The Rural Wave

A thing I'm working on. All the {} are further little stories or anecdotes/tangents that I halfway think are worth pursuing, but also halfway know only bring me farther and farther away from the actual point I think I'm trying to make. It may be that like many of my stories, I really don't have a point.

I grew up in an especially idyllic little pocket of suburban Maryland. Ours was a mish-mash neighborhood of fairly well maintained Victorian-ish houses whose larger acreage/plots had been subdvided and filled in with houses over the course of many decades. A house built in the late 1800s could easily be found next to a pistachio green plastic siding house from the 70s.

{Beekeepers. Old Man who? The wooden bridge.}

Visiting my paternal grandmother - known as "Granny" - in Sewanee, Tennessee most summers introduced me to an even slower paced and more magical setting. Granny lived in a house she had built in the late 40s/early 50s, which was very much in the Frank Lloyd Wright vein of architechture - lots of glass, and stone and very few steps or closets. The house's modern layout and aesthetic, and the way it looked from above gave my father - no more than 12 - the idea of naming it "Crash Landing," which stuck. {Getting lost in Abbo's Alley} By the time I was 10, I was allowed to walk from Crash Landing to the pastures near Lake Cheston to say hi to the horses, and maybe give them tufts of greener, less-nibbled grasses I plucked on the other side of their pasture's barbed wire fencing, just out of their long horse-neck reach.  Or perhaps an apple or two that my mother gave me to bring along. This was no more than a mile away, probably less. What I still just remember marveling at and feeling incredibly happy and excited about, was walking out of my grandmother's driveway and turning right, and walking along Florida Avenue, down the dip by the football field and back up, by my horse camp counselor from 1992? Jessie's Mom's house, and just collecting dogs as I went. {Go home Ernie go home}. I would pass a house with a dog I knew already somehow, just in its yard and I would encourage it to join me, and it would. I don't really remember making these dogs come with me, but I do feel as if I would encourage them. One kind of black and tan hound dog. Maybe Winston next door before he left [did he really get taken to a farm or did he die?]. And as I walked the peaceful, green, still but bug buzzy roads, we'd pass another yard, and another dog will join us. And together, four dogs or so would accompany me to the pasture. As I write this, I'm now questioning if this is true. I have a sincere memory, or series of memories, where the basic beats of what I just described happened. Sewanee was the kind of small town where everyone's dog safely wandered just a little, at least in the late 80s and early 90s. I would walk in the middle of the road. Which can fit two cars, but narrowly, a dog or two in front or to the side of me, and likewise behind. Sewanee had no leash law for years and years, and dogs really did have the freedom to do this back then, just as children like me were equally free to meander perhaps a little bit more than they are allowed to now, even in Sewanee.

And as a kid I got a real kick - and I mean a real visceral shiver of a kick - out of getting to the side of the road for the occasional 20-mile per hour car I did encounter, then giving a small wave to the driver, usually in response to their own. I didn't KNOW these people! But here we were waving at one another. Acknowledging our mutual existences in what felt to be a strangely intimate but anonymous manner. I really thought it was cool. I still do. I still like that while it's a little less automatic than in years past, you can still have a dialed down version of that kind of wave in Sewanee. It was just what you did, even if you couldn't quite place the person to whom you were waving.

Grayson County, Virginia. Or at least the small tiny paint spatter of the county I've really seen, is an area where there isn't necessarily a pedestrian wave. There aren't enough houses strung together for quite that unity. Or maybe I don't know because my house is tucked away from the road. I have to drive on one road to get to anywhere else in the world. And one thing I have definitely noticed is the one finger salute many drivers will give me as we pass each other on that one road. Old bearded men in pick up trucks are the most reliable, but women in compact cars too. A brief 1-2 second raising of a pointer finger, or even the pointer and middle finger together (never just the middle finger). And then we're past one another, barreling down the road that is taking us to wherever we are trying to go.

As a newcomer to the area, I appreciate this rural wave. With the exception of about three people, anyone raising their fingers in my general direction as we drive on by and past each other has no idea who I am. Last week I finally got my VA license plates, but even with my out of state plates, I got plenty of little salutes. I have begun to salute back. Or even to preemptively salute.

{Dad stealing corn on a country road somewhere near the Monastery}