Slow Road Home

A copy of Fred First’s book arrived today. A Blue Ridge Book of Days. This book has been a long time coming and it’s a thrill to see it finally bound and delivered—a book we’ve been watching happen through Fragments From Floyd.

When you write a blog, daily, you do write in fragments. Yet how well this transition—from screen to page—seems to have gone, especially since there are almost no photographs, a surprise for me. Fred’s writing is always at his best, I think, when he allows humor to punctuate his deep and often quite moving observations about place, his place, his nook in Floyd County where the county seat has only one traffic light (we’ve seen it).

And then there’s this:

“This was a pasture where cattle grazed. Before that, virgin hemlock and oak and white pines tall as ships’ masts grew in dark forests seldom visited. I wish I could have seen it then. I wish I could see it fifty years from now when it will have begun to seem like healthy forest once again. But I only have today—a fixed point in the succession from past to future; and I’ll try to do a better job of living in the land and in the time I have here.”

John Elder couldn’t put it better…