Virginia is for Lovers

I can't remember exactly what year it was that my parents moved to Florida from Virginia.

I know it was before 2001, that was the year they moved from Florida to Georgia, where they live now. It was after 1989, which is when I left Virginia and moved to Florida. I planned to stay here just a few years, and now I don't think I'll ever want to leave.

It was around 1997, or 1998... It was the last time I was in Virginia. It was the summer of the really bad fires in Florida, and I drove my car stuffed with boxes of my displaced childhood junk through the smoldering tree stumps on the side of I75.

Next week I'll be driving back up to Virginia for the first time in almost a decade. When I last lived in Virginia I was 23, single, wore a size 5... In retrospect, I think it's fair to say that I'd never been in love, although at the time I thought I had.

I'm excited to see the road that I grew up on -- a tiny, winding, single-lane road that literally began existence as a cow path. I want to see the house I grew up in, on the top of a little hill at the base of a big mountain. I'm trying to arrange it so that I can get together with some of my friends from high school, which would be wonderful.

I'm really, really looking forward to taking lots of pictures, and showing my husband the beautiful country where I grew up. A born-n-raised Florida boy, he's never seen anything quite like my mountains. I wish the leaves would be changing, but I think it'll be too soon.

Virginia is for lovers!