At the Middle Passage

One’s heart resides in one town

Walt Mills

Every summer about this time, the magazine arrives in the mail advertising the Virginia Highlands Festival, which takes place in late July and early August in Abingdon, Va.

Although we haven’t been to the festival in 10 years, I still sit down and read from cover to cover, thinking how good it would be to see Abingdon again.

We came upon the town late one October afternoon just before dark after a long day on the road. We were traveling north from Alabama, where we had visited my sister and her husband, on our way to Pennsylvania to visit my wife’s parents.

At that time it was just the three of us — my wife and me and our small daughter. We were leaving San Francisco but had not made up our minds where we would go. Every place we visited had its charms, the coast of Virginia, near the ocean and my oldest friends, my family in South Carolina and Alabama, the slower pace of life, the chance for our daughter to grow up with

cousins and grandmother.

Later we would visit central

Pennsylvania, where the golden farms and the bustling university would decide our fate. But on that fall afternoon, everything about our future was still unknown.

I remember the darkening sky, the fallen leaves blowing across the road from all of the sentinel trees that lined the streets. We turned off Main Street near the square and parked in front of a low building with lighted windows that turned out to be the town library, a comfort and a refuge wherever you travel.

The woman behind the desk told us that, if we could manage it, we should stay at the Martha Washington Inn, just a few blocks away on the main square. It was an extravagance for a young family traveling on a budget, but we felt like Virginia aristocrats for a night, sleeping in the airy rooms and strolling the manicured grounds.

We wandered through the town in the evening, past the Barter Theater, not a movie house but a live theater where the actors had bartered their talents for meals during the Great Depression. Down the street was a restaurant, called the Tavern, that looked like it had been there since George Washington was a boy, all rough tables, old plaster and oak beams. The food was memorable and we tasted Virginia wine for the first time, the taste of white grapes and sunlight.

And walking back to the hotel, I remember the candles in the windows of the houses along Main Street, and the next day the cool, high blue sky overhead and the air tasting like white wine.

We went back to Abingdon again for the Highlands Festival, a celebration of mountain crafts, music, and storytelling that lasts for half a month in the summer. And from time to time, we’ve stopped for an afternoon on our way somewhere else.

We could have lived there and been happy, I think, in the valley just west of the Blue Ridge Mountains among the folksingers and storytellers of the high hill country. But that would have been another life entirely and we are only given one, which is the saddest fact of all.

Walt Mills can be reached at wmills@verizon.com or at P.O. Box 174, Spring Mills, PA 16875.