Tucked inside my mind, there is a town.
Nestled alongside a mighty, winding river, in a valley that meanders between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Mountains, this town is small, its residents nearly familial in their familiarity with one other, with ties that reach back for generations on end. And while it is much more accessible to more populous and cultured cities in the state than it used to be, it has intentionally retained a sense of isolated self-containment, a world unto itself.
This is a town of seasons, four of them, each one a spectacular
showcase for Mother Nature's talents. The mountains sing to the skies
with glorious color in the fall, and wrap the town in the hush of a
snow covered blanket when winter makes its way. Farms and gardens
explode with lively life, announcing spring, and in the heat of summer,
the river sparkles like a sliver of silver, offering respite and relief.
This town is small, but full of vim and vigor. Downtown hums with a steady flow of regulars and the occasional tourist who failed to do his homework thoroughly enough. Proximity to the "big city" makes it an attractive place for the urban sprawlers, out to have it all; and then there are the passers-thru, here on their way to somewhere else. The diner down on Fairlawn does a brisk business, morning, noon and night, and the buildings lining Main and Fifth buzz with a bustle of eclectic activity, keeping the trend of dying business districts at bay.
History has its place here, too, although not in any traditional sense. No great Civil War generals waged battle here, no vast and booming industry was birthed here. The history of this town is as eclectic as its people, preserved and passed down not on white markers along the highway, but through the art of storytelling and keepsake keeping. There is the house where Julia Lloyd was born, and raised, and died, and wrote great volumes of poetry - twenty-three, confirmed - that didn't see the light of day until she'd been gone from this world two decades. There is the jagged gash still visible on the east side of Black Rock Mountain, marking the spot of the great Swinging Bridge tragedy of 1938. There is the painted house at the corner of Fairlawn and Second, an enduring monument to the drug riddled artistic mind of the young Andy Meyer.
The people who live in this town, those who call it home, have also been slow to change. They are comfortable with who they are, and who they know, and where they lay their tired bones at night. They are proud of what they do, and where they're from, and why they stay. They, the people who live in this town, have hopes, and dreams, and destinies to fulfill. They are of their town, and their town is of them, and together, they have forged community.
This town exists in details, known only - for now - to me. Its place can only be found on the map of my imagination, its people only in the population of my mind. But it, and they, are as real as any town I've ever lived, or visited, or passed through on my way to somewhere else, and they draw me in, day after day, begging me to draw them out.
So that's exactly what I've done. Am doing. Drawing this world in words, its stories spilling over themselves onto page after page after endless page.
Tucked inside my mind, there is a town.
And it's a place I'm finding terribly hard to leave behind.