Like “don’t settle until you have a ring on your finger,” was one she told me.

Based on the baseball card collection of young guys hidden in the back of her scrapbook, this was advice she also followed — as both a heartbreaker and heartbreakee.

My grandma once sent me a poem that she said was for me when I was really going through it, a thinning of the young heart pines.

When my grandma first got sick, she started telling me more about her childhood, about the farm, about where we come from. I was scared to listen though – thought acknowledging that she was trying to tell me a lot now meant acknowledging that she was dying. 

I should have listened more.

I should’ve got out of the car and walked on the land where my family had been born, lived, and died for hundreds of years with my grandmother one last time – even though I didn’t know then it would be my last chance. 

I should’ve asked about replanting pines after the clear cut when all the trees are mature, after they are all harvested and the land lays bare beneath the sky. All carved up with tire tracks and pine needles, saw dust, in the hot sunshine.

What do you do next?

When I think back to this day on the farm, the last day on the farm with my grandma, I always hear this poem in my mind. 

When my grandma was sick with the cancer that would eventually kill her, she started writing some of her memoirs about growing up on the farm.

She was a historian, and spent decades uncovering, writing, sharing, and presenting of peoples’ histories and stories. But she spent just a few months writing her history, and never finished it.

She titled it, Rollerskating on a Dirt Road.

Some of my writing about the farm now, sharing her memoirs as I found them, researching the history of this place that lives in my dreams and here in real life, is almost a penance. A penance for not listening more, for not asking when I had the chance, for not holding onto our history and legacy. 

What is wonderful about land though. About rivers, and sometimes even trees if we’re lucky.

Is that they will continue.

A timber stand of loblolly pines that is harvested, cut, burned, or thinned - will regrow. Sprout up. Even if you don’t replant, mature trees nearby will reseed.

The pines will come back.

They’ll be neater and better if you get out there and replant directly. But they’ll come back all by themselves too, either way.

A little bit like love itself. After heartbreak.

The trees will continue to grow, and live, and exist even through the days and years and eras when you’re too broken or self-absorbed to appreciate them. 

The land, the earth, the pines, and yes - your heart - will go on.

And if you’re lucky, the land will call you back as you live and learn and love again. 

To give you another chance to listen.

I returned to the farm eight years later, as a passenger again in a different car.

Not broken hearted this time. But full of love.

I was driven there by my then boyfriend – now husband. I didn’t know where we were going, but as he drove, the sun shining through the branches, orange and dappled - I recognized the turn onto my ancestral loop. My eyes widened and I turned to him, surprised, unable to contain my grin. 

How did you know? He smiled back. 

My grandma had always loved him since the first day I brought him over to her house up in DC. She wrapped her arms around him on New Years that very first year, a few months after we had met, and grinned. 

When she was in her last few weeks on this mortal coil, she asked me if he’d given me a ring yet.

Back on the farm again, we found that the farmhouse my grandmother grew up in was gone. But the barn was still there with a basketball hoop over the door.

And the magnolia tree my great grandparents had planted, bloomed with fragrant cream flowers and shiny green leaves as it watched over us.

We parked in the driveway where the farmhouse once stood, where I once stayed in the car.

We got out this time, me and my love together, stepping over shotgun shells and daisies. 

He walked me out to where the pines meet the fields, where grandma had gone and watched the timber be harvested, and he asked me to be his wife. 

There we saw the young pines sprouting up, some replanted maybe by my grandmother and her sisters after the big harvest, and some, reseeded and sprouted by the mature pines that grow nearby.

Less than a year later, we chose to read this verse at our wedding.  

Song of Solomon 2:10–13

My beloved speaks and says to me:  
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away;
for now the winter is past,
    the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
    the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
    is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
    and the vines are in blossom;
    they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away.

The land goes on. The trees regrow. And like love itself, they find us, and call us back. 

And if we’re lucky some of the stories are still there, just harder to find, hidden in books and library collections and old newspapers.

Maybe some are even there in the dirt, among the pines.

And other stories are ours to still live, to cultivate, to tell to our sons, hold in our hands, and to help to grow.

Knowing there will be thinnings and heartbreak, and even days when our hearts are laid bare beneath the sky.

But God willing, like the trees, the thinnings and the fires, even the clear cuts, make room for us to grow, and then sprout up again.

Here’s an excerpt from my grandma’s memoir, Rollerskating on a Dirt Road about growing up on the farm.

I don’t think the planting was intentional really. At least not by my parents. My family moved to Atlanta, and found a house, and it just happened to be a short walk to the Chattahoochee River.

But I come from water people, generations of us. No matter where we are, we’re drawn, like blinking, flapping, flying, dragon flies, to the water’s edge. We can’t help it.

Sometimes just seeing the water is enough to calm my heart, to fill my lungs with air, to clear the clouds from my eyes. But often, I feel that call, to take off my shoes, roll up my pants or hike up my skirt, and feel the water caress my ankles. Feel the sand, or mud, or rocks, or stone beneath my heels and under my toes.

The Chattahoochee runs 434 miles starting in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, through my hometown, the city of Atlanta, down to the border with Alabama. The river was named by the Creek or Muscogee, a name that means painted or marked rock. Today it provides the drinking water for more than a third of Georgians.

Although now I’m far away from the Chattahoochee, it still runs through me. Some days clear and cold, bright and sparkly. Other days, thick and cloudy, colored orange and brown with Georgia red clay that pours off its banks into its rushing waters after it rains. I can close my eyes and remember standing out on one of those painted rocks, the water flowing past.

To get to the river from my childhood home in Atlanta we walked down a tree lined street to our neighbor’s house. This was not a public river or park access, just a kind neighbor with a beautiful yard, behind which lay a giant open field, and behind that field, flowed the Chattahoochee.

We’d trudge or sneak through their yard; it always felt a bit like sneaking to me since they never seemed to be home when we went. And then walk or run down the steep hill behind their house to the huge open field.

My mom would always say - you know this field is so big, you could land an airplane here. According to her, sometimes people did.

Often the field hadn’t been mowed for a while, so we’d wade through the tall grasses to get to the river. I’ve always felt like knee deep grass was poetic somehow, although now with the proliferation of Lyme disease and other tick borne illnesses, I’m too scared to ever frolic in wildflower fields like I did back then.

A lot of my memories on the river scare me to think back to now. Sometimes I’d go there with just my friend and our dog, or just me and my brother, by ourselves by the river, not even teenagers.

Once my dog almost drowned in that river, my sweet, dopey Labrador Mocha slipped off the banks into the fast moving orange muddy water. She struggled to climb back onto the steep, grassy edge of the riverbank. I nearly joined her in the current.

By the grace of God, that trip to the river ended with my friend gripping Mocha’s collar and pulling her ashore, her copper paws, wet and muddy. My friend became a veterinarian when she grew up, a perfect role for a steady, cool-headed, animal savior.

When I grew up, I became a lawyer who conducts risks analyses. Seeking to predict and prevent calamity, reviewing and evaluating the environment, then issuing cautious edicts and advice to clients. “Don’t go close to the edge with the dog when the water is so high,” would be one I’d issue my past self.

The river was shaping us, like painted rocks, and we don’t even know it.

To cross from the big grassy field of our neighbor into the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, we’d have to walk across a log, or perhaps it was a metal pipe, that acted like a make shift bridge over a creek that trickled far below. I don’t really remember being scared crossing it - holding my hands out to the side as I balanced.

Maybe I was too young to be scared yet. Brave and I didn’t even know it.

After crossing the not bridge, bridge, and hiking a bit through the woods, we’d be in the park. The trail ran alongside the river, rocky, and green, with caves and lookout points alongside it. In my memory, I can still walk you through those woods of my childhood, to our favorite spot on the river.

A big stone jutted out over the water, a perfect spot to leave our shoes, socks tucked inside to rest out in the sun.

From there, I’d slide on my butt carefully off the ledge, my feet slipping into the cool rushing river water of the Chattahoochee.

I’d walk across the slippery rocks, feeling the water rushing around me, some parts of the river were deep. I remember a few times having to turn back when the water was too deep or the current too fast. Once I saw a snake swimming past, riding the current, slithering atop the white water. Another time, I turned back when I saw a copperhead sunning himself on the rocks in the middle of the river. But usually, most days we ventured into the river, the water was clear and cool, running down from the Georgia mountains.

Sometimes in the summer if the conditions were right, we’d cross the whole river, alternating between balancing on slippery rocks, and wading through the deeper parts till we got to the other shore. Over on the opposite side, we’d walk through the woods a bit, alongside the river till we arrived at a big tree with branches hanging over the water. Someone had tied a rope with knots on it to one of its branches. My brother and I would take turns, often with other kids, climbing up over the roots of the tree, grabbing onto the rope and flinging ourselves out over the river. Waiting for the perfect moment to release the rope, and drop into the water. Cool, fresh, just a little bit muddy river water.

I’d often imagine the Chattahoochee’s path when I was out there looking at the wide water, running down from the Georgia mountains, where it got its cool, clear, coldness, into north Atlanta where I admired its wide, rushing, beauty — framed by Georgia trees, changing colors in the sun and through the seasons.

I remember once in middle school my class went to the Chattahoochee as part of a volunteer project. I was looking forward to the trip, picturing the river I had leapt into many times.

When we arrived on the river bank somewhere deep in the city, I didn’t recognize it. We couldn’t even see the water. It was too covered in trash; bottles, plastic bags, diapers, wrappers, a floating sink or was it a toilet seat? We filled trash bags with wet trash for hours.

It wasn’t the first time I’d stood on the banks of the Chattahoochee, heartbroken by what people had done to my beloved River.

***

My earliest encounter I can recall with the Divine in nature was alongside the Chattahoochee River.

I must’ve been five or six years old. We weren’t in a park, I think it was an old farm. There we walked alongside the river, the dirt path lined with trees that must’ve been at least a hundred years old. The trees had wide trunks with branches that hung over the water, so thick and full with green leaves it felt like it was early morning or evening because the sun barely peeked through. Mist rose over the water. Some of the trees had apples hanging in their branches. There were wild roses along that path too, with tiny pink and perfect flowers and buds.

For a moment it felt like I was peeking into heaven there in the woods alongside the river. The light peeking through the leaves, the bird singing, the bugs chirping, the apples and roses, and oh, the river. The misty river.

When you’re really young, you’re more tuned into nature, to magic, to God, to the Divine that exists in nature. Before everything else crowds out that perception. And there, I remember, I could really feel it.

***

I never met my grandfather who also grew up in Atlanta like me. Was he planted and sprouted on the banks of the Chattahoochee too? I know he died on the banks of a lake, in a plane crash in Michigan, when my dad was not yet three months old. But did he ever leap into the same river as me? Did he ever feel God walking on a tree lined path watching the mist rise over the water of the Chattahoochee?

I found a few photos of my Atlanta grandfather fishing on the banks of a river. He’s got a pensive look on his face in one. A smile in the other. Was he at home there by the water too?

Through genealogy research I learned my great grandparents, Robert L. and Mary Will, moved down to Atlanta from the North Georgia mountains too. Like the Chattahoochee itself. Flowing from the mountains down to the city.

I imagine my great grandfather splashing in the streams of North Georgia as a boy with his twin sister, growing into a man working in the city — first on a train, a job that took his leg. And later, in a saw mill in Atlanta, where a workplace accident took his arm. He kept his smile though, and even married a beautiful second wife gaining two smiling step-daughters too. He moved them down from the North Georgia mountains, and helped raised the girls up alongside by grandfather.

My great grandfather was born in a town called Cleveland, Georgia. On the map, many streams that feed the Chattahoochee run through this town. Along rocky routes lined with thick green forests.

My great grandmother was born in Blue Creek, Georgia in 1898 according to the census. I can’t find a town called Blue Creek on the map, just the Blue Creek itself — as if she came bursting from the waters themselves. Into a bubbling cool stream that flows down from the Blue Ridge mountains of North Georgia, winding around and through Atlanta — the same journey she made during her lifetime.

As she grew from a girl, to a woman; becoming a wife, two times, a nurse, a mother just once, and then a grandmother to my father and uncle.

The county where both my great grandparents came from in North Georgia encompasses most of the headwater streams of the Chattahoochee River. It also holds the red blood from wars and massacres. Wars over gold that runs in those waters, and over the land those waters run through, wars and battles fought by the Spanish, Creek, Cherokee, Sephardic, English and so many others, peoples grown and shaped by the streams that feed the Chattahoochee.

The land where my great grandparents were born was treasured and nurturing, once built into mounds for worship and into farmland for food. The streams of the North Georgia mountains, including Blue Creek that birthed my great grandmother watched feet and hearts cross over their rocky beds for thousands of years.

But not all of these footsteps followed the path of the riverbed like my great grandparents did, down towards the city, or to the plain of Georgia, growing into adulthood. Instead, many Native peoples of North Georgia, children among them, were robbed of their gold and their mounds of earth, of their childhoods playing in the streams with their brothers and sisters. Among them were many Creek and Muscogee people, the same people who gave the Chattahoochee her name.

They were forced to take an unnatural trail, one that flowed west to Oklahoma, not down to plains of Georgia. Caught in the current of a red river, of blood not clay, a river fed by tears rather than the creeks and streams that feed the Chattahoochee.

***

As a child I believed the Chattahoochee was a river that ran not only through the rocky Georgia mountains, and Atlanta forests, and sometimes streets — but also through time itself.

I remember finding a message in a bottle wedged between some rocks during a canoe trip when I was maybe 10 years old. One of my friend’s dads pulled the bottle into their canoe and unrolled its contents — a letter. It was written in almost unreadable old timey handwriting, on paper tanned and brittle with time. The author’s signature was beautiful, classic looking, with big flourishing loops. In my memory the letter was dated in the late 1800s.

There in our canoes and life vests, we took turns squinting at the letter — deciphering an SOS message, requesting help be sent to some address in Georgia, with haste. A message flung into the water from back in time.

I imagined maybe it was written sometime around the Civil War — whispers and shadows from that war hung around Atlanta back then like smoke. I pictured the letter’s author scrawling this cry for help and hurling it into the Chattahoochee. It hadn’t gone far it would seem — well it traveled far in time, more than a hundred years later we unfurled it, but not far in space — as it was still here wedged between painted rocks in the water running through Atlanta.

During the Civil War, as Union General Sherman pursued the Confederate Army and sought to take Atlanta, the Chattahoochee stood as the last natural barrier protecting the city. More than a thousand enslaved men constructed six miles of trenches and fortifications at the direction of Confederate General Johnson along its bank. Johnson believed the fortification could hold the line on the north side of the Chattahoochee for thirty days. With the river at their backs, the Confederate army held the line at the Chattahoochee for five days. A few months later, more than 40% of Atlanta was burned to the ground.

Thinking back to this letter in the bottle, which neither of my parents recall — I’ve sometimes wondered if the letter was real. If perhaps one of the other dads on the canoe trip had dreamed it up to add a little historical fiction magic to our day on the river. I don’t think so. It seems a bit elaborate for 90s dads to come up with, especially as in my memory they all seemed pretty nonchalant about it — one dad promising to take it to a historical society once we got to shore.

I’ve searched since, for any online descriptions of 1800s messages found in the river. To no avail. I found instead another message in a bottle dropped into the Chattahoochee in the 1970s. That message traveled mostly through time and not space too — being discovered in 2018 still there on the banks of the Chattahoochee too, down in Columbus, Georgia.

Either way, real or imagined, that letter we found in a bottle in the river solidified in my mind that the Chattahoochee is a time traveling river. Where messages and memories flow between now and then, here and there.

It’s comforting, to imagine, or maybe to know that the river moves through time, not just through mountains and forests and cities, but through heaven and earth too.

To believe otherwise would break my heart.

***

Like my first heartbreak on the banks of the Chattahoochee, in that same spot by the river that I glimpsed heaven, and felt God.

We went back some while later and the old farm was gone. Every apple tree, every ancient trunk and thick green branch torn down and turned to mulch, every wild rose ripped up. The river was red, like the new paved road, wet with the blood red Georgia clay weeping in the rain. The misty heavenly riverside pathway was gone, replaced with plastic tarps and wooden stakes marking new construction.

