
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 11, 1994                   TAG: 9409130006
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Elizabeth Obenshain
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG                                 LENGTH: Medium

BEST THING ABOUT LEAVING IS COMING HOME

When I was child, Aunt Lucy was one of the enduring characters who defined our family. She farmed our family homeplace, walking the fence lines each summer to patch the wire, milking the cows morning and night, raising orphaned lambs on the back porch each spring, and feeding any relative or neighbor who dropped by at dinner time.

Her five sisters, who had left the farm for jobs as teachers and nurses, shared a family wanderlust. Come summer, one or the other would be off to Europe or venturing off on a more exotic trip to Russia or China.

Not Aunt Lucy.

She spent only one night away from home in all the years that I remember.

It was as if she knew the rolling, rocky farmland of Botetourt County was as beautiful as any place she could visit, and her lifelong neighbors the people with whom she wanted to spend her days.

Each year as I get ready for vacation, I think of Aunt Lucy and wonder whether I'm squandering dollars on a plane ticket that will take me no place more beautiful than home.

At night, my husband and I have ignored the thunder of cars on Prices Fork Road for an evening walk to take in the view of farmland that still edges the road and rolls away toward the mountains. The hedgerows, the contrasting greens of the fields, the sheep grazing in the dusk are spread out before us.

On weekends, our walking route is a twisting country road in Floyd that changes weekly with the seasonal rhythm of wildflowers.

Chicory, milkweed and Queen Anne's lace, those "weeds" from my childhood, are daily friends.

The spring blanket of trillium along the hillside gave way in the summer to daisy fleabane, lady's thumb and evening primrose. Then, the candle-like spires of the black cohosh shot up in the woods, their white plumes a ghostly strand among the pines.

As fall has crept in, always early in Floyd, the summer flowers have given way to the purple blaze of ironweed and Joe Pye weed and the bright orange of spotted touch-me-not.

It seems foolish to leave for other hills that can be no more beautiful than these.

But what we're leaving for is not so much a different scene as it is imposed laziness for two weeks - a chance to escape the telephone, to have the luxury of pausing and stopping to memorize a view without the nagging of daily chores.

But it's also comforting to know that we'll come back home to the mountains. I guess I've still got a little of Aunt Lucy in me.

by CNB