Why O Shenandoah?

It seemed sensible to me to begin this blogspot with an explanation for the O Shenandoah business. My mother came to the United States when she was 16 years old from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She came alone, the oldest of a large, poor family. While attending school in Ireland she had learned a song:

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away you rolling river,

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

When she married my daddy who was from Virginia (Germanna colony 1714) and came here to live she saw a river called "Shenandoah" and realized that this was the place from the song she had sung as a child in school with words of a place she had never thought to see. She was enamored with it. Enough that I remember her words of love for that river. As a child I spent many summers on the Shenandoah River in Luray, Virginia. Friends of my parents, the Lohr's, had a cabin on the river up there. We'd drive up 211 from Culpeper, (in the Piedmont), over the mountains on those two lane very curvy roads to the little town of Luray. Every summer we'd go to the Luray Caverns, (Shorty Lohr worked there I think), and the antique car display and then spend night after night on the river. It brings back fond memories for the most part. I was only allowed to wade into the river and was ever warned never to go alone (rattlesnakes) and never to venture far out because of the undertow of the river. I guess the summer I turned 12 was the last trip up there, as my mother died the following summer. Isn't it funny how some places stick in your mind as important? Those summers are now forty years past, yet, they are important enough to state here. The only other vacation spot I remember was Colonial Beach and Atlantic City and neither of those hold a candle to Luray.

So, I'm brought again to what that's meant to me? 42 years since I sat on that river with my parents, but about 6 years after her death I would move to the Shenandoah Valley and call that my home for, to date, over thirty years. No, no cabin on the river, but homes close enough to drive across that lazy river time and time again over the years. To learn of her valley history and appreciate the things that have happened here. My children were all born in the Shenandoah Valley and I have come to love her and the mountains that she flows through. Is there anything or any place more beautiful than the Blue Ridge, Massanutten, Alleghanies... those Appalachian ranges that crop up with all sorts of names? I love being in a valley where you see those mountains before you and behind you. As a child in the Piedmont part of the state, I had Old Rag mountain rising up from our back yard view. Otherwise, she was pretty flat. Only mountains to the west. Where I am living now, the mountains rise to the east toward "home" and rise to the west where I have also lived for a season. It's fall here now and the leaves are lovely colors and still on the trees. Apples are ripe and I'm working them up into pie fillings, apple butter and such yummy things as that. I want to make an apple pecan cake next week along with the apple butter. These aren't "foreign apples".. no, these are grown locally in orchards that I pray are not plowed under for "Franken-houses" like has happened in so many places in this Valley. So, I'll close this with a dream... I dream of a small log or stone cabin with an english cottage medicinal herb garden, big vegetable garden, fruit trees and room for a few goats, my llama and a steer or two ~ all set in a glen where streams of fog rise in the early morning and there is no noise of trucks or cars, no commercial Franken-farm houses and the eyes feast on mountains, streams and bucolic farms for as far as you can see. I continue to look for that dream... Let me know if you find it.