Idle Mountain Thoughts

One set of my grandparents lived just over the Virginia line, not too far from the real Mayberry, aka Mount Airy. They had about thirty acres of rolling hills and part of a river. One time in 2006 or so, my mom accidentally dropped her Nextel phone in that river. Those things were so indestructible, we joked for years that the fish were probably still talking on the phone. Visiting now makes me think time-travel may really be possible and wonder if I’ve slipped back myself.

I’m lucky to be able to go there whenever I wish, though both of my grandparents have been dead for at least fifteen years. I don’t remember my grandfather’s graveside service, but I remember my sister nodding off next to me during the funeral, and my mother trying to keep it together. Their place is a little trailer, and I remember when I’d stay there as a child my mom would always joke about the bears ominously. I’d really thought they were going to walk out of the woods and take me away. In the room that her and I would stay in, we would watch the old-fashioned true crime shows on the staticky TV, always adjusting the antenna.

Last time I visited was the first time I’d been in their home by myself. There was an strangeness to the silence and the sunlight shining relentlessly on a place whose owners had long since departed. I sat on the floor by the space heater and went through some old family photos. I didn’t know anyone in them except for my grandparents. I wasn’t in them. Neither was my mom. I also found a small stack of old records, mostly The Osborne Brothers. I took three of those and another by Roy Acuff.

My grandma (well, step-grandma) used to sew up the holes in my favorite stuffed animals here. She always said that she never liked children, my mom told me this. But I think she warmed up to my sister and I. She hated noise, and I can relate. I don’t blame her.

I drove up the mountain to an old market and café and got a barbecue plate with slaw and baked beans and cornbread. There’s a little cream-colored cat that lives up there outside the little country store. They have all sorts of stuff there. They sell those sugar rock candies on a stick, and fudge too.

I got back to my grandparents’ old place and found it a bit somber. No one has lived there in a long time and there are moth holes in the curtains and it’s very cold. A drunk-driver ran into the old one-room schoolhouse up the dirt road long ago and destroyed it, and the wood shed in the backyard is collapsing. Time just goes on and on, and time alone isn’t enough to make things pretty.