Some while later, we returned again. Couldn’t stay away I guess, once we had a taste of the river magic, and the human heartbreak. There was a new neighborhood there, big white mega mansions, tinged with red clay tears, planted into the naked ground. The yards looked bare and sad to me, with a few spindly trees hardly taller than me, and younger no doubt too. Even though I was not even seven.

There was a neighborhood “Home and Garden Tour” and we went to see a house right there, in that magic spot by the river. There was no magic there anymore though. I told the owner - it was so beautiful here before. I remember I cried after we left.

I’ve never been back there to that spot. I’ve grown up, and moved far away from the river. I’ve become a lawyer, a wife, a mother.

But time is long, like rivers. And spindly trees grow, just like girls who love rivers.

And maybe, just maybe, back behind that house thats construction broke my heart all those years ago, there’s roses growing again by the water. And there’s probably misty mornings when the birds sing. And maybe a kindly neighbor who lets kids cut through their yard to see the water. And maybe the grass sometimes grows tall.

And maybe back there in that once magic spot, where I felt heaven reach down and touch the earth, there’s another little girl feeling the water between her toes, and falling in love with a river.

Like painted rocks,

the river shapes us with her waters,

quenches us, and

watches us as we grow.

She flows past heartbreak and daybreak,

some days clear and cold,

others red and clouded.

She molds the children,

the lives,

and the generations that know her waters

as she traces the mountains,

forests,

cities,

and plains of Georgia.

The Song Of The Chattahoochee

Sidney Lanier

1842 – 1881

Out of the hills of Habersham,

Down the valleys of Hall,

I hurry amain to reach the plain,

Run the rapid and leap the fall,

Split at the rock and together again,

Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,

And flee from folly on every side

With a lover's pain to attain the plain

Far from the hills of Habersham,

Far from the valleys of Hall.

….

But oh, not the hills of Habersham,

And oh, not the valleys of Hall

Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.

Downward the voices of Duty call --

Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,

The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,

And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,

And the lordly main from beyond the plain

Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,

Calls through the valleys of Hall.

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When she moved my dad and his siblings down to her grandma’s farm in Eastern North Carolina, she bought all the kids ponies. And when she moved them to a semi-remote barrier island called Emerald Isle a few years later, she got them a pet monkey.

Her purchases and gifts didn’t always make much sense. With six kids and sometimes not enough beds or shoes to go around, she bought a two seater convertible, taking turns driving each kid around laughing, but never being able to take the whole family anywhere at the same time.

She was a beautiful, petite, redhead, who was maybe a little flighty. She had the same squinty smile I recognize in myself.

She once bought my dad and his siblings a big plastic flower sprinkler that waved around when it was hooked up to the hose, spraying water every which way like one of the inflatable waving wiggling guys that blow around on the side of the road. Its wiggling every which way uncontrollably wasn’t so great though when it wiggled its way towards an open window to their trailer, spraying water all over inside. My dad says that’s the only time he remembers his mom hitting him.

Since my dad’s retirement last year, I’ve been helping him to record his stories. There are many stories he sends that I recognize — the road trips we took together, or the classic Grandma Maggie stories like the time she was driving in the mountains in the snow, without chains on her tires and she called my dad.

“Pull over Mama and get chains on the tires, you can’t be driving alone in this snow and ice.”

She told him not to worry. Jesus was there riding in the passenger seat.

“Mama, Jesus doesn’t want to get snow in his sandals,” my dad responded.

It may be that’s one of my mom’s favorite Grandma Maggie stories actually. Grandma Maggie was my mom’s mother-in-law for more than 20 years - if you count all my parents’ years of dating too.

Somewhere there’s a photo of my parents when they were still dating in front of the Christmas tree in Grandma Maggie’s trailer on Emerald Isle. My mom is grinning with her arms wrapped around my dad’s waist.

It’s a regular Christmas tree, not a Christmas bush like the year my Grandma Maggie let the kids pick out the biggest tree they had; a tree so big and tall it wouldn’t fit inside the trailer. Instead of cutting off the bottom, they cut off the top and had a Christmas bush.

Anyways, my mom and Grandma Maggie loved each other, my dad says. My mom gave her a hard time, classic mother-in-law, daughter-in-law head butting, but my mom always said Grandma Maggie would take in anybody. If they needed a home, or a place for Christmas, or a family, there was a spot at her table.

My mom once wrote,

“Maggie welcomed me into her family with her big heart and happy spirit. I was a part of her warm embrace for almost half my life, and I am one of many people whose lives were made better by her love and affection…Maggie taught me a lot about unconditional love. She believed in helping others, and she gave of herself generously and without expectations.”

Grandma Maggie would invite you in, but be warned, she might be serving up Mama Lucci special - which my mom described as an inedible “Italian” meal that made the “whole house stink,” and “made your dad stink too after he ate it.” She told my Dad that he could not “build a shrine” to his mom in the freezer saving the Mama Lucci special leftovers, but it would still sit there for months collecting freezer burns.

My parents didn’t stay married. And my dad got remarried pretty quickly after their divorce.

The best part of my dad’s ill fated second wedding, was getting seated next to Grandma Maggie at the reception.

The wedding had some bad omens, signs of trouble ahead - my brother’s uncontrollable vomiting, the bride’s daughter’s uncontrollable bawling, and my dad asking the photographer “should I kiss her now?” after they cut the cake.

But sitting next to Grandma Maggie made the night down right fun for me. She told me about her time living in Norway with my grandfather - apparently she met the King, and she had me laughing all night long, with our matching crinkly eye smiles.

That’s the only photo I remember or like from that whole day, her and I laughing together. I have braces and a giant hideous over done curly hair-do. Her hair is curly too.

After the disastrous second wedding, my Grandma Maggie called my mom. “I know you loved my son,” she told her. “There wasn’t love at that wedding.” Grandma Maggie could tell the second marriage wasn’t right.

Thankfully for my dad, the third wife was the charm, and although Grandma Maggie never met my step-mom, J, I’m sure she would love her too.

I think I treasured that ill fated second wedding night, that crazy, awful, but somehow a little bit great night cause of the chatting, just me and her. Maybe she knew I needed it.

Although we’d visit Grandma Maggie up in the mountains of Asheville, and sleep on the sofa in her trailer, or sometimes in a hotel close by, I didn’t get a chance to really know her.

I do remember the great gifts she gave me though as a kid, a Barbie with a sparkly, glittery poofy red dress stands out in my memory, cause I wasn’t allowed Barbies - “they give girls body image issues” according to my mom.

I remember the excitement I had unwrapping the forbidden delight, but also the excitement she had. She loved giving gifts and you could hear it in her voice when she gave ‘em.

My brother and I still talk about how she gave us one of the most fun gifts we were ever given as kids — a giant, and I mean absolutely incredibly huge, stuffed animal dog. I don’t even know how my parents transported it home or even how she got it to her home from the store either. But we loved that stuffed animal dog. We’d take it to the top of the carpeted stairs in our house, grab onto its two giant floppy ears, and ride it down the stairs, fast and screaming.

It was fun, impractical, a bit dangerous. A perfect Grandma Maggie present.

I’ve learned more about the other kind of gifts Grandma Maggie gave my dad, gave our family through his recent story recordings; stories I hadn’t really heard before or really understood as gifts till now.

My dad has never really fit in, and I’ve often times felt the same. My Grandma Maggie didn’t care about fitting in though. She saw people as people, and didn’t care if that made her weird.

Just this year as I’ve been going through my dad’s story recordings, I learned that my Grandma Maggie was the precinct chair for the Democratic Party of Carteret County in Eastern North Carolina. Here’s what my dad said about it.

“But Mom had some, some good things going on with her. She was the Precinct Chairman of the Democratic Party for Carteret County.

You know, the county is 99% Republican, but Mom had a few rallies and was in the middle of it, and she, you know, she, you know, just really liked the Democratic Party and what they stood for. And, and she was very active.”

My dad isn’t involved in politics. He famously voted for Obama, “because he’s a Muslim.” I think I inherited a bit of his unique, one of a kind approach to politics though; a more informed version but the same refusal to fit in a box, and a commitment to seeing people as people - each one of us, an individual.

Here’s my dad’s story about Grandma Maggie learning that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963.

“The biggest news that I heard as a child or was down, oh gosh, it was at the farm where we were living, and it was when JFK got shot by a bigoted racist. Because JFK looked at everybody as an individual, and a person.

So the craziest thing was is, we heard that he got shot while I was at school and then we were riding home on the bus and all the children were going: ‘

Yay you know he’s dead. He’s dead he got shot. Yay.’

You know because the KKK was very strong in Eastern North Carolina back then.

And then I go home that same day and my mom is crying like crazy because of the president and John F. Kennedy the president had been assassinated. So it was just, it was, I thought it was a horrible event and it’s kind of really kind of crushed that family, and crushed the United States for a while and that was not a time for our country to be proud of killing the president.

That was absolutely horrible.”

My dad had told me the story before about being shocked by the kids on his bus, cheering, reflecting the hate you know they learned at home. He hadn’t told me the part about Grandma Maggie though — coming home to her in tears.

I love my family, and I love my homeland, but I often felt like the odd one out growing up in Georgia.

I remember I once went to a pre-debutante tea in Atlanta, and my mom, similarly clueless, or perhaps intentionally obtuse about Southern polite society fashion expectations bought me a beautiful but very costume-esque blazer that could be best described as a Mozart jacket. An exquisitely embroidered maroon and gold Mozart blazer. My hair was a curly out of control mess tied into an also Mozart-esque low ponytail. At the pre-debutante tea luncheon, the Southern belles had floral skirts, perfectly coifed, blow dried hair and tasteful makeup. I just didn’t fit in.

There was a darker side I didn’t fit in with too though. I remember going to a football game during high school at another private school in Atlanta, an early date with a white boy who lived in a big mansion near the Governor’s mansion. There was a tailgating pregame bonfire in the woods and some of the guys there, rich good ol’ boys in baseball caps and boat shoes starting joking around, jokes with punchlines that included the n word. My date was embarrassed when he looked at my face.

Nope. No thank you. Get me out of here.

Even thinking back to it, I can feel the revulsion I felt in my body at that sentiment, at that environment. Where the laughing and joking turns dark, and hateful when they think it’s just us; like some part of a certain white Southern masculinity is tied up in part paternalistic, part jealousy rooted racism.

Not that my dad, or any of my uncles, my grandma Maggie’s sons carried that. I never heard them speak hate when they thought they were in the dark, or wrap their masculinity up in perceived, or aspirational racial superiority. They treat people as people.

They got it from their mama.

When I met my now husband, a Southern white guy, from Louisiana; I eyed him a bit warily. He grew up in Southern Louisiana on a windy road by a bayou, in a place where the dark side gets really dark quick. But as we spoke one night, I realized he got what I had been looking for from his mama too. The only white guy on his basketball team, his mama was the precinct head of the Democratic Party in a mostly Republican area too. He had been kicked out a debutante cotillion tea luncheon in his skateboarding shoes — cooler and less embarrassing than a Mozart costume — but still.

He didn’t fit in, but he fit right in my heart.

This isn’t to say that political parties are some decisive measure of right and wrong - but more being willing to be the odd one out, to go against the flow, to be different, willing to be ostracized, when it would be easier to just laugh at the hateful jokes or cheer along with the riled up crowd, is a gift.

People are people; neither rats nor gods. Losing sight of that is when we go wrong.

To stand up for what’s right, even when it’s not the easy or popular thing to do is something my dad learned from Grandma Maggie, my husband learned from his mom, and hopefully I can instill in my sons too.

It was fun to learn through my dad’s recent story recordings that my mom’s mother-in-law, and now my mother-in-law were both the chairs of Democratic precincts in places where it wasn’t popular. They both love giving gifts, and both raised sons who understand it’s okay to be different, to not laugh or go along with hate, and most importantly to love people just as people.

About a year after Grandma Maggie died, she came to me in a dream. We were in a field with a big tree. My dad said her farm had a big tree on it.

Is heaven just full of farmland?

She held out her arms to me and gave me an incredible hug.

In my dream she said,

“I don’t know you, but I love you so much.”

I woke up and felt the dream was very important, that it really was her. I called my dad on my blue flip phone and told him I just dreamed about Grandma Maggie.

“Well, today is her birthday,” he replied.

Through my dad’s stories, I feel like I’m finally getting to know my Grandma Maggie a little more - and truly appreciate the gifts she gave me that I didn’t even realize were from her.

Do you have a favorite gift your grandma gave you? Or a favorite mother-in-law story? I’d love to hear more in the comments!

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Zebra? Horse.

Reindeer? Horse.

Cow? Horse.

Giraffe? Definitely a horse.

I always think of my mom as the horse girl of the family. But rereading some of the stories my dad has recorded from his childhood, I realized he had some horse stories of his own.

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After my dad’s father, my grandfather, passed away in a plane crash when my dad was not even three months old - and his mom’s marriage to his father’s best friend broke up, my grandma Maggie moved my dad and his siblings down to Eastern North Carolina.

Back to her homeland.

A part of the world that’s been a hideout or a homecoming for both sides of my family for as long as we’ve been on this side of the wide deep Atlantic.

I’ve written a lot about my maternal grandma, Margaret and her farm outside New Bern, North Carolina.

But my paternal grandma was also named Margaret, and she had a farm Down East too.

She changed her name to Margarette, maybe to sound more French. She went by Maggie anyways. She grew up in Washington, DC and Northern Virginia, a city girl but with farm girl roots down in Eastern North Carolina.

Well after it all fell apart, Grandma Maggie took the kids back Down East to her mama Ada’s land outside Maysville, NC.

This is a story my dad tells about Grandma Maggie moving the family to Eastern North Carolina to her family farm, and trying to help get them settled by buying all the older kids ponies.

Here my dad tells the story of Danny, his pony.

Another story is when we moved to the farm.

And one of the things that Mom did when we moved to the farm is she bought all of us a pony.

Mine was Danny,

Bobby’s was Tony,

and then Charmagne had Tinkerbell.

But everybody had a pony, but mine was a male pony, and then Tony, who is Bobby’s pony, and, and that was a male pony too. And it was, we didn’t realize that you have to keep those, the stud horses have to be sort of separated.

And what ended up happening to Danny, Danny was a small little Shetland pony, and he was trying to be the mate of Tinkerbell. But what ended up happening is Danny got his leg busted by Tony. Danny in the middle of the night. And so, so yeah, he got in a fight, and then he, and now he had a limp.

Now Danny had had a pretty significant limp, but I’d still ride. But it was a, but it was just that, one of the pony stories is about all of us.

I think, I think just about all of us, the children, we were on our ponies, and we are going back into the fields. And it was, you know, just a country road back there. And, and then Danny, the pony that I had, he was, he was hardheaded as could be. He was barn sour, that means he all wanted to do is eat, feed, and then stay in the barn.

He didn’t want to be running around and trying to do what I’m asking me to do. And then, well, when we got out there, Danny decided that he was tired of dragging me around, and he was gonna go back to the barn, and I didn’t even have a say so about it.

Well, well, he started. I put up a bit of a fight for it, but we started, he started taking off and going, going toward the barn, and then my saddle started sliding, you know, because, you know, it was before, I was just gonna, just ride the pony.

And then, but when Danny really took off, he was, he was hauling and boogieing with me on him, and, and he was doing everything he could to get me off of him.

And, and, and what ended up happening to me was Danny was going in and then I would be bouncing, and then next, oh, my saddle started sliding, and the next thing you know, I was underneath, I was right, I was on his belly and he was riding me, you know.

So it was, Danny was going back no matter what.

And then, and my saddle flipped upside down, and I just held onto the saddle horn, and then Danny ran all the way back to the, to the barn.

Well, well, there was a tree there, and he was trying to rake me off yet, just to get me off of him. And, you know, it impacted me.

And, and I think Danny realized that I’m pretty hardheaded, and I’m gonna stick with it.

