“Home is where the heart is.” Pliny the Elder Roman scholar, naturalist, and historian.
The blue sky and water welcomed me as I crossed the Chowan River Bridge on Tuesday and my heart whispered, Home.
As a child, my husband spent his summers at a cottage on Chautauqua Lake in New York state’s Southern Tier and we had our honeymoon there. But in 1976, my husband’s parents bought a house near Sesuit Harbor on Cape Cod Bay. For twenty years we crossed the Bourne Bridge to spend vacations with our children at Harbor Beach, playing in the waves and watching the sunset. In Mom’s kitchen there, a plaque read, “Does the sound of the sea end at the shore or in the heart of those who love her.” If I listened with my heart, I could always hear ocean waves no matter how far away I traveled and picture myself walking on the sand.
Edenton speaks to me that same way. It has since the first day I visited, not knowing then which of the 19 counties of my territory would become our home. I drove in from Winton from my office and crossed the river looking at the light sparkle on the water with a growing excitement and a sense of deja vu.
Walking from The Captain’s Quarters b&b, I arrived at the harbor just in time to watch the sunset over the water. It was breathtaking. Standing there, the Sound claimed me. I called my husband only to learn Doug had just spoken to the Pastor Nominating Committee from Edenton’s First Presbyterian Church and had an interview scheduled. Little did I know then that I would fall in love with the land as much as the water.
Three months after that first visit, the crape myrtles lining West Queen Street welcomed us to our new home which I would come to think of as “The Shore.” As we walked to town, down to the harbor, and home again we saw porches and gardens, large and small, filled with lovely flowers unknown to me.
Our backyard had a porch and lots of trees, but mostly fence and grass. Making Edenton our home meant taking the Extension Master Gardener’s class and creating a garden of my own. I learned to love taking out grass, creating and edging new beds, even composting. There was no problem that didn’t come into better perspective after I “dug in the dirt.”
Slowly, I learned about plants I had heard of, but never seen in the north, like jessamine and honeysuckle. Part of our welcome to Edenton came in gifts of plants shared as touches of grace. Hostas, caladiums, crocosmia, hydrangeas, coneflower, bee balm, canna, iris, curly willow trees, and tulip poplar were graciously given and gladly received. Across our fence, Esther, an elderly Moseley neighbor, shared gardening insights and bulbs. Southern hospitality bloomed everywhere.
Ever since our son moved to Raleigh to become a Tarheel, I have loved North Carolina. Moving to Edenton made me a talking billboard! I would proclaim its charm, boasting about the historic houses, the Trolley tours, the Founding Fathers who lived here, speaking with pride of Penelope Barker organizing the first political protest by women at Edenton’s Tea Party. I would promote the Candlelight Tour and the Pilgrimage, inviting everyone who’d listen to North Carolina’s prettiest small town.
Especially at Christmas, as we walked past the Christmas wreaths on the vintage lampposts on our way to dinner in town, I felt a sense of peace and of place. It was a wonderful life and Edenton was home. My home.
I have lived many places, but not every place feels like home. If home is where the heart is, it is like falling in love, if you do, you feel as if you’ve always known that person, that place, as if you were meant to be together.
Doug taught me that you tune a guitar by plucking a note and adjusting the peg of the string to be tuned until it vibrates to that note. This resonance with the tone of this place, feeling in sync with the rhythms of Chowan county and its people, vibrates my heart-strings. And now, whether I am at Colonial Park or at our new house near Raleigh, a part of my heart beats to the gentle ripples of the Sound, and I can envision the Lighthouse against the setting sun and picture myself walking Edenton’s streets.
So, as the time approached when Doug would retire and we’d move closer to family in Raleigh, nostalgia became a constant, and I feverishly worked to “complete” my garden. I wanted every bit of the long fence to have plantings. I wanted to leave something behind as a remembrance that if only in a bit of altered landscape, something was different in Edenton, even if just slightly, because I had lived there.
We moved in December. As spring came, I began my garden here in Willow Spring. Here, at the house I call Holly Cottage, I again found few plants and an empty fence. It made me homesick. So, Tuesday, I came home, over the bridge, back to Edenton and my garden. Most things there had to remain, a sort of living legacy. 
