Coming Home to a Place I've Never Been Before By Eva Jaunzems, St. James', North Salem, NY (Eva is a book editor for Reader's Digest.) Robert and Glenda and their three young sons live in a tiny wood frame house that sits next to a creek in Upper West Dante Hollow, Wise County, Virginia. The house is constructed in a style the locals call "vernacular", meaning whatever way they could get it done with whatever materials were to hand. The walls have never known a plumbline; the tin roof sags; the wiring and plumbing are less than rudimentary. A broad porch across the front of the house is the one appealing feature, doubling the living space in warm weather and shading the interior from the hot sun. The house wakes memories in me. I grew up a couple hundred miles to the west in Laurel County, Kentucky, and on Sunday afternoons my parents took us for scenic drives winding through the mountains past homesteads just like this one. With our smug middle-class noses pressed to the car windows, my brother and I would stare at the ragged children playing in the yards. I was fascinated, I remember, and I felt superior. Hillbilly kids slept ten to a bed and never went to school, so I'd heard. I couldn't know for sure because, of course, we never stopped. Forty years later I have a second chance. It's a hot July afternoon and two able carpenters, a half dozen teenagers and I are eating ham sandwiches and chips on the porch, resting after a morning spent digging a ditch for a septic system. The mother of the family is away working her shift at Burger King, but we're joined by her husband and three sons. We're talking about this and that: Our lives, our schools, our jobs. I sense we're being careful-all of us, even the teenagers. We hold back questions, tell only parts of our stories. The wrong word could offend against this fragile communion of two very different worlds. Robert (who calls me ma'am!!) asks if I have a husband and kids back in New york? No, I'm single, I tell him, I have a dog and a job. What do I work at? Well' I'm an editor, I work on books. And that's about as far as this conversation can go, I think. I'm wrong. On the last of our work week, Robert Jr, the oldest of the three boys, asks me to follow him into the house. I'm uncomfortable inside; it's dark and untidy, with a musty small, and it gives me a claustrophobic feeling. But I've grown fond of this bright, blond thirteen-year-old, and he has something he wants to show me. He gets down on his hands and knees and drags a cardboard carton our from under his bed (he has his own bed, I'm pleased to discover!) and begins to lift out the contents of the box, one by one. Books. "I want to show you my books because you like books like I do. Some of 'em I got at school and some of 'em my Mamaw gave me." His favorite is Black Beauty. He loves to read and stories about animals are his favorites and he want to go to college so he can be a vet when he grows up. Roberts flood of words brings me up short. My heart catches in my throat, and I think of a hundred things all at one. I think of the obstacles between Robert and his dreams, and I think of a stuck up little girl in a '52 Chrysler. Together we sit on the floor of the house in Wise County, Virginia, and turn the pages of Robinson Crusoe.
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