And, and that, that’s the story.

We went to a horse rescue in the countryside of Andalusia earlier in the summer - and my youngest son got to meet some horses.

He was too timid when we offered to let him ride the pony, but the smile he had when he reached his little hand out and touched the pony’s grey mane was quite possibly the biggest, most joyful smile I’ve seen from him yet.

Pony? A horse, for sure.

Is there a place you’re barn sour for? Do you have stories of mishaps and mean ponies too? Share your stories in the comments.

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I remember some moments from being three or four, the moments I was really excited, but also the moments I was really scared. But also some everyday moments and feelings too.

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I remember the day we got a puppy. My brother was a baby and we lived in Florida, near Orlando. I remember driving to a backyard full of Labrador puppies, yellow, black, brown, and ours, copper like a penny.

In my memories, my brother looks similar to how my youngest son looks now, blonde and usually in just a diaper. I feel like I can almost picture him in that backyard among the puppies. I’m sure he wasn’t just wearing a diaper then though.

I wanted to name the new puppy, Pocahontas, after my favorite movie character. My parents said no.

”how bout Pocha?”

“no”

“how bout Mocha?”

Pocahontas with an M was my thinking, because M is the first letter of Mom, she was sure to like it and agree.

And she did, and thus Mocha had her name.

We lived in Orlando for less than a year, but it was the year we got Mocha.

Our house had stone stairs in the front yard, they must not have been steep as Orlando has no hills at least as I remember it. Just swamps and ponds with alligators. Grass that was somehow always wet and squishy.

Once I was chasing Mocha down these stairs, momentarily forgetting the stairs existed, flying, smiling, and then falling, falling, falling into the stone stairs. I remember the tears but mostly the lion king band-aids I covered my knees and elbows with after – they were turquoise with Nala on them.

We had neighbors who had a little girl my age. She would pick up those little lizards that skitted everywhere and get them to bite her ears, hanging down like earrings. A true Florida girl. Whenever I tried to grab one, their tails would just fall off and they’d scurry away. I don’t remember her name but she had black curly hair in my memory and was the boss.

At her direction, we’d fill a bucket with water and then dip the sidewalk chalk in water to make the colors brighter. I remember coloring the sidewalk with her, dipping the chalk into the water, and painting it into the driveway till it became a tiny nub in my fingers.

 We’ve been visiting my dad with my sons recently - trying to capture memories and moments between our fingers before they slip away. I know my diapered boy will be unlikely to remember these days playing with his grandpa, building Lincoln log cabins, pushing the balance bike around, and coloring chalk on the sidewalk together - but I’m hoping my older son will have these happy memories from his days of being three and four to look back on.

I’ve been helping my dad to record some of his stories to hopefully share one day with my sons, and to have as a record for future generations too. Here’s a story my dad tells from our brief time living in Florida.

Halloween in Orlando

This is this is this is me telling a story about B and Paige is Halloween in Orlando when we live down there we live down there for about a year and this is the first year B it was absolutely tiny little baby and what not. It was my job to the walk Paige and then I’d be holding B and we walk over to our neighbor’s house and they were probably about three or 4 or 5 houses down the street and it was Hot.

The bugs were bad that you know it. I mean Art neighborhood was actually a swamp, they had to drain the swamp out of our neighborhood - the builders at the houses that were there. Those were nice homes, so I mean we had a pool. We had a nice yard. There was a doctor of one side. We had a big business owner on the on down the street And so it was nice.

You know it was very very nice but I thought B was gonna burn up because he was it was so hot. S made him a little bunny outfit but he was. He was sweating like profusely by the time we got home.

---

You can read more about the project I’m working on recording my dad’s stories here.

Thank you for following along! I write mostly about family history, genealogy, and American history. I have some Eastern North Carolina history articles coming up soon. Grateful to have you here!

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Paige 💙🌊🌾✨

Giving birth, at least that actual moment where your baby slips from your internal world to this world here on earth, the outside world, feels a lot like how it seems in those videos of horses or giraffes giving birth. Slippery, and such a relief. The baby plummets from the sky down to the earth, to the soft green grass, a springtime meadow with flowers.

A mother goes from unimaginable pain to indescribable joy so close together, but such completely different feelings, almost in one instant.

It really is like they slip between worlds, from somewhere above the sky down to earth - one moment inside just you, between their mother and God - and the next moment - they’ve joined all of us here on earth - becoming of the dirt, and the sky, and the sea, in that one slippery moment.

My friend’s mom once described labor and giving birth as a journey where the mother has to cross over to that other world, the land of the unborn and also of the passed on - to get our baby and bring them back. A moment, a place, somewhere between life and death. That seemed an apt description to me. A hero’s journey, a dangerous one, to a mysterious realm, with the ultimate reward at the end.

With my first son, after 24 hours of labor, without anesthesia but with a drug called pitocin to induce more powerful, faster, and more excruciating contractions - I did feel as if I was in another world. Looking up at the cross above the bed, or was I up there by the cross looking down at the bed?

For 90 minutes I pushed and cried out to God. And God comforted me. And guided my son here sliding out into this world - passing from the womb world where he held my finger in a dream, to this world, where he held my finger on my chest. Just like in the dream I had before his birth. Assisted by a young, pretty Serbian lady doctor who had loudly threatened to have to get the vacuum and suck my son out, in the few moments before I helped launch him here without mechanical assistance.

When I was pregnant with my first son, I started reading the book Good Night Moon to him in my belly. I figured he could enjoy the book more when he arrived and I had always enjoyed that one when I was little. I read it every night for a while in bed, my hand on him in there while I read aloud. After his arrival, I recited it to him from memory as he lay in the NICU pumped full of antibiotics and on breathing support. Holding onto his precious fingers like we had held each others’ hands in my dreams. After six days in the hospital, we brought him home.

Here on earth with all of us. At home with us. A blessing, and my greatest joy I had yet known. My son.

Before I knew I was pregnant with my second, my grandma who passed in 2018 came to me in a dream.

In the dream she asked me, “where are your boys? Are they down on the farm?”

“Grandma, I only have one boy” I replied.

And she smiled.

I found out soon after the dream that I was pregnant. And a few months after that, I confirmed what she had already told me - I would have another boy.

My eldest son is like me, he loves history and likes to look at old photos. He often asks, “where was I?” When we’re looking at photos from before he was born or talking about things that happened before he and his brother were born.

“You were up in heaven,” I tell him.

Of course, I don’t know exactly where he was.

Where are we before we are conceived in our mother’s wombs? Before we slip from the sky world down here to earth?

“Where is heaven?” He asks.

“Up above the sky and space,” I reply.

I assume, obviously I have no idea.

When my second son was born, I did not have to have to push and strain between those two worlds for hours. Thankfully, he flew out like a rocket ship after just three hours at the hospital and just a few moments after my water broke; launching from space down here to earth. In those few crucial moments - I remember crying out for help, from God, and also from the doctors and nurses. I remember the head doctor was an older man with white hair and glasses who sprinted in and threw on his gloves, as what I’ve now learned is called the ejection reflex launched my second son from somewhere up above the sky down here to earth, to join us.

Guided as always by the hands of God.

I don’t know if I will ever go on that hero’s journey again, that reaching up into heaven and helping bring a new life, a new person down here to earth. But I’m grateful to have made those journeys, those two times, and to have returned here to earth with my most precious blessings. My two boys. Down here on the farm.

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If you’d like to learn more about our farm check out this article.

It was the Fourth of July in Maui, Hawaii in the late 1940s. It must have been sometime after the end of WWII because most of Hawaii was under a blackout during the war - which meant they would not have been permitted to shoot off fireworks.

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She was a young teenager, maybe around 16 and she was out on a dock by the ocean, to watch the fireworks. Somehow during the show a piece of a firework careened onto the dock and went down the front of her dress. I always pictured the ocean, the smoke of the fireworks, the green of the island volcanos behind her, the palm trees near the dock. I think I even imagined her dress when she told this story.

She hated fireworks after that, and didn’t much care for Fourth of July either.

Addie grew up in Hawaii. Her mom Ella Kealaimoku Tai Hook was half native Hawaiian and half Chinese, and her dad Charles Lukens Clark, was a white American soldier from Virginia who was stationed in Hawaii.

Addie married my grandfather Bob’s brother, Frank in California. They were married for 28 years. She was his third wife - he was her second husband - and she was my great aunt.

I loved Addie as far back as I can remember. She’s a main character in most of my earliest memories. When my dad was stationed in San Diego with the Navy, she lived across the street. I was around 2 or 3 years old. My parents said I would stand at the front screen door slamming on it and calling out her name, Addie. or at least the baby version of her name, Aya. When my dad was away on a Naval ship for most of the first year of my life, it was Addie who helped my mom take care of me.

She kept a big tall plastic jar of fig newtons in her 1970s wooden kitchen cabinets. I called them Addie cookies. She’d open the cabinet and unscrew the jar. I can still recall the excitement, and even almost the smell. Her house had thick 1970s carpeting too that I loved under my feet. I still love fig newtons, and think of them forever as Addie cookies.

She drove a big red car that had red leather upholstery inside too.

I remember when my baby brother was born, she drove me to the hospital to meet him. I remember the red leather upholstery and trying to look out the window. Was I in a car seat? Who knows! I don’t remember the part where I met my baby brother that day though. Just driving there in Addie’s car. So happy and excited.

Addie was born in Honolulu in 1931, before Hawaii joined the United States as a state. That wouldn’t happen until 1959. Back when Addie was growing up, Hawaii was a territory of the US. By the time she was nine years old in 1940, her family had moved from Honolulu to Wailuku, Maui - likely along with other military families. During World War II, military personnel outnumbered local residents in Maui four to one. Her father Charles, originally from Virginia, was a Hawaiian National Guard instructor.

Maybe growing up surrounded by the U.S. military led to Addie joining the Marine Corps after she graduated high school. In 1948 Congress passed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act. Addie left Hawaii a few years later, the island where she was born and raised, the only place she had known, and went to another island - Parris Island, South Carolina, where she joined the Marines.

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While the Armed Services had integrated women by the time Addie joined the Marines around 1960, racial segregation was still legal and ongoing when Addie arrived in South Carolina for training. My dad said in South Carolina people were racist to her and she faced segregation, because she was native Hawaiian, she was Asian, because she wasn’t all white. My mom told me, Addie had talked about being scared as one of the few young women surrounded by mostly male Marines in training. Addie never told me about her time in the military or in South Carolina though.

I remember spending a lot of time with Addie’s mom, Ella too. She had tan wrinkled hands and I remember she would hold mine in Addie’s flower garden. It was a rose garden, with little rock pathways between the roses. We’d walk together, holding hands, and smelling the roses one by one. Even to this day, a sniff of a beautiful rose can transport me back to Addie’s garden. My dad said, it was more like Ella’s garden as she was the one who cared for it most days.

Ella was born in 1904 in Wainiha, Kauai, Hawaii, the same year the first wooden bridge was built to the island, and six years after Hawaii had been annexed by the United States.

Ella’s father had come to Hawaii from China to work in the sugar or rice industries. Her mother, Malie, was Native Hawaiian and had been born around 1870 likely on the northern coast of Kauai, Hawaii, which was extremely remote back then.

We left San Diego when my dad left the Navy. We still came back to visit and I asked for Addie cookies from the big jar and smelled roses in Addie’s garden for years. But I never lived across the street again.

When I graduated high school, Addie flew from San Diego to Atlanta to be there. She had already begun slipping into forgetfulness, but she hadn’t forgotten the love and friendship we shared.

The night before I graduated, she brought out a red bag that she had written a beautiful letter on. She read it to me, and she cried. Her tears washed the words right off the red bag, so I can only hold onto the feelings from that moment.

She told me that Ella had asked her to give this gift to me. That her mom had loved our time in the rose garden together too. When Addie had graduated high school in Hawaii, her mother, Ella had given her this ring. Addie told me Ella wanted me to have it now at my graduation too, almost 60 years later.

Addie and Ella weren’t my blood relatives, but they were my family and we loved each other. They passed down this treasure to me. For me to one day pass onto a daughter, a niece, a granddaughter, or just someone special on their graduation.

Addie passed down more than this gift to me though. She also passed down a different perspective on this holiday, on what the history of this country means to our family. Addie didn’t like the Fourth of July or fireworks - probably not only because of that one fireworks accident.

She was born into a territory that was annexed and then occupied by the U.S. military. Even before Hawaii became a state, Addie signed up to serve the U.S. as a Marine. During her service, she faced some of the worst ugliness our country has to offer in the form of state-sanctioned racism.

In Hawaii, July 4th marks not only America’s Independence Day, but also the day that the Republic of Hawaii was established in 1894, marking the end of the reign of the last queen of Hawaii, Queen Liliʻuokalani. Addie’s American story holds this duality.

This Fourth of July, Addie and her American story are on my mind.

The love of family and between generations isn’t only through blood, but also through your heart. And I hold Addie in my heart.

In memory of Adeline Kuulei Clark Vining.

As long as my mom knew her father, Bob, he had carried this engraved money clip. One side his initials, the other side, “Love, Aline.”

“Who is Aline?” she had asked him on more than one occasion.

“A friend,” he had replied.

There’s some stories that don’t get passed down. If you don’t tell them, or don’t know them, they are lost to time, mysteries for all eternity. Or so it would seem.

Except here, more than 40 years after my grandfather Bob died, a mystery was being solved, a missing piece was found.

My mom’s big sister. K.

My mom wrote back to her nephew, her lost but now found, nephew:

Like I said earlier, my mom has never seemed like the eldest sister. I’m the eldest sister in my family - and there are signs. But mom, well she just doesn’t have those quintessentially eldest sister qualities.

She has so many wonderful qualities, but you wouldn’t peg her for the eldest. She’s doesn’t seem to carry that responsibility obligation most eldest sisters have as their birthright.

Before I was born, she worked at the Winston-Salem Journal, a newspaper in North Carolina. She wrote articles, editorials, restaurant reviews, and occasionally - she’d share family stories. My grandma saved many of them, clippings of her stories or stories about her. I found this one, and think it really shows what I mean.

See what I mean? A classic eldest sister would be washing the spinach, and telling off the younger ones.

When my mom was growing up, she used to wish for a big sister. She has two younger brothers, but she’d pray for a big sister. She told me that many times, long before we discovered she had one.

Maybe in her heart, she a little bit knew someone was missing. We don’t know if her dad did though.

From my cousin M we learned that Aline had passed before they could meet her as well. But they had met some of her sisters.

She was from Baltimore, but had moved down to South Carolina. Is that where she and Bob met?

M sent a photo of our grandfather Bob to Aline’s sister - and she remembered him! She even remembered he had a big dog, a Weimaraner that he would bring over to their house when he and Aline were dating.

My grandma met that dog too, named Blue. She said he was out of control. Did Aline dislike Blue too?

Together my cousin and I tried to piece together the stories and photos, the documents and the memories to tell Bob and Aline’s story, the origin story of K.

The missing piece, the true eldest sister.

There’s so much we’ll never know. Can’t ever know now. Stories and secrets that will never be ours to know.

We met my mom’s sister K later that year, our family all together - of course in our favorite place - Emerald Isle.

We took photos and hugged and laughed over all the family resemblance, both physically and otherwise. (My mom and her sister, K both studied to be yoga teachers and lived in Atlanta at the exact same time.) They also both have Bob’s smile.

Meeting my aunt K, and getting to know her more over the years - she’s a classic eldest sister. She was the middle sister in her adopted family, but she’s got all the qualities and responsibleness I recognize as a fellow eldest sister.

During our first reunion, my uncle found Bob’s engraved money clip, polished it, and presented it to K and her sons, to M - who had found us.

Here in her hands was an artifact, a gift, given by her mother to her father before she was born.

There’s so much we don’t know and will never know. But we know Bob held onto this gift till the day he died. Kept it with him every day. The money clip fills in so many of the gaps, and the unknowns.

That night we were so grateful to have found the missing piece of our family.

