Blowing Rock: Notes from my Dana 3
Our parents' house is painted the same color as the mountain, a mixture of soft greens and grays. You reach it first by driving a long, winding road up, then taking a long, even more narrow and winding private drive with a slope on one side and an apparently bottomless pit of brush and trees on the other, then a dangerous hairpin curve onto their own driveway, down to the little pocket of their property nestled in the side of the mountain. Visitors are always announced by a slow crunch of tires on gravel.

Inside are a vaulted ceiling, wooden floors, furniture and decor that is not merely old. Every other object has meaning, requires some sort of explanation to do it justice. The long dining room table, with its comfortable matching chairs with clawed armrests, belonged to Dad’s parents. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting at that table in the house on Bayou Deseird back in the early ‘60s, listening to the adults talk politics and share anecdotes and enact their own dramas. A plate decorated with a small purple crown hangs on the dining room wall. It’s not visible to the casual visitor, but we insiders know that if you lift it from its holder and turn it over, across its back you’ll see a piece of tape scrawled with the words, “I want Butterfly to have this.” This plate has a certain significance, but I hesitate to share it. I’m half-convinced that if the truth got out, we could get in trouble not only with England’s navy, but with the British royal family.

A bust that Jim Barnhill did of me, back when I was a pretty, swan-necked artist’s model, stares blankly out over the main room from a high shelf, a Stetson cocked on its ceramic head. A mural of the Blue Ridge mountains, painted by my brother J., hangs on the wall of the stairway landing. On one of the bookshelves in the living room is a polished wooden box of ivory dominoes, (unfortunately minus one domino), yellow with age and probably over a century old. My mother remembers hearing them rattle late at night as her parents played after the children had been put to bed.

Practically the entire rationale for the house’s existence is the broad back deck, which overlooks a rolling ocean of trees. That ocean has a sound as constant as a real ocean’s surf, a never ending breath moving through leaves, rising and falling, sometimes a sigh, sometimes a roar. The deck is where you sit, (when the trees are sighing rather than roaring) to read a book or sip a drink or talk about the day and inhale a scent that’s not mint but slightly cool and spicy, not flowers but still sweet. The closest visible signs of civilization are on the mountain on the other side, where a few of the buildings of Blowing Rock are visible as half-seen squares through the trees during the daytime, and distant lights at night.

There is wildlife, of course. Birds flutter at the feeders. Hawks wheel over the trees in the valley. On the little dirt road that leads down to the trout pond, Deer pause to mooch on the apples my brother T has scattered there for them. When the sun goes down, things edge closer. Raccoons invite themselves onto the deck – my mother can sometimes hear the little thugs rearranging the outside chairs. One evening, sitting out on the deck with my parents, I looked up to see an opossum staring moonily down at me from where it had tucked itself just under the eaves of the house. A bear tried to climb onto the deck shortly before midnight two summers ago, seen by my parents through a sliding glass door as a lunging shape with teeth before it pulled off one of the deck railings and tumbled down the slope. And late one evening, as we were driving away from the house, on that narrow tree-crowded private road, we heard something shriek. It sounded like a man screaming – not shouting, but screaming – briefly and hoarsely. Conversation in the car stopped, we listened, and then we heard it again. And then, after another pause, again, exactly the same short scream after exactly the same interval, very purposeful, the sound of something communicating.