But I wanted to enrich my new home, my new garden, with bits and pieces of Edenton. So, I dug up seedlings and divided bulbs. I uprooted a sampling of irises. and will relocate a lilac bush barely hanging on in the too shaded garden to a sunnier spot at my new house.
From our screened porch in Willow Spring, we now watch new birds come to new feeders. I really like our house…and feel stirrings of love growing.
Yet, Edenton is forever in my heart, and as I look out at plants that began there and now will bloom here, I hope I will hear a resonance, that the song of the Sound and the notes of a charming town will carry and help me once again find home.
Spring always finds a way to steal its way into my heart. I await it like a lover pacing the floor before their beloved arrives.
In the unusually warm beginning to February, the abundant weeds in our 1/2 acre, but neglected, back yard began to spout. I said prayers for it to stay warm enough to weed, and managed to clear the sunniest of the back “beds” around some of the bushes…and spring began its siren song.
A visit to Home Depot took me past pots of pansies and boxes of bulbs…and peonies, one of my mother’s favorite flowers. I tried to resist…but surely pansies were ok… they are tough. I know they are supposed to be planted before December, but just a few good roots and they grow and spread, even blooming through the winter…and it was almost March….
Oh, if only I were as strong as my pansies, but those bags of peony roots kept calling me…and I went back to Home Depot and the next love affair began….they had sprouting emerald emerging daffodils shouting spring at me, and unfolding grape hyacinth and the bluest of anemones singing of summer. Ah…the song of the siren.
Finally, lastly, when I went to get birdseed, some herbs seduced me. I knew it was crazy, even in NC there is no planting herbs in winter! But the groundhog certainly could be wrong, couldn’t he? My peonies thought so and began to sprout! I kept the herbs in their pots though my mental impatience progressed to fast paced tap dancing!
Making things worse, the last week of February I went to Edenton for a concert. It was a dose of spring to see the Japanese magnolia I had planted in our backyard fully in bloom, graceful limbs with delicately spaced blooms of waxy pink tinged cream peaking from the center of magenta outer petals like a promise against a Carolina sky. My daffodils and forsythia enticed me further in cheerful yellow from the landscape that took me nine years to create, the swords of iris Kelly green, pointing to the blooms to come. They have been my harbingers of spring for years.
So………at least Oregano and Basil (oh, fresh Basil) had to be planted. But exercising restraint, I put them in a large moveable planter.
So, of course, the urge to dance into spring was irresistible, but if I just had stuck with my pansies….ahh…this maligned but study flower: Despite the false use of their name employed by my childhood friends in taunting the weak or wimpy, they are Don Quixote, the knights-errant of the winter, stronger than they appear.
Loved this word but urgent warnings on my weather app of snow, sent me scurrying. Tray of herbs and planter moved inside, I warmed towels in my dryer to cover the peonies’ sprouts and the daffodils’ fragile blooms. I didn’t cover my hardy, brave pansies….that would have taken all the towels I had! Then, we had to wait to see how cruel an Inquisitor Stella would be to my fledgling flowers…and my pansy knights.
We made it through the snow, which is insulating – but then fiercely dropping temperature hit. This morning it was only 27 when I got up and still below freezing until almost 11 o’clock. Looking out my window at 7 am, I could see my pansies yellow and orange bright as the sun which had not yet warmed them, boldly purple in the morning light and pure white as the snow they had survived.
“When you are more fortunate than others, it is better to build a longer table than a taller fence.” Author unknown
Many in my family worked more than one low-paying job in order to secure a better life for their children. My father’s father helped build the railroad in the late 1800s.
They shake their fists, lean over the “treasure,” daring those who arrived late to the game to even think they should have a seat at the table let alone capture a spoon. “Mine, Mine, Mine, Get Away,” they seem to say.
“Someone” took away some or all of their spoons. Robotics and other technologies, outsourcing and corporate closures of plants, downsizing, lay-offs, lost or reduced pensions, and fear for themselves, their children, their future, and for their country. It was a disappearing way of life, a vanishing culture.
So let me share again a favorite cartoon, this time with a slight twist. It is a two cell cartoon. The first square shows a room labeled Hell, angry people around a huge table stretching elongated spoons to reach a bubbling stewpot in the middle. The spoons reach it, but, only able to hold them by the end, the people cannot bring the food to their mouths and fights erupt.