And that night, the true eldest sister slept with the money clip under her pillow.

Did researching your genealogy help you find any family members you didn’t know about before? I’d love to hear your stories too.

Here’s a story a little about what Emerald Isle, North Carolina means to our family.

She doesn’t talk much about the other horse.

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Maybe that other horse was the one that fell on her when she was riding in the woods by herself as a girl. She rode home in pain, and cried to her mom, my grandma.

Her mom said she was okay and to just rest. When her dad came home from work, he went to check on her.

“The damn thing is broken!” he yelled.

He took her straight to the hospital. She had a broken collar bone and multiple broken ribs.

Sometimes she tells a story of going to look at a horse with her dad one weekend. The horse was young and had just come off the race track. He wasn’t fast enough to race, so they put him for sale as a jumper. My mom lived in Alexandria, Virginia and drove out with her dad to the country to see this horse. My mom was young, maybe 13 or 14 and they put her up on a beautiful young horse.

And the horse took off.

She was holding on for dear life while that horse flew. Her dad watched from outside the gate.

When the horse finally stopped. She hopped off and said to her dad and the man selling the horse, “a little green for me.”

And they left.

In her story, her dad is relieved she’s okay, and shocked, or maybe a bit impressed at her nonchalance.

I only know my grandfather Bob, my mom’s dad through these stories. He died tragically and suddenly when my mom was 18, a freshman in college, from a heart attack. Her brothers, were even younger.

Even before his death though, he was a bit of a mystery. He was from Texas, from Palestine, Texas. So I think he had an accent. He went to West Point too, and for most of his career he couldn’t talk about what he did.

We know he worked at the Pentagon during the height of the Cold War, and traveled all over the world. During the one year he had of retirement, before he died, he published a report titled “The Effects of Nuclear War,” which provides some clues.

I know some about my grandfather Bob from my grandma. She’d now and then carefully bring out a box of old photos with him in there, and open the box out on her dining table. She’d saved letters from his West Point roommate, Ed White, the first American to walk in space. She also had a few small photos of him as a child in the countryside of Texas.

I heard from someone, somewhere that he wasn’t meant to go to West Point, that it happened a bit by luck. He graduated high school, and was headed for a local college in Texas. He loved to golf, and caddied at a local golf course down nearby. One day the governor of Texas came to that golf course, and my grandfather caddied for him. The governor liked him, and wrote him a letter for West Point and thus his career began.

I’m not sure if it’s all true. Or if it’s just a story partly true or partly remembered. That’s how most family stories are right, unless you have the documents, the proof, the artifacts in front of you - we have to rely on our memories, and the perspectives of those who told us.

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One time my grandma told the story of how they met, at East Carolina University in the 1950s. My grandma went to university a bit older than most students, and my grandfather was there as a professor, a bit younger than most professors. They were only three years apart in age.

He was there at ECU teaching physics and heading up the ROTC program. I found photos of him there during my ancestry research. He’s got a big bright smile and is standing near a giant globe in his uniform.

My grandma said back then, there were many boarding houses. And even if you weren’t a boarder there, you could go and they’d serve food. She said there was a really good one near campus that she loved to eat at.

As the story goes, my grandfather saw my grandma there one day “eating more cornbread than he’s ever seen anyone eat before” and fell in love. Somehow he got her number and called her up and asked her to be his date to a dance.

She also told me she had many suitors back then, which is not surprising if you knew her. She said when she and my grandfather, Bob decided to get married, she went to tell one of her other suitors, and he was very disappointed. “I had a lot of wonderful plans for us.” He told her.

I never heard stories though about my grandfather Bob’s prior loves though. It’s not the kind of thing that is usually passed on. Especially in your absence. In the records of our lives, and the stories that are told about us, ex girlfriends usually don’t make the list.

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When my mom used to drop us off at school when we were kids, she’d repeat what she said her dad told her before school, “make them fill your basket!” An encouragement to listen and learn. Once my uncle, the youngest brother told a story of his dad, Bob, whacking him on the head, always wearing his West Point ring.

Just little parts and pieces, was all we got of his story. Now and then.

During Covid, still locked inside with nothing but time and existential dread, I re-upped my newspapers.com account and searched for articles about him.

I learned he won many golf tournaments, he loved to golf. He volunteered running blood drives. He also survived an incredible earthquake in Alaska when he was stationed there in 1964. It was a 9.2 magnitude earthquake - still the largest to ever hit North America.

In the news article I found it said, he ran out into the snow in just his underwear. My mom and her brothers never knew he’d been stationed in Alaska, or that he’d experienced this huge earthquake. I carefully added these articles to his ancestry page and uploaded some of the photos I had of him to his profile.

I selected his West Point yearbook photo as the main one. He was known for being handsome, is what my mom’s movie star cousin had told me once. He looks like all the men in my mom’s family, including my brother. Blonde, blue eyes, bright smile that goes up on one side. My mom has that smile, and so does my brother.

Little did I know, someone else was out there at the same time, looking for my grandfather Bob. He just had even fewer parts and pieces though.

He’s really sentimental like me, and loves genealogy and family history. I guess it runs in the family a bit - at least for us two.

He knew only two things about my grandfather. Or should I say, his grandfather.
One: he went to West Point.
And two: he was from Texas.

While I had been doodling around on ancestry passing the time, my cousin M had been searching for Bob, for us, for years. Through all the detective work, dead ends, and careful genetic genealogy family tree building, he put all the pieces together when he opened my grandfather’s profile and saw his West Point uniform - and his smile that goes up on one side.

He wrote a message to my mom, who knows how long it took to compose. It was short, but if he’s anything like my mom - it probably took some time to write.

My mom forwarded me his message, as the resident family historian and genealogist/best friend.

“Is this legit?” She asked.

I pulled up his family tree on ancestry and clicked around till I found her, my mom’s sister, her big sister.

Her birthday is two years before my mom’s. More than a year before my grandparents were engaged.

M had uploaded her school year book photo. At first, I thought it was a photo of my mom. She looked just like her.

Blonde hair, blue eyes, and there it was the same smile as Bob, as my mom, as my brother, the one that goes up on one side. I told my mom, this has to be your sister.

She thought for a minute.

Read Part II Here:

For new readers, I moved to Spain this year with my family and get to enjoy the gorgeous Mediterranean now everyday from my window.

But like the generations before me,

something in my heart always calls me back to the white sands and sea grasses on the Bogue Banks of Emerald Isle, NC.

My dad grew up there. And my mom’s mom, my grandmother Margaret was born and raised on a small tobacco farm about 40 minutes away from Emerald Isle.

At least one Sunday a month, they’d make the drive down to the beach and she often spent weeks there with relatives in the summer.

She continued to return to Emerald Isle - usually a few times a year - for the rest of her life.

Her mother, my great grandmother Keturah was from the town right across the Sound from Emerald Isle, Newport.

Great Grandma Keturah told stories of going camping on Emerald Isle as a child herself, which must’ve been back in the 1910s or 1920s.

She even had stories about Salter Pathers too.

It’s no wonder, my mom met a cute local surfer on Emerald Isle when she was 18 and married him when she was 21.

As the story goes, my mom was walking on the beach with her cousin when they spotted my dad surfing.

My mom turned and told her cousin, “he’s so handsome, I’m going to marry him.”

So she did.

And thus my brother and I were born. While their marriage didn’t stand the test of time, their shared love of Emerald Isle has.

They’d still plan trips to overlap on Emerald Isle, and we’d all get together, step mom and step dad included to share a seafood boil or Eastern NC barbecue. Some of my fondest memories are being all together on Emerald Isle.

After my parents divorced, but before they became friends again, they’d still send us to Emerald Isle, even if they didn’t come. My brother and I would fly up to New Bern or Jacksonville.

We’d stay for a few wonderful weeks with our aunt and uncle and cousins who live on the Sound.

My uncle would take us “extreme boating” and teach us how to cast nets and fish off the dock.

My aunt would set up crafts for us - making wind chimes out of seashells.

I loved staying up late playing her favorite card game and listening to all her life advice.

She only has boys, so I fancied myself her girl.

My love for Emerald Isle is a sensory experience. It’s the smell of the sea when you first cross the bridge - windows down of course.

It’s spitting black watermelon seeds off my grandma’s beach house porch into the dunes with my cousins.

It’s shooting fireworks off my uncle’s dock on the Sound.

It’s bags of still warm boiled peanuts from Winberry Farm in Cedar Point and just a little bit greasy hush puppies from Moore’s barbecue in New Bern.

It’s the hot sand on my feet running back to the wooden boardwalk during the day;

and the cool sand on my feet on an evening walk to the pier with my grandma.

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She loved “a brisk walk to the pier.” She would walk so fast, with her head held high, always standing up straight and regal. I’d always get a cramp walking to the pier with her.

I couldn’t keep up.

She’d still stop to pick up seashells though, even at her brisk pace. She usually had on a beautiful straw sun hat. She was always fashionable, and elegant, even at the beach.

After she died, I got to take some of her things, including a little red wooden box shaped like a heart. I figured she must have jewelry in it, because she kept it with all her precious jewelry.

But when I opened it, there inside were a collection of smooth, simple, and beautiful sea shells and coral.

White, cream, orange, and purple.

She had collected and saved them from her lifetime of walks on the white sandy beach of Emerald Isle;

the same beach we’ve all been walking and loving for generations.

My sons are the fifth generation that I know of, but I’m sure my great grandma’s parents loved Emerald Isle too - so I guess that would make my boys, the sixth.

My grandma passed in 2018 but just last year I found a collection of memoir essays and letters she wrote about her childhood in Eastern North Carolina.

Here she wrote about Emerald Isle in a letter she addressed to me, my brother, and my cousins - her grandchildren.

My grandma Margaret and a puppy in Swansboro

I hope you enjoy. It covers family memories from at least as far back as the 1910s.

Letter from Margaret:

Dear [Grandchildren],

In summer 2004, B commented that it never rains at the beach. He was sitting in the sand on the beach at Emerald Isle, shaping turrets on his sand castle a few feet above advancing waves.

To him, a six-year-old, the beach is a magical, happy and carefree place, always sunny—just as it was to your parents when they were your ages.

For them, coming to Emerald Isle from places like Massachusetts, Alabama, and Germany, the beach was a place to reconnect with North Carolina grandparents, go fishing with Granddaddy, and mark this year's growth by your names on the kitchen door jamb in their summer cottage.

My grandma Margaret, my mom, and my great aunt Ann in the 1960s

Not everyone likes the beach that much. The combination of hot sun, sand, breeze, and dampness, and wearing swimsuits all day every day feels just perfect to us, but many people don't like it at all.

Have we inherited our attachment to the beach from the many generations of my mother's family who lived in the coastal area of North Carolina?

My grandma’s family in Newport and Emerald Isle, 1936 and 1942

For me, the twenty-five mile stretch of the North Carolina oceanfront running roughly east to west along the Bogue Banks curiously turns out now to be the constant in my own life.

Growing up nearby on a tobacco farm, I liked to go to the beach, but no more than the picnics and boat rides closer to home; it was rare and exciting to leave the farm for almost any reason, especially in summer when we were out of school.

Margaret in 1941

The beach was memorable mostly for the inevitable sunburn that only fresh whole cow's cream would relieve. Now, inexplicably, the seashore draws me back to North Carolina far more than the farm where I was born and grew up with parents and two sisters.

We did not go to the beach very often when I was a small child. In the earliest trips, I sat in the swirling waves shrieking for rescue from the sensation of being swept away.

Your grandmother would recite: "When I was down beside the sea a wooden spade they gave to me to dig the sandy shore. The holes were empty like a cup, in every hole the sea came up 'til it could come no more" from A Child's Garden of Verse by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and sure enough it did.

My mom’s cousins and aunts and uncle in Swansboro

I now recite the rhyme to my grandchildren.

The early trips to the beach were made in our '35 Ford. They were always part of a visit to one or more of my mother's relatives.

Mother was a Garner and her family had for many generations lived on farms or in towns in Carteret County near Bogue Sound.

Your grandfather had no interest in Mother's family. He evaded spending Sunday with them; it was a source of contention between Mother and Daddy since Mother insisted on going "down to Newport" for a Sunday visit with her family at least once a month.

My great grandfather “grandaddy” George and his boat

Daddy drove us the thirty-five or forty miles but once there he developed a severe headache that sent him somewhere to "lay down," often in the car.

…

When we go to Emerald Isle now we cross the Cameron Langston Bridge over Bogue Sound at Cedar Point.

The bridge arches gracefully between the mainland and the barrier island, tall enough for large sailboats to pass under.

The view crossing the bridge

It spans the sound near the spot where two ferryboats once crossed back and forth shuttling about a dozen cars every half-hour in the summer time.

That was when people first began to come to our beautiful isolated stretch of sand.

I discovered it even before then, when Emerald Isle had only an ocean fishing pier, a motel that catered to fishermen, and a few summer cottages.

To get there then I had to drive miles out of the way to Morehead City and cross to the barrier island to Atlantic Beach. A narrow blacktop road ran from the resort at Atlantic Beach to the old fishing village of Salter Path.

Marshes in the Sound

There were only a few houses along the way between Atlantic Beach and Salter Path, a place that I connected with my mother and her story about her Newport High School girls' basketball team competing with the Salter Path girls.

At games, her team taunted their Salter Path opponents with an exaggerated down east tidewater brogue, "High tide, no fish, gotta' go home and dig 'taters."

Emerald Isle - an ocean fishing pier, a motel catering to fishermen and a few summer beach cottages - was then a few lonely miles beyond Salter Path.

There the road ended.

— Margaret

Margaret by the sea, her favorite place to be

My grandma never finished her memoirs. The only copies I have end with no sign off.

But I remember how she signed off all her letters, and most of her texts to us, so here I’ll add it in:

Mmmmmm

I’d love to hear about the special places your families love. Do you hold Coastal Carolina in your heart too? Or somewhere else beautiful?

Read Part I here.

When my first son was due to be born in early September, it was perfectly poetic for me – the time of year when my favorite fruit is ripe, my baby was ripe too. Muscadine grapes are my favorite. Picked and perfect that time of year, just like my harvest moon baby.

When late August, early September arrive I seek out muscadine grapes like no other. When we lived in DC, I’d order big boxes of muscadine grapes shipped overnight from Georgia to our door, where they arrive hot and sticky, but still so sweet.

I’d fill the shelves of our fridge and proselytize about their deliciousness to anyone who might want to try some. You do have to share, not only because you want others to experience the “sweet musky aroma emitted by the ripe grapes, deliciously sweet pulp, large seeds, and thick, tart skins that characterize the ‘berry grape’.” But also, because when you order so many boxes of grapes, you have to eat them or share them quick, lest they go to waste.

They are a quintessentially Southern fruit. They sell them at farmer’s markets sometimes, and if you’re lucky you can maybe find them in the organic grocery store, at least on the East coast; just for those last few weeks of August and the first few weeks of September.

Once I found someone on our neighborhood Facebook in DC who had a prolific vine in their backyard. I drove over in the dark after my son was asleep to go pick up the bucket of grapes off their front porch.

My grandma, a daughter of Eastern North Carolina, like the muscadine itself - planted a muscadine vine in the front yard of her Washington, DC Capitol Hill townhouse. She said it takes five years to grow fruit though. She passed away before it ever grew grapes. Sometimes I would walk by her house after she sold it, after she was gone, and look to see if there were grapes.

My love for muscadine grapes and scuppernong grapes, the golden muscadine, is a love I’ve inherited from my mom and my grandmother, but it goes farther back than that too.

Muscadine grapes have grown in the land now known as North Carolina, long before Europeans first reached the sandy shores of its barrier islands.

In 1584, following the first voyage from Europe to the island of Roanoke, North Carolina, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, described the island as,

“so full of grapes, as the very beating and surge of the Sea overflowed…on the sand and on the green soil, on the hills as on the plains, as well every little shrub as also climbing towards the tops of tall cedars, that I think in all the world the like abundance is not to be found.”

