Why Virginia?

When I was about 11, the ideas of ancestry and home became fixed notions in my little mind. Two events birthed this fixation: I read L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon, with its unyielding, grinding emphasis on family and pedigree, and I became aware that some of my classmates' own pedigrees outdated my own. I boasted of my great-grandparents emigrating to America in 1920, proud of my ancient lineage, till I learned the boy I hated had streets named after his family members, who founded the Southern town in which we lived. Southerners match Montgomery in their familial obsessions, and I writhed under the knowledge that I dared have relatives living above the Mason-Dixon line and could not claim a great-great somebody who had fought in The War. (For the uninitiated, not to be confused with World War II, but the Civil War, or War of Northern Aggression, as a history teacher of mine called it.)

Ancestry and home have become constant ruminations, mental themes I frequently touch and sound in my adulthood. I pore over public documents, looking for the birth record that will link me to my undisclosed past. I dream about old houses in France and forests in Germany, wonder if there are distant cousins in Poland who survived the 1940s. I shrug off the vagrant, poor Scotch-Southerners who apparently never got around to joining the butternut army. And all the while, I wish there was a place, a house, that was my family's, had been my family's, for generations. I want a family graveyard, a rose bush my grandmother planted, an archway under which a great-great-grandfather was married. A spot on a wall where my parent's height was marked out as a child.

I was born in New Jersey, but never lived there within waking memory, and shrink from the state's loud, seedy reputation. I was raised in the South, but distinctly made to feel an interloper by the authentic residents, because of my birthplace and "lack" of "Family." (And yes that capital "f" was intentional.) To sum up, I always felt betwixt and between, wholly belonging to neither.

Which is why I love Charlottesville, Virginia. Here is a pleasant mix of restless, adventurous young people from the Deep South looking to escape their ancestors' clutches, and quiet, gentle Yankees looking to escape brash, bright snow. We are the middling ones, downing our Firefly and equally eager for manners and punk shows. I haven't found an ancestral home, but I sure as hell have found a good one.