Sunday, January 18, 1998

In Blue Ridge Mountains, leaves still fall

By Sharon Randall

EDITOR'S NOTE: Sharon Randall is on vacation. This column first ran in November 1991.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, there lies a little community of small farms and aging homesteads that will one day be replaced by golf courses and video outlets and time-share condominiums.

It is not a question of whether it will happen; it is happening already. The old-timers are weary of trying to prevent it and wearier still of trying to understand why their children think it can't happen soon enough.

There are four lanes on the highway where there used to be but two, and a restaurant that stays open all night. They built a golf course on the site of an old Indian village, where golfers have found arrowheads in the sandtraps.

There's a subdivision on a hillside that once grew thick with rhododendron and dogwood and blackberries free for the picking and another's being built on an old farm where the barn's to be restored because someone thinks it's quaint.

Changes aside, the area remains the same in many of the ways that mattered most to me when I was growing up there a lifetime ago. Buildings and landscapes can be altered over night. But people and customs take a bit longer to change.

That's what I discovered recently when I went back to North Carolina, home as they say, to bury my father.

If you get off the four-lane and drive up into those mountains, you'll meet people whose families, like mine, have lived there for generations. Gentle by nature and proud to a fault, they're often torn between a love for privacy and a curiosity about the world. Many of them live on the same land, in the same house where they were born.

No longer able to scratch a living out of farming, they work in textile mills and grocery stores and such. But they still tend gardens for vegetables and flowers. They grow the best tomatoes and corn you'll ever put in your mouth, and chrysanthemums big and golden as a baby's head.

If you get a chance to visit, don't be put off by their dogs. Hounds mostly, they'll rouse up from a stupor and bark like they mean business. But when their owners hear the barking, they'll come out on the porch and call them off. Then they'll invite you into their home and inquire after your mother and offer you something to eat every time without fail. When you leave, you'll take vegetables from their garden, fresh if in season, canned if not, and venison from their freezer. They'll tell you to come back and see them, and you'll find yourself hoping you can.

That's the kind of people I knew in childhood and got to know again. They brought ham and sweet potato pies and made me laugh with much-embellished stories about my dad. Then they stood by my side as he was buried in the church cemetery where most of them had laid loved ones to rest.

Fall had come and nearly gone, but the colors were still something to see. As a child, I was fascinated by the transformation, watching green leaves turn to scarlet and gold then finally, inevitably, to brown. But I hated the last part of the process, when the leaves lay fallen in great crumbling heaps, and spring seemed so far away.

My dad once told me dying is a necessary part of life; that it's how old things fulfill their calling and make room for the new.

Leaves have destinies of their own that have little to do with us. We can no more prevent them from dying in autumn than we can cause them to bud in spring. And so, we rely on memories, green and scarlet, gold and brown, to see us through the winter. And most of the time, it's enough.

Sharon Randall is a winner of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors and the Best of the West commentary awards.

Scripps Howard News Service