My seventh great grandfather, George Kornegay was among the two voyages that arrived to the same sandy coast of North Carolina in 1710. While Virginia and South Carolina had easy to access deep water ports which had been bustling with trading and new arrivals, the coast of North Carolina was long protected by barrier islands, and shallow waters.

By the time my Palatine and Swiss ancestors arrived in Eastern North Carolina in 1710 - many of the earlier non-Native arrivals who had made their way before - had already left, fled, or, like the fateful Roanoke settlement, simply disappeared.

Among those who remained were outlaws, pirates, colonists, and enslaved people. They had come from England, France, West Africa, and interestingly, many had come most recently, from Barbados. They primarily arrived via rivers and land routes from ports in Virginia and South Carolina, some seeking more land, some brought against their will, and many simply seeking the remoteness and privacy the shallow waters and barrier islands provided.

My Palatine and Swiss ancestors arrived in what is now known as New Bern in 1710, with Baron von Graffenried - who was from Bern himself, and John Lawson, who was from England. Von Graffenried was a Swiss nobleman seeking his fortune in the new world. John Lawson was a surveyor, an early explorer of North Carolina. By his account and by the account of others, Lawson was a lover of the native grapes and vines of Carolina, the scuppernongs, the muscadines. A love that some think contributed to his downfall and likely eventually, the downfall of the new settlement.

Lawson admired the native people of North Carolina, and wrote extensively of his admiration for them, describing the Tuscarora chiefs as having “all the integrity imaginable, never looking towards their own interest, before the public good.”

While European colonies in Virginia and South Carolina grew rapidly in the 1600s, North Carolina – especially Eastern coastal North Carolina where my family is from, remained Indian country. The people that lived there, included the Algonquian, among them, the Hatteras, Pamlico, and Yaupon tribes. And the Tuscarora.

The Tuscarora moved from the area around what became New York to the area that became North Carolina in approximately 1400. Despite their migration, they retained their ties to the five nations of the Iroquois, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. This land had been their native home for more than 300 years when my ancestors arrived, and New Bern was established on what the Tuscarora considered to be part of their capitol city.

“Lawson recognized the Indians’ right to the land on which they lived and hunted; he recognized, unlike most, that the Indians did, in fact, have a strong attachment to their ancestral villages and farms, woods and rivers. Although their concept of ownership clearly differed from that of the English, they kept track of what belonged to them:

‘They have no Fence to part one anothers Lots in their Corn-Fields [cornfields]; but every Man knows his own .... (184).’”

In Lawson’s accounts of early 1700s North Carolina, he argued that settlers should treat the natives fairly and marry into their tribes, learn their languages, and better understand the land and nature that they sought to make their new homes.

He believed that then the children of North Carolina could learn trades from their English family and ways of living and loving and care of children from their native family, “for they do not practice beating and correcting their children, as we do.”

In the July 1902 issue of The North Carolina Booklet, Judge Walter Clark wrote that before 1711, John Lawson’s claim,

“that North Carolina was the only instance of a nation planted in peace and located without blood-shed was well founded”

He stated that “[t]ill that date, friendly relations between the natives and whites had been unbroken. There may have been occasionally variances or feuds between individuals, but these had always been settled by the law, and remained at peace. The Indians were…admitted, without suspicion, and at all times, into the white settlements.”

This is not the whole story though.

While the settlers who had arrived in the 1600s encroached on hunting and fishing grounds of natives, and personal disagreements broke out between settlers and natives related to trade or religion,

“the most heinous English crime of all, in the eyes of the Indians, was the enslavement of their children. White traders stole great numbers of young Indians from the woods and bought the Indian captives kept by warring tribes. They sold these captives to colonies as far away as Pennsylvania and Barbados, trading through the Charleston slave markets.

English traders incited the tribes to war against each other for more human goods, infuriating the parents and relations of the victims, turning the equitable system of captive trading among tribes into a shambles.”

– Jim Shamlin

The Palatine and Swiss settlers who arrived, fleeing Europe in 1710 did not understand the situation they were arriving to when their beleaguered families arrived on the banks of the Neuse river; on the land that would become New Bern.

In the few letters that remain from the first year after their arrival, the Palatine and Swiss families wrote about the beauty and bountifulness of the land, the hard work that they must put in to survive, and of the losses and difficulties they faced on their journeys.

Their letters do not include accounts of the kidnappings of Native American children to be sent down the river to Charleston, or up to Pennsylvania.

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On July 8, 1710, two Tuscarora chiefs, Terrutawanaren and Teonnottein presented to the Pennsylvania government eight wampum belts symbolizing their requests and complaints. These belts were presented with the goal of leaving North Carolina; which had been their home for more than 300 years, moving to Pennsylvania, and ensuring peace and safety for their people.

Pennsylvania did not grant their request. Instead this bid for peace and safety was met with an influx of new European settlers to their lands in North Carolina in 1710; as around 650 Palatines and Swiss arrived on the banks of the Neuse and Trent River in what would become New Bern.

Among them were my seventh great grandfather, and his parents, grandparents, and siblings.

He would be the only one in his family to survive the next year.

She grew up outside New Bern, North Carolina on a farm on a dirt road named Simmons Loop. She was a Simmons. This land has been in our family for more than 300 years. She addressed this passage about summertime on the farm to my brother and I, when we lived in Southern Italy, the summer of 2003.

***

In 1943, I was just about your age [10 years old]. The weather always got very hot in North Carolina by mid-June and the schools in Jones County closed in early May so that a lot of kids our ages, yours and mine, could help their parents on farms -doing early summer work, planting, chopping, and plowing.

The parents of most of my school friends were tenants or sharecroppers, which meant they did not own their land; part of the earnings from their hard farm labor went to the landowner. My sisters and I helped on the farm, too, but we were never kept out of school to work on the farm.

We were just as poor as most of the tenant families. For the past ten years, there had been “The Depression” when everybody around us was very poor, too. Mother and Dad were fearful as young parents with three little girls and with no money, even though they were educated and owned their farm. They told us later they knew a lot of people who lost all their property, and they had also seen many people who had to beg for food.

How shameful and awful it was for them to even imagine such a possibility -and they did imagine it. Things were better later by the time I was nine or ten, especially after the war began, but the Depression left my parents and others who lived through it very anxious for the remainder of their lives.

There was always lots of activity on the farm in June. I loved being out of school, out of doors, spending time with the farm animals, especially my dog, Candy, and my cat, Sing-Sing. The mailman delivered peeping baby chicks in large flat boxes in the trunk of his car. Every box had one or two little “biddies” that were sickly outcasts, doomed to be pecked to death.

It was my mission to save them; separating them from their brood, I gave them names and installed them in a cardboard mansion-hospital I’d built. There were also new families of pigs, cows and their calves, sheep and lambs whose tails whirled in circles when they nursed their mothers, even a goat or two in the stables.

The sheep lived in a pasture across the road where there was a dipping vat -a cement trough into a deep vat where the sheep were herded for a chemical bath to keep their wool clear of infestation. One day I’ll tell you about how sheep were sheared to harvest their wool. Broom sage grew so thick in that pasture that my sisters and I could hide in it and creep upon the sheep, chasing them into a herd as if we were sheep dogs.

This was forbidden. Dad accused us of being wild and often cautioned us not to let a poisonous snake bite us —he said it would kill the snake.

We worked hardest on the labor-intensive tobacco crop because it was our main money crop, but the early garden Mother planted was already giving us lettuce, radishes, carrots, green peas, and the first corn was almost ready to eat.

Later, in July, we would eat field corn when it got ready but most of that crop was left to dry for animal food. As the summer wore on, we’d also get greens, tomatoes, three kinds of beans, potatoes, peppers, and lots more vegetables from the garden, some to eat and much more to “put up,” in jars for winter.

May was probably my favorite month -it was my birthday month and the weather was usually very nice, not too hot. June may have been my next favorite month of the year.

Tobacco took up only a few acres of the farm; most of the land was planted in corn and soybeans for the summer. In June, more than most other months, all three - tobacco, corn, and soybeans, required hard work to plant and still harder toil to nurture them during the first growing stages. And the farm animals required looking after.

Day laborers, men, women, and children came from a black family settlement nearby that had for centuries been part of Simmons Farm, to help as needed, mostly with tobacco. The children were our only outside playmates in the summertime, and we shared warm friendships that have always transcended the color barrier.

It is such a treasure for me to have these stories and photos. I hope sharing these stories helps inspire you to collect and share your family history too.

If you’d like to read more about our farm, start here:

The summer I lived in Beirut

I ate hot manoushe w jibne w zaatar everyday

I stood in line in front of roadside stands

watched the man spread rich dough over the hot stone

adding the melting cheese on half and spreading the olive oil mixed with zaatar on the other half

w khiar I’d ask

he’d add fresh crunchy cucumber spears

and wrap the bottom half in foil

I’d grab this warm melty masterpiece

fresh pillowy bread

bright zaatar

white cheese

crispy green cucumbers

every time perfection

bliss

I ordered this same order in my budding

Lebanese Arabic

bedi manoushe

merci

shukran

All over the city

and every time incredible

I spent my afternoons by the water

sitting in the sun on the rocks

climbing into the beautiful

sparkly Mediterranean Sea

the same sea I swam in Amalfi and Cannes

my skin turning freckled and tan

chatting with my girl friend on our beach chairs

I had a black string bikini and hers had red cherries on it

Salt water drying on our eyelashes

In the evenings, I walked on the Cornishe

after dinner

with families and children

young and old strolling and enjoying the orange and pink sunsets

night stars over the water

we watched fishing boats and yachts in the harbor

listened to the music and looked up at the high rises

some bright and new and others

dark war skeletons

before I came to Beirut I worried guys would bother me walking alone at night

instead I found the Lebanese women were so beautiful

I hardly turned any heads

I bought more tube tops

and going out skirts

and every bar was the coolest bar I’d ever been to

with incredible music

posters and art covering the walls

gorgeous bartenders offering us arak shots

every nightclub epic

no one grabbing you

dancing all nights

with rooftops that opened up to the stars

dance floors over the ocean

or clubs deep underground

in bomb bunkers

I took taxis all over, sometimes by myself

sometimes crammed in with friends

laughing and close

one time a taxi driver couldn’t understand what I was saying

where I wanted to go

Mar Mikhael I tried to say

over and over

as he drove

we eventually figured it out

one night I took a taxi to an art gallery

to see my Palestinian friend from DC play the oud

passed shot up French style buildings

with colorful stained glass

and arrived at a gallery full of art and artists

poets and dreamers

she played oud and I felt

so fucking lucky to be somewhere so cool and beautiful

another night we went to a poetry slam

at the bottom of street side stairs

with true poets

girls with long dark curls

telling stories in English and Arabic and French

back in our dorm

I’d stay up late giggling with my roommate and her friends

Lebanese girls who partied more than studied

so they were here for summer school

we ordered the best delivery food on our flip phones

they have the best restaurants in Beirut

delicious sushi, shish taouk, fries, pizza

anything you were in the mood for, any time

arriving quickly to the university gates

delivered by cute guys on motorbikes

one night I drank so much

I felt sick during the dabke class in the morning

my Arabic studying was bad

but the university was beautiful

orange trees and olive trees

pink bougainvillea and friendly street cats

curling up around your sandaled feet

laying on their backs in the sun

stone steps overlooking the sea

palms trees and the perfect breeze

that summer I was crazy and broken hearted

young and dumb

but Beirut

Beirut was perfect

Beirut welcomed me

into her classy cafes

into her bookshops

let me walk on her rocky beaches

and climb in her green mountains

smell her cedar trees

and drink her coffee

her arak

her music

her poetry

her starry sky over the sea

when I left Lebanon

I tried to find the perfect manoushe again

I went to the Palestinian bakery in Atlanta and bought it wrapped in a plastic bag

I bought it frozen from the grocery store in DC

I had it mailed to my door in dry ice that made my dog bark

I made dough at home, waiting, letting it rise

then spreading it with zaatar w cheese

cutting Persian cucumbers into spears

mint leaves from my garden

but nothing came close

to the perfection found on every street corner

in Beirut

eventually I just bought a book

with photographs of street side manoushe in Lebanon

Smiling manoushe bakers

pillowy dough

remembering the

zaatar dripping between my fingers in the sunshine

I read somewhere

that Beirut makes

every visitor think she’s theirs

Beirut the mistress of the world

my Lebanon

your Lebanon

and for that summer

I almost

for a moment

felt like she was mine too.

Tragedies can ripple through time. Like the splash of a heavy boulder. In the lake of time. In the water of a family.

John, or Johnny as my Grandma Maggie called him, was not tall, but he watched over us. He was a soft spoken, even-keeled, handsome man. His smile and beautiful blue eyes shine bright in his photos and in the smiles and eyes of my father, brother, and now my sons.

He was born and raised in Atlanta - in sweet 1920s brick bungalows - like the one I grew up in. In fact, my home was just down the street from where he grew up. I didn’t know that though, yet.

We didn’t know much about him at all. Of course my dad can’t remember anything being less than 3 months old when he passed. My Grandma Maggie called him the love of her life, but remarried a few months later to his best friend in the Air Force, Roy, and had four more children after his death.

We knew he loved to fly though. He was in the Air Force, even before it became the Air Force and traveled all over the world, from Libya, to Norway, and Japan. And we knew he went to Georgia Tech.

It’s more than serendipitous that we ended up in Atlanta, his hometown. We were looked over by him like a guardian angel on the streets and hills that shaped him, and then raised me and my brother up too.

My dad was in the Navy when I was a baby so we moved often. Even after he left the Navy, we kept moving around for his jobs - from North Carolina, to San Diego, to Orlando, and back again to California. When I was six years old he accepted an offer for a job in Atlanta, the hometown of his father, a city he had never lived and hardly knew.

My dad used to tell us he came to Atlanta sometimes as a child, driving down from Emerald Isle, North Carolina where he lived with his mom and siblings to visit with his Grandma, Mary Wills, John’s mother.

Mary Wills, my great grandmother was heartbroken for the rest of her life by the loss of her only son, John. She poured love into John’s two boys, my dad and his older brother. My dad said when he was a kid, he didn’t understand why anyone would live in Atlanta, if they could live at the beach.

I found this photo of him and his brother, on the street with their grandma in Atlanta - with stiff forced smiles so emblematic of kids being forced to smile. Just two beach boys in the city.

And yet, after struggling and shuffling back and forth around the country, and after a year at sea on the ship with the Navy, it was Atlanta that welcomed us home, into her embrace. Watched over by the bright blue eyes of my grandfather, John.

My dad didn’t know where his father was buried. Or even if his body was ever recovered in the lake where his plane crashed. In Atlanta we saw our last name on billboards, the sides of trucks and in the white and yellow pages, but we didn’t know how or if we might be related to these people who shared our name, shared our city. We lived in Atlanta as if we were rootless new arrivals, despite my grandfather being a true native son.

Maybe these mysteries, unknown histories of my grandfather are part of what led me to my interest in genealogy and helped uncover how we’d been walking in his footsteps unknowingly. Little signs of him watching over his three month old son and his family.

One of the first things I discovered in my research was my grandfather’s grave.

He was buried in a beautiful cemetery that we drove past everyday when I was a child. It was the cemetery right next to the preschool and elementary school my brother and I went to our whole childhoods. I remember every morning and every afternoon looking out the window at that cemetery, and sometimes holding my breath like other kids said to do when passing a cemetery. It was green and full of trees and often flowers, and I stared out the window at it, drawn to this place without knowing why. He was buried there alongside his father who passed the same year, just a week before my dad was born. Later he was joined by his mother Mary Wills and his father’s second wife.

Later through my searches of yearbook records I discovered he went to high school at my neighborhood high school. The same high school I walked to on chilly fall evenings to watch football games with my friends under the bright lights. Afterwards we’d get pizza at Mellow Mushroom across the street.

I looked up his addresses for his houses he lived in when he was growing up and realized I had walked or driven past his homes a hundred time. He lived in Virginia Highlands with his mom, in Grant Park, with his dad, and then as a young person he lived off Buford Highway. These were the same neighborhoods, where I lived, where I hung out with my friends, where I got Vietnamese food with my family.

