Mom’s Going Home Tour

When you grow up in one place and go to the same place for vacation every year it really does not take long to revisit your whole childhood.  Between late yesterday afternoon and lunch time today my mother and I were able to see everything she wanted to see from her birth to the death of her parents and lots of fun things that happened in between. 

We started the tour of my mother’s childhood home and drove past practically everyone of her friend’s homes as if we were on her regular bike route.  We stopped at her elementary school and could not retrace her walk to school exactly because some new houses had been built where there once had only been woods, so we settled for driving the route.  As is always the case, what used to seem so big or far away, was now tiny and close.  My mother said she used to complain about what a far distance she had to walk to and from school, when in fact it could hardly have taken her more than five minutes.

We saw her junior high, now a community center and the University of Tennessee where she spent her first two years of college before heading east to UNC back in the days when Chapel Hill only admitted women as juniors.  We drove up to her grandparents house which became her parents home when my mother went to boarding school.  That was the house I spent my childhood visiting and it looked much smaller than I remember, but the huge front yard with it’s hundred year old oaks was just as big and thankfully still full of those same trees.

We meandered past my grandmother’s hairdresser, Mr. Christopher, a very important spot in the life of a genteel southern lady on the way to the cemetery where all our family is buried.  The place is huge, but my mother kept telling me to keep going up the hill, “they are at the top.”  We parked the car, still unsure of exactly where the family marker was and no sooner did we look to the left, there, right at the top of the hill was the big “Wright” headstone.  I think visiting my grandparents graves was really the most meaningful part of the trip.

Having done all of Knoxville we headed east to the Mountains my mother loves best.  As a child her family had a summer place called Cascades Lodge, which had fourteen bedrooms and a big  commercial kitchen and dinning room with lots of tables with checkered table clothes.  I know this because I used to go these when I was a kid too.  The lodge had porches that hung over the river which it was built beside.  There was a huge swimming pool that was fed by a stone trough from the river.  The lodge was the my mother’s favorite place since it was where her family escaped the summer heat of Knoxville to sleep under blankets, play in the river, read books on the porch and while away the summer days with no worries.

Long ago, well after her father had sold the lodge it burned down suspiciously, probably for the insurance money.  Since it physically is gone it made finding it hard, but we did.  The river with  the many waterfalls make it sound exactly the same as it did years ago so.  We walked down a driveway of a house for sale and found the foundation and the outline of the old pool.  The stone walls that held the river back were still there.  Of all the things we revisited I think this made my mother the saddest.  She always longs to have those summer lodge days again, but we all know you can’t go back.

To solidify that even if the lodge were still here, we might. To want it back we visited Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. Pigeon Forge had been nothing more than a laundry mat and small country store when my mom was a child.  Today it is outlet after outlet and every has been fast food restaurant you can imagine.  Gatlinburg is the worst that America has in a vacation spot.  With the exception of the Pi Beta Phi Arrowmont crafts school, there is not one thing in Gatlinburg any person I know would like unless they were blind.  No one can see the beauty of the mountains through the haze of Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum or the Moonshine Company.  It is a good place to end the nostalgia tour because it really makes us love where we live now a lot more.  You may be able to go home again, but you just might not like it as much.