For a city boy like myself, that first trip each year to our four-room farmhouse near Charlottesville is always an adventure. Come the first day with temperatures in the 60s, Barb and I head west on I-64, swing off at the Keswick exit, slow down to accommodate the narrowness and curves of Black Cat Road, make a right turn onto Route 22 and chatter in anticipation as we cover the last mile to our little retreat.
The farmhouse was a wonderful gift, an inheritance from Barb’s father long ago. When our children were growing up, they never enjoyed the place as much as we did, never became accustomed to the rusticity, the intensely quiet nights, the family of mice that had to be cleaned out of the kitchen drawer each spring, and especially the possums, raccoons and black snakes that lived around and sometimes under the house, tending to pop up at odd times and scare the daylights out of you.
One year, a squirrel had come down the chimney and entered the house through the flue of the propane heater and promptly forgotten how to get back out. Barb and I were in the living room dealing with his mummified corpse when daughter Sarah, then about 10, standing outside horrified and teary-eyed, yelled in to say, “When you guys die, I’m going to bulldoze this place!”
As she got older, she came to like it better, though, and she recently spent a year living there by herself. Now it’s a part of her heart, too.
This year, as usual, we spent as much time sitting on the screened porch talking as we did opening up the house for spring — so many memories. I recalled looking out an upstairs window the year we were overrun with Canada geese and finding that Barb had crawled out on the roof and painted them a message: “Honk if you love Jesus.” I have another picture in my mind of her painting the steep side of that roof on her 65th birthday.
From the east side of the house, I look now across the long garden at Uncle Roy’s house, which hasn’t seen him now for a decade. Uncle Roy provided me with material for some of my best columns over the years, and I never go to the farm without offering a salute in the direction of his house. He typified old country wisdom and know-how, and the sort of sense of humor you find around the potbellied stove of the country store.
Way down in the bottom, out of sight of our house, lived another eccentric neighbor. One day when there had been a great thrashing about in the rusty oil barrel we kept for burning trash, I walked down and asked Billy what I should do, not wanting to stick my head over the barrel in case it contained a skunk. He came a few minutes later with his rifle, walked fearlessly to the barrel, peered in, said “possum” and raised his gun.
“Don’t shoot it,” I yelled, “don’t shoot it.”
That evening I arrived at the country store at Keswick just in time to hear Billy regaling the farmers around the potbellied stove with a story they found tremendously amusing. The punch line seemed to be “Don’t shoot it, don’t shoot it.”
This year’s adventure actually did involve a skunk. Barb and I were standing on the screened porch in the dark, admiring the multitude of stars visible in the country, when the motion light came on. There, a few feet from us on the other side of the screen, was a huge skunk, waddling up the sidewalk. He was unaware of us, fat and sleek, with a clean white stripe and a satiny black coat. As I stood there not daring to move, Barb —ever the smart aleck — leaned over to whisper, “Don’t shoot us, don’t shoot us.”
Randy Fitzgerald teaches modern American literature at Virginia Union University. He was a longtime public relations director at the University of Richmond and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