Once in high school I volunteered for a local politician and one sunny Sunday I knocked on what felt like every door in Grant Park. Did I knock on his door?

Many of his homes he lived in as a young adult in Atlanta are gone now - sacrificed through eminent domain to the always striving growth and expansion of Atlanta. There’s one spot on the highway, I used to always get a strange feeling when we drove past it. It’s not remarkable in anyway really, it’s a big Atlanta highway, close to an unremarkable exit ramp, green trees on the side of the four, five, six lanes. One night, as I googled the different addresses I found for him, this part of the highway appeared on the google street view. The memory of his home, here in the census records, and somehow someways a little bit in me too.

Another spot he used to live in Atlanta was on the edge of a small airport near an Indian restaurant we always liked. The restaurant was in a more than half empty strip mall near a Winn Dixie. We used to drive out there, even after we’d moved really far away to get our favorite Indian food. We’d pass this small airport right down the road, the DeKalb Peachtree airport and my dad would always say, my dad flew small planes like that. He loved to fly.

I learned later that my grandparents lived right next to this airport, their home taken by eminent domain to expand its runway. He lived there because he loved to watch the planes - at least that’s what his sister told me.

Wait, a sister?

My grandfather was an only child. That’s part of what made his death so absolutely devastating for everyone, for his mom, for my grandmother, for my dad and his brother, that his loss severed a line, a stepping stone between generations that disappeared into the water of that lake in Michigan.

In my ancestry research, I found he had two step-siblings though. The family tree on Ancestry said they were living, and provided no additional information. It was private, their names and birthdates hidden. I screenshotted it and asked my dad, but he had no ideas. His grandparents were divorced, and both had remarried. His grandfather, Robert Lee had remarried a woman with two children - two daughters I would learn - my grandfather’s sisters.

I think I eventually found my grandfather’s step-sister through Facebook. During Covid, locked inside our DC carriage house with stained glass windows, I found J and sent her a message.

“My grandfather is John. I’d love to know more about him.”

She was so happy to find me - that I found her. We shared photos and she shared memories, of how loving and kind and generous my grandfather was. How he always brought her gifts back from his trips to Paris. How she loved my great grandfather too. He married her mom, a widow with two daughters, and promised them a pony if they moved down to Atlanta with him from the North Georgia mountains.

She still sends me gifts for my sons and cards for their birthdays. We text on holidays and now I recognize her gorgeous smile in the photos of her with John. No longer a mystery, but a friend, a sister, my great aunt.

I wanted to know more about my grandfather, John though. And now with my father’s memory getting worse, I wanted to share more with him too, about his handsome father, who still shows his love for him, for us, through the curtain of time.

Many years ago I tried to request his military records, to get more information about his career, where he served, the horrific plane explosion that killed him. I received the reply that many children of veterans and genealogists have received before:

Another tragedy, more mysteries lost to time and space.

But this year my step-mom tried again. She submitted the request - received the same reply: records destroyed. And then a few weeks later, a large package arrived on their doorstep. Her and my dad coming home from a walk, there it was. Somehow, hundreds of pages of my grandfather’s military records had arrived.

His voice, his memory, here - back in the hands of his son.

My step-mom lovingly scanned the hundreds of pages in and emailed them to me. She read sections to my dad, reading them again and again as he forgot. He sent me this about learning more about his dad:

This is C adding some information relative to my father‘s evaluations as a fighter pilot and trainer.

It was interesting to see that he had a very similar evaluation just about every time. He was a very effective leader, but he was just. He was very humble. He was very supportive. He didn’t, he didn’t berate people. He helped tremendously.

You know, he for a while about a year or two looking over the record, he was over in Norway, teaching those guys in Norway, how to do a fighter jet or how to how to be a fighter pilot with the planes that they had — and they couldn’t say enough nice things about my father and his leadership the leadership that he showed to the people in a group.

Even the hardest core person thinking that my father was too soft on on people and and in reality that those people they they, they were very, very, very effective with the with the leadership that my father left or gave them.

I enjoyed personally I enjoyed learning that and it correlates with what my mom told me and what other people have told me about what a nice gentleman he is.

But he’s also there, he’s had a very active life. It was interesting to see that he finished a degree and Georgia Tech a very, a very rigid and tough university, and he was in two years he finished his his his education and you know, and then he was a big-time athlete. He did all kinds of stuff and won a tennis tournament in Atlanta when he was a younger guy.

So I mean it was wonderful to just to get to know who he is besides just being my my father that I don’t really have any recollection of being around him at all.

Here I sit, how old am I now? 71 years old and my father. I’m just, just this past month, I learned more about him that I have my whole life before.

Just it’s really really nice to hear this kind words and nice words of what people thought of him and and so in other words, I would’ve loved to be around and you know. As his son, to have learned how to be a peaceful effective gentleman and and a very loving guy.

You know, looking at my father‘s record that we got from the military it shows or reflects a lot of similarities that they wouldn’t be learned. It’s almost like those are just ingrained into my father and it’s ingrained in to me. You know from the ancestors that we have together.

I was you know as as a small as as a first grader I was always trying to be the fastest guy in school. I was always you know always loved the wrestle. I would take on anybody anywhere anytime I rode my bike like a maniac and you know it is similar characteristics that I would think my father would be doing too. You know if his mom would let him.

But he was an avid athlete. He was a golfer. He was a tennis player. He won a tennis tournament in Atlanta that we we we heard of. You know I’ve been a big tennis player most of my life since I started since being in college and and then we were just he was always a gentleman always low-key you know just he’s a very consistent person. It sounded like and he’s a very, but a very good athlete very bright.

My handwriting is uncannily like my father’s. You know, my signature and then put it right right beside his signature, it is my signature and they look almost identical. So in other words, it’s kind of almost, it’s interesting to even say this is a genetic thing. I mean, this is a genetics being passed down from one generation to another generation.

The day after we received his lost military records, my great aunt, John’s sister texted me out of the blue. I told her we found the records, that I had just been thinking of her, thinking of John. She said it’s not a coincidence, it’s a God wink.

She sent me a photo of John’s airforce wings that she had just found that evening, a discovery which prompted her to message me. Her beloved brother, when he got new wings, he gave those just to her. And now me, through space and time, another native daughter of Atlanta, feeling his love, through his angel wings.

I’ll share more about what we discovered in his military records, what we continue to learn. But today, Memorial Day, I’m thinking of my grandfather, and all the other soldiers taken too young from their families - but who continue to watch over them from just beyond the curtain.

May has always felt special - the planting and sprouting of new crops, the birthdays, the sunshine.

This May my husband, sons, and I are in Spain though - at the beach and in the countryside.

I grew up in the city, in Atlanta, and then lived in Washington, DC for almost two decades. But in my heart, I love the beach and the countryside the best.

Driving up to North Carolina from Atlanta or driving down from DC, always felt like driving home.

Once my step-mom bought me a canvas photo of a city scape at night, with sky scrapers and twinkly white lights. I thanked her and politely asked her why she selected it for me. “Because you love the city,” she replied, as if it should be obvious.

I had always lived in the city after all.

It stuck with me. I don’t love the city though. DC always felt like a good compromise because the buildings aren’t too tall. Atlanta is a city too, where I was raised, but the best parts about Atlanta are the trees, the green, the sunshine through the leaves.

Then of course, there’s the ultimate city: NYC, which I never liked. It seems to be almost universally beloved by most people - I always feel lost or get lost there. Also, it smells like trash and it feels impossible to see the sky.

I read Prince of Tides a long time ago, a book by Pat Conroy. I forget most of the storyline, but I remember one scene vividly when the brother discovers that a young homeless man on a bench is a Southerner. He describes how the city, how the North took this son of the South and tore him up. I went and found the passage when writing this article.

“But Luke remained undeterred and continued to offer assistance to every drunk we passed, until one day in a small park on Seventh Avenue, he came upon a young teenage boy, supine on a wooden bench, who did not respond to his soft ministrations at all. When Luke moved him, all of us could see that rigor mortis had set in hours before. There was a hypodermic needle in his coat pocket and a driver’s license listing his address as Raleigh, North Carolina.

The boy haunted Luke because of his southernness, and he thought it unnatural that any southerner could flourish between the Hudson and East rivers after growing up in the softer, more forgiving zones of the South. A southerner had to change too dramatically to become a New Yorker, Luke thought. He explained his newly conceived theory to Savannah and me over croissants and French coffee at breakfast one morning.

‘It’s like a trout trying to become a streetcar, Savannah,’ Luke said, pointing at her with his croissant. ‘It just wasn’t meant to be. You’ll see. You may pretend you’re a New Yorker, but you’re southern to the bone, Savannah. It don’t wash out.’

— Pat Conroy, Prince of Tides

Once in DC I had a similar encounter in Union Station. My husband and I started talking to this young guy who was hanging around inside the train station. Union Station is where a lot of homeless people and transient people hang out - like many train stations and bus stations. Maybe he asked us to buy him some food. I don’t remember. He didn’t have that totally lost look in his eyes though, he seemed sweet and young. We took him to one of the fast-food spots there and started talking.

Where are you from? we asked.

He was from North Carolina. Eastern North Carolina actually, like my family. He had taken the train up to the city for New Year’s Eve to party a few weeks earlier and hadn’t gone home.

We paid for his lunch, but I wish he had asked instead for a ticket home.

In college I took a course from an incredible professor, Professor James Miller, probably one of my favorite classes I ever took, called African American Literature.

The books and lectures were all about the Great Migration, the movement of tens of thousands of African Americans from the South to the North between 1910 and 1970. We read classic literature and stories about individuals and families escaping the South, leaving the beauty and the horrors of the countryside, their roots, their land, their homes and their generational pain, and coming up to the North to start over - in big, crowded cities where they were often targets of scammers and new versions of the violence they were escaping.

I loved that class. Professor Miller gave long lectures and I wrote down every word in my notepad - about history, the books we were reading, life in DC.

I remember him saying one time something to the effect of:

It felt both humorous, deeply insightful and bit poetic. I wish I could find those old notebooks.

I didn’t listen in a lot of my classes in college. But I listened in the really good ones. I got a B+ in that class ironically, so I don’t think my great appreciation for his perspective was reciprocated, but that of course is not the point.

I think part of why I loved that class so much is I felt myself in the stories just a little bit - pictured myself displaced and adrift from my home and homeland. Of course, some of that displacement and lost feeling is the almost universal sentiment that accompanies youth, those transient and transformational years that make up your early 20s.

My Grandma lived in DC when I was in college, and going to her house, riding the metro over to Capitol Hill felt like a tiny home base away from home. She and I would buy boiled peanuts from The Commissary on the military base across the river in Anacostia, and sit on her rooftop porch and peel open their wet salty shells. We’d go to Union Market together, back before there were any apartments besides the Tyler House projects in that neighborhood, and she’d buy bright green okra and dark purple muscadine grapes from the Jordanian man who still sells produce there.

I watched a documentary once on the Lovings, the couple that took interracial marriage to the Supreme Court and won. They were from rural Virginia - in the documentary they went to the town they were from and filmed the flowers, the grass, the quiet streets and the old trees. Mrs. Loving spoke about how they were forced to go to DC after they lost their case in Virginia - but that they missed their home and kept driving home back to the countryside in Virginia - where they’d again be arrested for being in an interracial marriage.

The Lovings took their case to the Supreme Court so they could finally go home and sleep in their own bed and listen to the crickets and watch the lightning bugs, instead of hearing the sound of sirens and seeing the search lights from helicopters in DC.

Both my grandmothers lived in DC and many times made the journey home to North Carolina, in May for their birthdays, to the beach, to the countryside.

My mom’s mom, my Grandma Margaret was born and raised on the farm in Eastern North Carolina. I’ve written about the farm here before. My dad’s mom, Grandma Maggie grew up in Washington, DC and Arlington, VA but her parents had a farm down in Eastern North Carolina too, in Maysville where she spent every summer as a girl.

She eventually moved back down there - and raised her children down in the countryside and at the beach, on Emerald Isle.

From our home here in Spain we can see the water. Somedays after school, we walk down to the beach and my boys play in the sand and splash in the sea. On the weekends we’ve been visiting farms – driving into the Andalusian countryside to pick oranges, pet horses, and see the olive trees.

I’m grateful to be living somewhere beautiful, that I love. Even if it is a bit farther from home.

Now if my step-mom is looking for a new canvas art photo for me – the beach and the countryside please.

I do live here after all.

My grandmother Margaret wrote about our shared love for the beach, about our generations of Mays in Emerald Isle.

In summer 2004, B commented that it never rains at the beach. He was sitting in the sand on the beach at Emerald Isle, shaping turrets on his sand castle a few feet above advancing waves.

To him, a six-year-old, the beach is a magical, happy and carefree place, always sunny—just as it was to your parents when they were your ages. For them, coming to Emerald Isle from places like Massachusetts, Alabama, and Germany, the beach was a place to reconnect with North Carolina grandparents, go fishing with Granddaddy, and mark this year’s growth by your names on the kitchen door jamb in their summer cottage. Not everyone likes the beach that much. The combination of hot sun, sand, breeze, and dampness, and wearing swimsuits all day every day feels just perfect to us, but many people don’t like it at all.

Have we inherited our attachment to the beach from the many generations of my mother’s family who lived in the coastal area of North Carolina?

— Margaret

When I was growing up, we spent five or six summers at the beach and in the countryside in Southern Italy. My brother and I splashed and leapt into the Mediterranean, we stood on the shore and skipped rocks into the light blue sea. We climbed and played in the lemon groves and among the grape vines.

Now my boys get to do the same, here in Southern Spain.

My dad once told us – “It was tough being away from you during those summers you spent in Italy, but I was happy you got the chance to grow up at the beach like me”

Have we inherited our attachment to the beach from the many generations of my mother’s family who lived in the coastal area of North Carolina?

— Margaret

Last year when my eldest son was preparing for his first day at school, we filled out that cute First Day of School board with his name, age, favorite things, and his goal job. We asked him: “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A bus driver,” he replied, like his Grandpa.

My Dad was a doctor till he retired last year, but before then he had many other jobs too – including school bus driver. Ironically, I remember him telling us more stories about his few years of being a bus driver back when he was a teenager on Emerald Isle than about his decades working as a doctor. I only have this one bus driver story that he’s written down so far though. It’s a funny story about him being 16 or 17 years old and having a rowdy Salter Pather student on his bus who just wouldn’t listen.

Quick aside for readers who are not familiar with Salter Path, North Carolina and its inhabitants: Salter Pathers. Salter Path is a narrow 81 acres piece of sandy land on the Bogue Banks near Emerald Isle, where my dad is from. Salter Pathers are notorious, or at least were notorious back then for being tough like no other and being very unfriendly to outsiders.

My dad said growing up there were three types of kids: White kids, Black kids, and Salter Pathers. Salter Path was a squatters community established without deeds – residents who moved in the late 19^th and early 20th century and their descendants were allowed to occupy the narrow beachfront land, but none of the individuals who lived there held title to the land until 1979. Maybe this history explains a little why they were so tough and known for sticking together and standing up against outsiders. Some posit that they are the true descendants of the Lost Colony of Roanoke but I’ll save that for another post.

Here’s the story of Tommy Lee from Salter Path acting up on my dad’s school bus.

“I have a few bus stories. One of them was a guy named Tommy Lee from Salter Path. And I drove the elementary school kids. And this time, Tommy Lee was a tough little guy, but he was harassing the other kids. He was bouncing up on the seats all over the place. He was doing that.

I was telling him, “Tommy Lee, you gotta sit down, buddy. You gotta sit down.” And then he was not listening, so when it was time for me to drop him off at his house, he walked up there to the door and “BAM” I punched him right off the bus.

Nowadays I would be arrested but back then, his brother who was my age never said anything to me about it.”

Thankfully he did not bring this propensity for corporal punishment into his job as Dad. His discipline style as Dad has always been to just explain why what you were doing was wrong for so long that you wanted to fling yourself out of a bus to end the lecture.

