5 Things I'm Bringing Back from Virginia

1) a renewed reverence for small towns...

"Everyone's safe here," a patron of a pub said, "especially here." Every small town has one haven for the people who count themselves as "other" whether by race, class, sexual orientation, whatever, and in Cape Charles, VA, that pub is the place. In small towns people take care of their own, and their own may be healthy and rich and disabled and poor and blind and drunk. Even transplants from out of town become family through humor or generosity or good deeds.

2) everyone has a story...

On the panel, "The Stories We Were Meant to Tell," at the Virginia Festival of the Book, we had an author writing an 8-part romance series she was self-publishing (at the age of 83, she had completed 4, and she was writing #5), a man writing about fertility from a man's perspective, my novel about bullying and loneliness, and a man writing about humans being a construction of God's consciousness. The room was packed.

3) every story has a reader...

See #2.

4) Virginia is for lovers...

That love is thick. It runs between families and strangers who have grown into family. In Cape Charles, I met a group of people who have become chosen family, and their love is fresh and deep. They have each other's backs. They care for each other in the biggest sense--by bringing groceries or calling the minister or turning type into large print. Whatever it takes.

5) memory is fickle...

One of my sisters and I remember our past in completely different ways. Over the weekend, she and I kept recounting the same event with different endings or beginnings. She remembers our childhood caretaker dying on the operating table, and I remember her dying alone in her apartment. Both are awful, and it's clear that our memories are shaped by our own interference. Our childhood friend and host in Cape Charles told us stories we hadn't heard, that we couldn't remember because we weren't old enough. To have a witness who is willing to help fill in the pieces is to feel the smooth fit of a completed puzzle, the soft, hilly texture, even though the pieces are not pretty. Still, I am so grateful because memory can be a dark glass.

Traveling helps me see the inside from the outside. I'm so grateful that I can travel and meet generous, gentle people. Thanks, Virginia.