On November 13th, we had a celebration for my husband’s retirement after 45 years in the ministry.
It was filled with lots of laughter (A This is Your Life, Doug Eddy! program scripted with a lot of humor – to the left Liz Woodbury as me [my wedding veil] and the doll for our son Chris!), as well as wonderful family and friends, great food, and a few tears…most of those falling when our daughter, who hates public speaking, offered a tribute.
The day after all our company left we began to seriously pack for our move, a sort of altered reality. Only now, as we finally are getting genuinely settled, is the reality of his retirement, our retirement, really reaching us and we can look back with a bit of perspective at our lives through the lens of that celebration.
“Thank you to the Edenton church for taking such good care of my parents…
“When my father first decided that he wanted to go into the ministry, his parents were not really in favor of it. They worried about the challenges and financial security and like all parents, they wanted that security for their son. But my parents’ calling was strong and they had a dream about what their life would look like and they decided to accept the challenges.
“We have talked about the hours it takes to be a minister. There were calls in the middle of the night and we didn’t know what was happening, but we knew that someone needed help. My father managed to do this while pursuing his doctorate. My mother worked full-time and went to school to get her MSW. There were times when my mom worked 3 jobs. We didn’t have the brand name clothes or the best cars, money was tight, but when I think about my childhood, that doesn’t even enter my mind.
“When we moved to Syracuse, every year I would ring bells for the Salvation Army with my mom at the giant kettle in our local mall. I believe we started when I was about 8 years old. After our shift, we would take a tag from the Tree of Lights and go shopping for someone who may not have a Christmas without that tag.
“I remember one Thanksgiving my mom got a call that a family was looking for a Thanksgiving basket that had long since been distributed. When she hung up the phone, she told my boyfriend (now husband) that we needed to go to the store and we shopped for everything you would need to make a Thanksgiving meal. When we were done, we went to the family’s home. My mom told the woman that we were able to find one more basket. As we brought in the bags, their children were peeking out at us from the stairs. This was one of the most meaningful Thanksgivings I have had.
“Often times, I would go to my parents with what they would call my wounded birds. I remember one Christmas, I was working at BJs with a single mom who worked 2 jobs. She told me that she wasn’t going to be able to buy her boys Christmas gifts that year because she was struggling to just keep up on her bills. So I did what I always did. I called my Dad. I told him the situation and asked him to help. Christmas was only a week away and my dad told me there was nothing left, but that he would see what he could do. I took a private collection at work and managed to gather a small amount, but before the end of the day, my dad showed up with a large donation. My friend, who worked so hard, was able to buy gifts for her children that year.
“I remember asking my father how he was able to find a donation so late. He told me that as he was leaving the church, a man showed up and said that God had been good to him that year and he wanted to make a donation. Did this man actually exist? I don’t know. What I do know is that my father is one of the most selfless people who I know and that never, not even one time, has he ever let me down.
“I hope that you enjoy taking life a little slower, although I have a feeling there will be some sort of community work before I know it. You have done what you committed to each other. You have touched countless lives and have made this world a better place.
Doug is enjoying not having to preach. He always described writing sermons as a bit like producing a term paper every week, not just a couple of times a semester, but week in and week out. The unrelentingness of the task is not all: it needs to meet the needs of every life in the congregation, no matter age, or situation, and speak to every hurting soul there present. And if that isn’t enough pressure, you are doing this for God, as well, so you are not allowed, or don’t allow yourself, a merely adequate sermon. To use a sport’s analogy, Doug loves those, you can’t even just bat over 300 like the great Babe Ruth, because that would mean (only) getting a hit one out of three times at bat. No, you need to hit a home run out of the park every time while doing all your other pastoral duties as well. So, after forty-five years, and batting close to 900, a little rest at this point seems fair.
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Another of my favorites was a small framed picture another manager gave me of an eagle soaring with a Knute Rockne quote that read: “Leadership: Eagles do not flock, you find them one at a time.”