Bus driver was not his only job back on Emerald Isle in the 1960s and 1970s though. Here he talks about more jobs that he had on the Island, around Carteret County, and at East Carolina University.

I’ve had a lot of jobs too. I worked at a couple of convenience stores, one at the beach.

One kind of cute story: it’s actually my first job where I had some seniority, and it was at a little putt-putt. The H family owned the big fishing pier and then they had the miniature golf course, and that was a lot of fun. And my, my trusted assistant was [my younger brother, D], and he was eight years old. Mr. H would come by and say, “Where is, where is [C]?” And he said, “[C] is done. You know, but [D] can do it real good.” And then, you know, Mr. H, he was a great, great, great guy. He’s tough as nails. His sons were always in the state championship competitions for wrestling, and they’re just kind of small guys but very, very good surfers and great wrestlers.

D is my dad’s younger brother who still lives on Emerald Isle. I like picturing my Dad leaving his eight-year-old brother in charge of the putt-putt, D passing out the buckets of balls and clubs to the tourists while my Dad is out surfing.

And then one of my other jobs, I coached, right? I taught tennis class to a lot of people in Emerald Isle when tennis was really getting big. And at East Carolina, I was a coach, a gymnastics coach, and helped East Carolina with their gymnastics program where they had competition, and they had a youth group that would come in and practice gymnastics. It was, it was a good time.

One thing I did that’s kind of held on for years and years and years: it was a Carteret County fun run series. And the way that I set it up, I don’t know how it is right now, but when I set it up when I was a program supervisor for Carteret County, we would just, we would, every other weekend or something like that, we would go to the beach. And then we would have a, mark off the different odd, to make it, to make it more interesting, we would do it like in Salter Path. And then Carteret County, and then in North, and then at Atlantic Beach.

So, everybody had an opportunity to make it relatively convenient. And this was about the time when road races with running were real, real, real popular. And then, lo and behold, I, somebody mentioned it to me that like 20-some years after that time that the races, the racing series is still going on, and people from all, I’ve seen advertisements all across the United States, you know, in magazines.

When I was, when I was, what was it? What’s my title? I forgot again. Program, program supervisor for Carteret County Recreation Department. And so, as in charge of basketball, I was in charge of volleyball, I was in charge. The other, there were two other guys that were more senior than me. And what they did is they, they basically took care of all the softball and baseball and things like that. Those, those were the ones where those type of people are fanatical about those things. Mine was more just I helped start programs like the fun run series.

Did my dad invent the fun run? At least it seems he founded it in Carteret County when he was the program supervisor. I did some quick google searching and it does seem like the whole concept of a fun run took off around this time, so who knows.

And one thing that we did is, and I started coaching soccer for the kids down at the, the west, east part of the west part of the county. And, and we used to load up these little kids in the back of my pickup truck at the time, and me and S would go and help, help our kids learn how to play soccer and help them compete with other teams.

My parents have both told me funny stories about their times coaching youth soccer for Carteret county. My dad said my mom would be out there kicking the kids in the shins and stealing the ball. She tells the story differently though of course.

And, and some of the, some of the craziest things, you like one of the Faren boys, he was so, he had a crush on his little girl, and he was singing a song to her while we were riding back in the back of the truck.

There’s something so quintessentially nostalgic about riding in the back of the truck – maybe because I can never picture allowing it now as a mom. (and as a genealogist! One of my great Uncles died falling from the back of a truck!) I still though have fun memories of summer camp as a kid piling into the back of a pick-up truck or even in high school seeing our friends pull up in the back of a pick-up singing too just like the Faren boy in my dad’s story.

At East Carolina, my jobs where I worked for a, what is it? A little convenience store, it’s called Stop-N-Go. Yeah, and it was, it was just a little experience and added in money, so I had gas money and stuff.

And then what other job did? Clam digging. What I’d decided to go to med school. I could learn. I can’t remember how much you can’t, you can’t make that much money clam digging, but it would be over $100. And so on the weekends, I would come home and I would, I would clam dig to pay my rent. And then, and then I was helping with coaching gymnastics. And then I was a judge for gymnastics.

Clam digging is always the most interesting sounding job to me of my dad’s many jobs before becoming a doctor – maybe because it’s out in the water and the sand, in the marsh and the Sound. It feels like you’re part of the cycle of the tides and the seasons, part of something timeless.

My dad used to dig clams and then bring what he couldn’t sell to my mom Suzanne’s grandparents, George and Keturah out on their farm outside New Bern (that I’ve written about in earlier articles here and here). My great grandmother Keturah would cook them up and they’d eat dinner together in the farmhouse.

I’ve also had a lot of jobs, but all seem really far from the earth and the sea in comparison to clam digging.

Nothing quite as earthy as clam digging though. I did spend a few months living in rural Southern India at an orphanage when I was 18; volunteering, hanging out and playing with the kids, tutoring English, and “helping” in the garden and the kitchen. I felt really useful when helping the kids with their classwork, doing art, playing games, and praying – a little less useful though when chopping the okra or pulling stones out of the garden – but I did feel really grateful and close to the earth and to God in those moments too.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I recently resigned from my attorney job in DC, a city where it feels like almost everyone is an attorney and there are seemingly endless roles for attorneys. I haven’t really started looking for a new job here in Spain, as my youngest has not yet started preschool and I barely have time to fold laundry and write up some Substack articles during his nap time. I do occasionally send my resume along though if I see a role that seems interesting or up my alley.

So earlier this month I sent my resume along for a job with Big Four consulting/auditing firm in Spain. The job posting was in English and emphasized the importance of fluency in English, there was no cover letter required, and the office is close-by; so I clicked submit. A few weeks later, a woman emailed me to schedule an interview.

I should’ve known when all our correspondence was in Spanish and I kept having to use a translator app…that maybe it wasn’t the role for me.

After a few reschedules, we’re on the zoom call. She’s speaking all in Spanish…and it’s fast Spanish. I’m realizing what I thought was my 75-80% Spanish comprehension is actually reliant on people speaking to me clearly because I’m a foreigner. My comprehension with her Spanish is hovering around 40% and periodically dipping to 20%.

I felt like it was all going pretty well until she started asking me questions. You know – till the interviewing part started. I asked if we could switch to English, but alas. Turns out the role is all in Spanish and you just need to know English to occasionally engage with their other offices in India and the Philippines.

My perception of my skills in Spanish got a big reality check though during that zoom call. I’m breezing through restaurant ordering here, grocery shopping, even handling government appointments in Spanish easy peasy. I can chit chat with the other parents about school or kid related topics too. Give me a kids book in Spanish about Spiderman and I know almost every word – pronunciation on point.

However – give me an interview for a role as a lawyer in Spanish with a Big Four consulting firm and I will utterly embarrass myself. There were zero questions about Spiderman and I had no use for all my superhero vocabulary!

So, I’m reining in my resume send outs and will only be throwing my hat in the ring for roles I am positive are in English only – at least for now!

As the interviewer said, in a tone I may never forget – “poco a poco.”

I recently sent my dad a list of questions to help spark story ideas and included the question: what’s the best job you’ve ever had?

My best job ever is being a dad and a husband to J and I loved every moment of both of those two jobs and all the other jobs were jobs that you know to put food on the table and maybe pay for education for people so they can have the opportunity and they really do something big time.

I’m reminded every day my most important jobs though, before all of the others: mom to my incredible sons and wife to my wonderful husband.

I’ve been interested in genealogy and family history since I was in elementary school at least. I was often searching for my last name on AOL or eBay on our first-generation light blue Apple desktop computer, looking for lost family heirlooms or forgotten histories - in between caring for my Neopets.

But in my years of ancestry research, I never had traced my family in New Bern, North Carolina, my grandmother Margaret’s family, back to Europe.

She told me that her grandmother, Agnes DeBruhl (1872-1965) had been proud of her roots in the Alsace, which is the region of France right across the border from the Palatinate area of Germany, along the Rhine River. In my grandmother’s writings I found after she passed, she wrote about her family’s ties to Europe and the oral history that informed these stories.

“...[W]hen we left the farm at all, we used the north end of the loop to go to the nearest community, Rhems, nearest the county line. There, my grandparents presided over the community - Rhems Methodist Church which they founded, a store that they owned, and a railroad crossing with ‘Rhems’ written large on each end of a covered platform. Grandfather George Simmons (1861-1931) was influential in coordinating the intersection of the Norfolk and Southern railroad with the interstate highway.

He named the railroad station to please grandmother, Agnes DeBruhl Simmons, known in the community as ‘Madame Queen.’ Grandmother boasted French heritage of Rheims in the Alsace Lorraine area of France. Grandmother Agnes was educated and quite accomplished; remember her nice painting in my house now? Grandfather George was a successful businessman. The question is, why did he name the crossing ‘Rhems’ rather than Rheims? In any event, the Norfolk and Southern railroad brought the Simmons family from the old family farm to a new, up-to-date, house on Highway 17 around 1917.”

— Margaret (1933-2018)

My grandmother was curious to know more about her European heritage. She often traveled to Europe, to Paris, Barcelona, Budapest, Glasgow, even living in Stuttgart, Germany. Once she noted that the handmade lace curtains we saw in Hungary looked like the ones her grandmother had in North Carolina, wondering aloud if perhaps our family had roots in Eastern Europe.

Our New Bern family has been in the US for hundreds of years – so I agreed with her that based on my cursory ancestry research it just seemed they’d been “staying in the same swamp for generations,” as she described it. Regrettably I just let our European roots continue to remain a mystery for many years.

I remember being in her beautiful kitchen in Washington, DC chatting, sitting around her round wooden kitchen island eating pickled okra, fresh bread with butter, triscuits, or those fresh cucumber pickles she made with chopped up white onions.

My grandma was a professional historian, a curator of women’s military history at the Smithsonian. She and I shared a passion for preserving history and uncovering untold stories. In the first few years after I graduated college, I worked at a research institute dedicated to preserving Palestinian history. She and I would bond over peer reviewed historical research articles and old photos from WWI, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate of Palestine. We spent many afternoons and evenings retelling each other stories from recent articles we’d read. She would pick out articles, folding magazines or journals open at the start and put them on my spot at the table for me to read. She was a great listener, better than me.

Years after she passed, I finally traced her family back to Europe and in doing so I discovered the incredible story of my seventh great grandfather, George Kornegay (1701-1773). George along with his parents, siblings, and grandparents were the first people in our family to arrive to New Bern, NC from Europe. George was the first person in our family to own our farm where my grandmother grew up. He was likely a survivor of a pirate ship attack, and just a year later, he became the only survivor in our family of the Tuscarora massacre. He was kidnapped and orphaned in a massacre that killed 130 men, women, and children. He would go on to own huge swaths of farmland in Eastern NC, including land that is now ours.

I wish I had dug deeper back then into this branch of our family tree - so I could have shared his story with her around the kitchen table, over homemade pickles and triscuits and fresh baked bread and soft salty butter. I’m sure she would have loved to hear the stories of his journey, and confirmed that our family really was from the Alsace region like her grandmother had always said – at least from the area right across the Rhine river. Perhaps, that is the true origin of the name Rhems, the town my great great grandparents named.

George Kornegay was around eight years old when his family left Europe. They were Palatines from either Switzerland or the German Palatinate area in the South along the Rhine River (right across from the Alsace as claimed by my great great grandmother, Agnes). His family and many of their neighbors fled first to England, escaping from repeated wars and a cruelly harsh winter in 1708. They took refuge in tents along the Thames River in London, hoping that Queen Anne would help them as fellow Protestants to seek a new life in America.

He and his parents, younger siblings, and grandparents were part of one of the two voyages that came to New Bern, NC in 1710, as part of the settlement led by Swiss nobleman, Baron Christoph von Graffenried.

It’s not clear if the Kornegay family came on the first ill-fated voyage with John Lawson – a trip that was poorly provisioned and made up of Palatine families already weakened and ill from living in poor conditions in refugee camps and drafty tents in London. This first trip from England to Virginia, then to North Carolina set sail in January 1710 and should have taken 6 to 10 weeks, but instead the ship didn’t arrive in Virginia for 13 weeks. It was a treacherous voyage that resulted in the death of more than half of the passengers. Even as they were within sights of the coast of Virginia, they were attacked by French privateers. The pirates plundered what little supplies and clothes they had, leaving them even more destitute and heartbroken upon their arrival.

Baron von Graffenried wrote his account of this journey and the arrival of the first ships to New Bern.

“This took place in the winter—in January—and then, because of the rough winds and storms, this ship was so driven about that it did not arrive in Virginia until after thirteen weeks. This, along with the salt food to which the people were not accustomed, and the fact that they were so closely confined, contributed very much to the sickness and death of many upon the sea. Others could not restrain their desires when they came to land, drank too much fresh water and overloaded themselves with raw fruit, so that they died of fever, and this colony therefore had half died off before it was well settled.

The one ship which was filled with the best goods and on which those in best circumstances were traveling, had the misfortune, at the mouth of the James River, in sight of an English man-of-war, which however lay at anchor, to be attacked by a bold French privateer and plundered. This is the first misfortune.”

— Baron von Graffenried

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Baron von Graffenried led a second ship of families from Bern, to New Bern. This ship “had a favorable passage with me in a good and favorable time of year, with plenty of room, and not one sick on the way.”When this second group arrived though, they were shocked by the conditions of the earlier arrivals whose “misery and wretchedness were almost indescribable.”

New Bern is beautiful. It is nestled out on a point of green sandy swampy land where the Neuse River meets the Trent River. It is the town that inspired many Nicholas Sparks romance novels and was described by the New York Times as the “Capital of Love.” Its historic buildings were spared the destruction faced by other Southern cities (like my hometown, Atlanta) during the Civil War, as it was occupied by the Union and served as a refuge for people escaping enslavement. More recently New Bern welcomed more than 1,800 refugees from Burma in the early 2000s.

Once during “Covid,” a term I feel like we all use to describe those bizarre desolate years between mid-March 2020 and sometime in 2022, my husband and I drove from DC to New Bern. It was wintertime, and in DC everyone was wearing masks, and averting our eyes from each other, as if by not looking at each other we might avoid spreading disease.

We arrived in New Bern in the evening, unloading our car at the cozily appointed carriage house in the backyard of a beautiful old Victorian home in downtown. As the sun set, we walked the old cobblestone streets, past the Swiss inspired bear flags and Spanish moss decorated oaks, branches lit up by streetlights and Christmas lights, till we arrived on the bank off the Neuse. The water was completely obscured by a thick magical fog that felt transformative – transporting us back in time.

Even in the fog and darkness, people on the streets smiled and nodded our way. It felt like a refuge from where we had been, from the stress and tension that enveloped DC during those years.

I wonder if my seventh great grandfather felt like that upon his arrival in New Bern too. If the fog and oak trees were a welcome sight after his harrowing journey. Or perhaps he had the sense already that more turmoil and loss lay ahead.

I shared the story of George Kornegay and his journey from Switzerland or Germany to England, then to New Bern with my great aunt, my grandmother’s sister, who still lives in New Bern. I bought her a fantastic book called The Tuscarora War, by David La Vere and we talked about all the places she recognized in the book, from the history all around where she lives in and grew up on the farm. (I highly recommend reading this book if you are interested in the history of this part of the country.)

She told me when she was a girl, they would often find arrowheads on the farm, out in the fields when they were playing – clues about the not so distant past.

I will share more about George’s story, and what lay ahead for the Palatines and Swiss immigrants on their arrival to New Bern in future articles.

For now, I will share this excerpt from an article about the Tuscarora Indians who arrived in what would become New Bern around 1400, around 300 years before my seventh great grandfather, George arrived from the Rhineland-Palatinate in Europe.

“In their new land, the Tuscarora raised beans, peas, squash, melons, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and corn. Tobacco was a sacred herb, its smoke used in ceremonials and prayers. Villagers tended apple, quince, and cherry orchards near their towns. Hunting parties ranged widely, making temporary camps and often ‘firing’ the woods to drive game toward their arrows. Tuscarora kings were male but, as was true for all Carolina tribes, their line of descent was matrilineal, passing from the mother to the sister of the king, and on down to her children.”