In downsizing to move to my new house, I have pared away many of these items. However, a stone with a motto on it that I chose for Doug now resides on my new desk in my new home. It reads, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
For a while yet, since we moved in December, it will be figuring out our house and where to fit things…and deciding some things no longer fit. As spring comes, our new yard, a pretty blank slate, will also await. So, I know there will be lots of digging in my future. And of course, there are still this blog and my book…I need to get back on track with my agent and publishing quest now that our move is almost behind us.
What else awaits is…unknown! What a gift! A new lease on life to discover. New directions, maybe new work, volunteering – All kinds of possibilities to explore.
“The happiness your toys bring…is your gift.” S. Claus in The Meaning of Christmas
Over the next few years, he began to collect Star Wars figures, a Millennium Falcon, a light saber, and we saw the movie several times. He LOVED Star Wars. Finally, when Gretchen was six in 1980, it was re-released just before the Empire Strikes Back was due to come out, so she saw it as well.
As was true for a lot of our life, but especially before I went back to work, money was tight. I scrimped and saved all year for Christmas and planned it down to my last penny, like a general marshaling the last of his troops. But the universe, (God to me), had a different message to give that year. It happened this way:
By 1980, we had moved to Syracuse. Doug was a Pastor with three Christmas Services on the 24th. So that Christmas Eve, the children and I frosted the last of our cookies for Santa (The recipe is in my blog post Santa Cookies – Making Christmas Memories) and I started the Stollen dough that would be our Christmas morning’s breakfast bread. Then, Chris and Gretchen and I ran to the store for more sprinkles, whose purchase was going take my last $2.00.
Of course, front and center as we walked into the store, there it was on display: Christmas in the Stars: A Star Wars Christmas Album record. The kids were beside themselves with excitement. I don’t remember what it cost, but I didn’t have the money. So, I tried to talk them out of it – “why, we didn’t even know what it sounded like” – but to them it was Star Wars…so it had to be great. Of course, I was heartbroken as I told them I just didn’t have any more money. Gretchen still had confidence, “Don’t worry, Mommy, you have checks.” But that only works if there is money in the bank, and my Christmas money was spent. More explaining….Chris was crushed.
Christmas junkie that I am, I had always been determined that Christmas would be the one time of year my kids would not do without even if they were preacher’s kids. So, I was equally crushed. But not Gretchen, and I heard her confidently say the words every parent dreads: “It’s ok, Chris, we’ll just ask Santa for it. It’ll be ok, Mommy.” She believed in Santa and his ability to grant wishes with every fiber of her being, the trust shining in her eyes. Chris, who had decided immediately after Christmas the year before that Santa no longer existed, looked at me, and wisely said nothing. Yet, more explaining. “Santa’s sleigh is probably already packed, honey. He may not be able to get it into his bag on time to get it here this year.”
We finished our baking, ate what had to be a quick dinner with Doug, and went to the 7:30 Christmas service. Then, we raced home. Time to write our notes to Santa and put out the cookies. Gretchen confidently wrote in her note: “Santa, please bring the Star Wars album for my brother.”
Christmas morning, on the very top of the jumble of gifts under the tree, wrapped in Santa paper, there it was: Christmas in the Stars. Chris actually jumped for joy – perhaps even restoring his faith in Santa a little. Gretchen, just thrilled for him, said, “I told you Santa would bring it.” The ah ha moment came to me then: Santa had honored my daughter’s faith. It’s just that like God does, he works in mysterious ways.
The concept of the album was of a Santa’s Workshop where droids made toys and wondered about the boys and girls who received them.
When we say, I can love you, my gift to you, is that I do, will you all say with me to each other, I can love you, my gift to you, is that I do, I do.
“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
The days are racing. Usually, this time of year it would be my count down to Christmas. It would be putting the candles in the windows, and putting up the tree, picking gifts, baking cookies, wrapping presents, placing Santas I’ve collected on the table, stockings on the mantle and a big Santa in front of the fireplace, a manger set, lights everywhere, while carols play on the stereo, I am a Christmas junkie! While I wrapped the presents I had carefully selected, I would watch A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
This year there are lots of boxes, but no ribbons. This year it is sorting and taking lots of things that used to be important to the Habitat for Humanity Restore…hoping they can be just the right thing for a different person, and packing the things we will keep to take to our new home.