— Jim Shamlin, 1992

Read the next part here:

You can read more about our farm and family history in this article.

I always believed in miracles, even before I first saw one, because of a story my dad tells about the time he prayed so hard that God acted through a ketchup packet. We call it the ketchup miracle. We would ask him to tell it and retell it, a true testimony of the power of prayer and how God can act in our lives, even through a ketchup packet.

Here my dad retells the Ketchup Miracle.

This is a story about me losing the car keys in our front yard. I was probably 10 or 11 years old. Mom, we had a little Volkswagen Beetle, and it was our only car. I would drive the car around in the front of our lot where we lived. You know, I could shift and everything like that, but we only had one key. And I was driving the Volkswagen around and, lo and behold, I lost the key.

I was, I was kind of devastated that I lost the key, the only key to the car, and we weren’t going to be able to go get groceries.

“Mom’s gonna cut my head off,” you know, all those thoughts going into my little 10-year-old, 11-year-old head.

And I felt like I combed that whole big lot that we had, looking, looking for that key, and I couldn’t find it for anything. And then I was really, really frustrated. And I saw it on the ground. It was either on the ground or in the backseat of the Volkswagen that there was a little packet of ketchup.

Hadn’t been opened yet; it was just a ketchup pack.

And I prayed to God that I could, I prayed to God that I was going to throw the ketchup pack over my shoulder and then there would be the key.

And, lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened.

And I just feel that was a God moment.

I was really ecstatic when I saw that I found the key. You know, my family is going to have transportation, we’re going to be able to get food, you know, all the things that go along with having a car.

And I’ve shared this story with a lot of people. You know, when you’re a little kid, you just, you know about God, or you hear people talk about God and everything like that, but when you really get your back up against the wall, and for a little kid, losing the car key for the family, that’s, that’s a big deal. And I prayed about it.

And, lo and behold, God, when I threw that ketchup packet, it landed on the ground. I ran over there to it, and right there beside it was the key. You know, a miracle or just, I’m luckier than you could ever imagine.

But even saying that, I’m luckier than you can imagine, that means God loves me. God, God pulled me out of another jam. God, this story has been told 25, 30, 40 times. You know, and it’s a cute little story about a little, little, little guy kind of getting real frustrated when he lost the car keys, but I see it as I’m sharing a miracle with everybody.

And when something like this happens, you have to, you have to think, you know, God is right here at the point where the youngest, or the littlest, or the most insignificant thing you could think of, but God is there with us and for us all the time.

And I’ve had, I’ve had other really big-time miracles, but I really like this story of the little kid losing a car key and then I found it right where I asked God to put it. And it was, it was a miracle for a young, little 10-year-old guy.

My sons are young now, toddlers. I need to tell them the ketchup miracle story though. I always loved hearing it when I was a kid, and I appreciate the lesson even more now as an adult – that God is always there, when you need him, when you reach out, even if you’re a little kid down on his knees praying over a ketchup packet and some missing keys.

Since I’ve been helping my Dad record his stories, he told us about hearing the voice of God guiding him and about another miracle he’d never mentioned before. I’ll share it here below. I call it the Parking Spot miracle.

When I went to East Carolina, I became a Christian, and I have to say, I went. I did backflips being a Christian and loved being a Christian, and then, and then I really didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do.

S and I were together, and I think we rented a house down there too, and we were in a duplex, one side of a duplex, and I had a really good time, but it was all surfing, and I just didn’t see any—and in retrospect, I could’ve been a millionaire just doing real estate down there. And then my grandmother set me up so that I could’ve probably done it, but I decided I wanted to be a doctor.

Oh, the way it happened is S was kind of pushing me a little bit, but I went out on the porch, and then it’s like God spoke to me. He said, “You’re gonna be a doctor” and it’s kind of funny because I claimed it too, and then I went and told my mom, I went and told Carl. Carl laughed at me. He said, “you a doctor? That’s a joke, you know.”

And but, you know, just when I was at East Carolina, I didn’t work, but I went to this Bible group, and they were really into Acts and speaking in tongues and a lot of stuff that a lot of people don’t really get into. But a friend of mine, he played rugby with me, and he had his girlfriend and whatnot; they were pretty active in this group, and they talked to me. And the other reason I got into this Christianity thing is my girlfriend dumped me because I wasn’t a Christian and wasn’t Christian enough.

And then, but the big deal is I got together with God, you know. I really, really saw some miracles happen.

I saw the crazy, crazy little miracles. I’ll say this, but the one at the—you know, when I was over there learning more about Christianity and everything like that, they said, “Oh, God will answer your prayers if you ask God to answer your prayer and believe it in your heart, guess what? It’s gonna happen.”

And I was sitting there, I don’t even know what I want, you know. I’m pretty happy just the way it is. But then I decided, you know, everybody else was in big stuff, and I was just—then I just said, well, the only thing I could think of is, it’d be nice to have a parking place near my dorm because most of the time I have to walk like a mile or two to get back to my dorm room.

And lo and behold, the day that I asked God, and they said, “Just ask God, and he’s gonna help you out, he’s gonna let you get what you feel you need,” and so I said,

“I’d love to have a parking space. It’s in a convenience, you know, because I can’t think of anything else I want. I’m fine, you know, God, you don’t have to worry about me.”

And then, when I got out about 7 o’clock that evening, it’s starting to get dark, and the next thing you know, I leave the area where I was learning about the Bible and all this stuff, “asking you shall receive,” and then I came around, and I was thinking all the parking spaces were gone, and all this kind of stuff, but there, I pulled up; nobody was fighting me for the spot or anything like that.

It was just the most perfect parking place for me where my dorm room was, and right there, if I had to pick, if the building was empty and I just would walk in, it would be the right spot.

And God gifted me a parking spot in a place where normally you have to walk over a mile to park your car, and that just blew me away to see something that you—and I think about it, Charlie just got it—but there was nobody around; it was packed, you know, all the spaces were gone, and then there was a space that I could park my car.

And it just was, it sounds borderline ridiculous now, but I really, really think that that was a miracle from God.

We moved to Spain this year. I wrote a bit about our move in an earlier post. We made a lot of big shifts together, new country, new language, and for me personally – taking a break from work. I’m loving my time with my sons, playing on the beach, going on walks with other moms and babies around town, and helping us settle in to our new home. Being their mom is truly my greatest joy and every moment I spend with them is a blessing.

Before coming to Spain, I was a full-time attorney for an international corporate law firm, “BigLaw” firm, representing some of the largest companies in the world on complex and high stakes matters. Most days I liked my job, figuring things out, looking into tricky questions or situations, and writing reports, presentations, and giving advice. Some days it was less fun, but to be honest I have a lot of patience for the less fun parts of work too.

Now I find myself thinking about the next steps in my career, and wondering where I want to go, where I can go, where I should go. These lessons from my dad about listening to God and asking God for what you need feel really timely as I figure out my next steps. Most days I just thank God for my abundant blessings – most specifically my wonderful husband and incredible and precious sons, and pray for their safety, health, and lives full of love.

I’ve never otherwise been a person who “talks to God” much. Usually just a thank you so much, and please let me keep it. Sometimes I pray for those in trouble, in war, in sickness too. Going into this new chapter though, I want to practice listening prayer, where I seek God’s guidance on these next steps and to ask where I should go next in my career, at home, where I am needed. And then to ask God for it.

If I rise the wings of the dawn, if I settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall guide me, your right hand shall hold me fast.

psalm 139:9-10

I’d love to hear your stories of witnessing miracles or seeking guidance from God.

We’d lived in DC for more than a decade, and were going on two when we decided it was time to leave.

My husband and I met in DC after college, in a smokey red brick row house off North Capitol St., back before Union Market became “Union Market.” Before the trendy restaurants, Trader Joe’s, or luxury apartments. The row house was home to multiple bands – and a few straggly weed plants that took over one of the only two bathrooms shared with 7 housemates.

In DC, we became adults together. Him an engineer, me a lawyer, and then eventually taking on our most important jobs – mom and dad.

Our journey here, to Spain, wasn’t easy, but not in the ways we expected. My husband and I have always appreciated each others’ decisiveness, so when we decided to move, we were both ready to go. We moved quick with the details, agreeing on the city, the house, the schools etc. Our years of watching International House Hunters had prepared us well.

I spent the most time over-investigating international movers — I am an investigations attorney after all, with expertise in due diligence of high-risk third-parties (like freight forwarders), and a sentimental attachment to my old photos and handmade quilts. This investigation led to tens of interviews and deep dives into reviews, fake reviews, business registrations, and ship manifests — I even uncovered an international shipping crime syndicate complete with fake employee names, felony convictions for crimes related to shipping, and fraudulent company naming schemes. It was a side quest, but at least we ended up with a good non-fraudulent moving company and I think all our stuff arrived quickly and in one piece. (We still haven’t unpacked everything, so can’t say for sure yet.)

The worst part of the move — which I honestly have recounted so many times for travel insurance claims, I grow weary of telling it — was catching norovirus the morning of the flight to Spain. With our pets in their carriers, dutifully waiting, our two young sons being as good as a three-year-old and not quite one-year-old can be, and my sister helping to lug our bags and wrangle our boys, I turned the move upside down as I loudly vomited in the trashcan in the boarding line. Chalking it up to food poisoning or potential morning sickness, the gate agent warily let us aboard only for the plane to have to turn back to the gate as I got sick again while taxiing. I was taken away in the ambulance to the ER, where the doctor told me — you should probably delay your trip.

It’s not a trip though. It’s a move. Our house was fully empty. Our car sold. And a mega snow storm (that would turn into the month long Snowcrete) was baring down. I told the doctor, no it must have been some bad bean sprouts. My husband and sister bent over repeatedly vomiting as we went through customs in Madrid proved the doctor right. At least we had made it to Spain. And gratefully, it’s truly been up from there.

Aside from the occasional deep dive investigation, I’ve taken a pause from lawyering since we left DC, leaning into the walks on the beach with my boys, planting seeds in the garden together, and holding their hands as they fall asleep. I’ll hopefully get back to it in the fall after my youngest son starts preschool, but for now I’ve been trying to help us settle into this new country, this new life, and catch every drop of sweet baby love in the Spanish sunshine.

I hadn’t spent much time in Spain before we moved here – in fact I’d probably spent less than three weeks total before we took the leap. I take comfort in knowing this road has been tread before though, by my grandmothers.

I’m not the first mama in my family to move her children to Europe, to Spain even. Both my grandmothers moved abroad to Europe with their husbands and children — following husbands in the U.S. military.

My dad has been recording his stories and memories since starting his retirement – dictating them and sending them to me piece by piece for me to help him assemble and organize – and one day share with my sons. (I wrote more about this project in a previous article.)

My dad was around five years old when his step-father was stationed in Madrid at Torrejon Air Base. It’s interesting to hear what he remembers from that time, and to think about my sons making their early childhood memories here now too, in Spain.

My dad talks about all the castles they saw when they lived in Madrid. The photos I’ve found of their time in Spain show them standing in front of castles and ruins in the countryside of Spain.

I love this photo above of my Grandma Maggie standing before this arch, her children by her side. Anyone have any guesses as to the location?

Here my Dad talks about Christmas in Spain.

Our family, Roy was my stepfather. He had orders to go to Madrid and be a pilot out there for the Air Force, and so we, all the kids, I think maybe [my sister] was there cause I remember when she came home and in a little yellow outfit that was real nice.

And then, and then we were there in Spain for Christmas. And what, what we did for, what my family, Mom and Roy, they came up with this idea that they were gonna tell us that Santa Claus didn’t know, he just doesn’t go to Spain, or, you know, it just wasn’t. And so we were, honest to God, it wasn’t that bad, you know. I mean, we were saying, okay, well, if Santa is not gonna make it, they can’t make it, you know. And then we just keep on playing like little kids and stuff. But, but Mom and Roy really worked this thing up.

And so Roy had bought a go-kart, and he came in a Santa Claus outfit, and we went in, we all went crazy about having Santa Claus come to our house driving a go-kart. And that, that was, that was really nice and really fun experience.

— Charlie

It’s funny now to hear my elder son talk about being in Spain, and moving to Spain. He talks often about his toys coming over on the shipping container here (investigation paid off!), and one day over dinner asked, “why are we in Spain?”

Another evening, he packed some of his toys into his backpack and told us he is going to the airport now…to move to Poland. (We’ve never been there before, but he does have a talking globe so perhaps that is how he selected this destination?) More recently he told us, “I’m from Spain.”

What children remember, hold onto, is hard to predict, those moments, memories you carry with you from those early years.

Here is some more of what my dad remembers from living in Madrid.

You know again I was very, very, very independent. I don’t know what Bobby was doing but you know we hung out a little bit and I rode a bike. I had a bike. I had a small little bike and I rode that bike actually about 5 miles away from my home and then I had to turn around and the weather got really cold and nasty and somehow, I made it back home.

Once me, and my siblings everybody was crammed into a closet. I don’t know why we’re doing it but somehow, God, I’ve been into our closet and that was that was kind of a fun experience.

In another good memory with Roy, Roy was in the military, and he had his buddies in the military and every now and then about you know once every two or three months he’d come home kind of south. You know where you drank too much or something and then he’d want to wrestle. He’d want to wrestle me, [and my brothers] and he would he would get kind of tough with us. You know he’d be wanting to win the fight, but you know more than one of us, well we were able to handle them pretty good. [My younger brother] would probably remember those type those times a little bit, but he was he was a pretty young guy at the time.

We’re raising another generation of boys who also loves to wrestle with their dad. I’m hoping we can avoid the five-mile bike riding by a five-year-old, but it has been eye-opening and inspiring to see how children seem to have more independence and confidence here.

My mom’s family also lived abroad with the U.S. military, moving when she was eleven or twelve years old to Stuttgart, Germany, where my grandfather Bob was stationed as part of the U.S. European Command. She talks fondly of their time there in Germany and of their travels around Europe, including Spain.

I found this photo of my Grandma, Margaret standing in front of a rocky Spanish hillside dotted with yellow wildflowers that looks so like the rocky flower covered hillsides that surround us here now. This photo is from the time they drove from Germany down to Spain and around elsewhere in Europe.

In our shipping container (alongside all the toys), I brought an old photo album of hers with pictures from their travels during their time living in Germany – travels to Spain, Greece, Italy, and even Iran.

Neither of my grandmothers spoke to me much about their time living in Europe though. About making a new home for their children in a new country, uprooting, replanting, growing far from home. Probably because they were both military wives. It was just what they did, what they knew how to do because they had to.

We haven’t been here long, and some days it still feels like a dream. We look out the window and it’s gorgeous, the sea, the birds, the yellow wildflowers dotting the green rocky hillsides, the mountains climbing up in the distance behind fuzzy white clouds. Most days it still feels like a vacation, an incredible vacation with four artichokes for a euro, and boxes overflowing with bright, fresh kiwis for two.

“There are playground everywhere” is what I tell everyone when they ask how it is – and it’s really true. There are the best playgrounds, walking distance from the next incredible playground. Some even have little cafes attached where parents can grab coffees and children can get ice cream.

It’s been a big contrast to the US, and maybe especially to DC, a city not built for children. In fact, DC is a city usually straight up hostile to children, (and often adults too). Here in Southern Spain, old ladies smile at children and ruffle their hair. Toy stores are on every corner. And life seems made for both the very young and the very old to be out together, enjoying the sunshine.

I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to offer too many deep insights into Spanish life. I can say that we are thankful to get this chance to live here.

I wish I had spoken to my grandmothers more about their time being moms abroad, in Spain, in Germany, in Europe. I’d love to hear their stories and get their advice on being a mom far from home, on helping our children to feel at home, on settling in ourselves. For now, I just look back at these photos of my grandmothers, beside castles and wildflowers, and ask my parents for their stories, while we write our own new stories here, together, in the sunshine.