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 BLACKSBURG, VA The Earth Beneath Your Feet
Compost makes me homesick. Not just any compost. Alan's compost. He sent me a picture of it over the Internet: two rich piles of Virginia dirt mixed with garbage, neatly contained in a pallet fence he built himself. "If you come home," said the attached e-mail, "I'll build you one just like it." I have not yet deleted the picture, though it takes up 132 K of precious disk space. Every few weeks, I open the file to see the sun warming Alan's earth and orange peels. I study his hemlock tree, and I wonder if the hemlocks in my old yard are still fighting off the blobs of white lint known to many Southwest Virginians as "The Dreaded Woolly Adelgid." I cannot see beyond Alan's yard in the artwork he entitled "Compost1.jpg." I know what's there, though. In the distance, mountains, hunched like shoulders and tinted a pale, cornflower blue. They ward off the wind like a shawl and I feel bare without them. Just off Main Street: a doughnut shop, with round vinyl stools and a glass window that watches over what I still think of as a sleepy Southern town. Blacksburg, Va., was a place nobody seemed to know about until Virginia Tech's football team, the Hokies, started doing well. My husband called it "The Edge of the Known Universe," even after they built a Wal-Mart six miles away. Located more than four hours from Washington D.C. and just shy of the West Virginia border, it is one of the state's biggest towns when the students are there, but it is tiny when they're gone for the summer. Their high per-capita computer rate helped give Blacksburg its national reputation as one of the most wired towns in the country. It is a land of ranch-style houses and wooded nature trails, of mechanical engineers and orange-and-maroon Tech flags. People smile and say hello whether they know each other or not. I'm not very good at change. I never was. So it is still hard for me to reconcile that, after more than 30 years in Virginia, Blacksburg is "there" now. Jamaica Plain, Mass., is "here."
Blacksburg, Va., is the sort of town that's always changing, but in the reverent, rose-colored minds of those who love it, it always stays the same. That is why 20 years after Mr. Fooz disappeared from Main Street, people are still shocked to see a coffee shop in its place. They forget that between biker bar and coffee shop, it spent five years as a Chinese disco. Other things have changed, too, I am forced, with new distance, to notice. The big retail stores have either closed or moved to nearby Christiansburg, a town that has never understood the words "urban planning." When Blacksburg's K-Mart moved to Christiansburg (positioned, strategically, next to the Wal-Mart) some inventive kilroy spray-painted the new building with a picture of the earth and the words "On the eighth day, they paved it." I've thought a lot about ecoterrorism since then and I'm pretty sure I'm in favor. Kilroy had disappeared by the time Christiansburg got Super Wal-Mart. Next to that, they built a Target and a Home Depot, naming the new shopping plaza Spradlin, after the farm that used to be there. Smalltown America in the 21st century. I try to ignore these things, focusing instead on Mike's Grill, which still serves the best hamburgers on Blacksburg's Main Street, and Gillie's, with its unequaled huevos rancheros breakfast. The 7-Eleven in Blacksburg is still open 24 hours a day and I don't think it's ever been robbed. When I was in high school, we'd get Slurpees from that 7-Eleven and mix them with moonshine. Purchased for $10 a mason jar from somebody's renegade uncle, it was much easier to obtain then a fifth of store-bought Bacardi. With our hillbilly daiquiris, we walked from arcade to arcade, pretending we were drunker than we really were. On Halloween, we went trick-or-treating in the apartment complexes for cans of beer. Somewhere along the line - the mid-1990s, maybe, when the football team first went to the Sugar Bowl - the region started getting trendy. Instead of flannel shirts, students bucked the cow college image and donned clothes from the Gap. Soon, the retail center of Christiansburg even had a Gap, which was about as inconceivable in that part of the country as getting a Victoria's Secret. (They have one of those, too, now, just around the corner from the NASCAR shop.) The university's fighting-gobbler mascot got another redesign: once a long-necked turkey made from what could have been the Brady Bunch's discarded shag carpeting, the new Hokie Bird is now stocky and cocky, and cute enough to be replicated proudly on the front of T-shirts. Blacksburg added a Cajun restaurant and ESPN started broadcasting from Lane Stadium on College Game Day. I stuck with my old haunts, frequenting the refurbished movie theater and attending the Fourth of July Parade that is oh-so-Andy Griffith. It features a community band on a flatbed truck, along with every available fire engine, Mode T and Boy Scout troop. Add to that the more adventurous members of Virginia Tech's entomology department who dress as insects - ladybugs and butterflies, but not the German cockroaches the university is known for studying. During that time of year, real lightning bugs hang thick in the pine trees. During that time of year, my husband and I moved to Jamaica Plain, just outside of Boston, Mass.
Jamaica Plain is a diverse community, a mix of black, white, Hispanic, straight and gay, the open gay you could never be back home. There are active non-profits, more mechanics and beauty salons than you can count. There are gallons of homemade ice cream. I read somewhere that New Englanders eat more ice cream per capita than anyplace in America. Judging by the number of Dunkin' Donuts strewn through Massachusetts, I'm sure the same is true for crullers. We moved here for a change of perspective, which is a nice way of saying that my husband was getting really bored with Virginia and its general ruralness. He wanted a place with more energy, he said, maybe New York. But to someone who learned to drive on empty Virginia roads, New York seemed a little scary. I won't even start to list the things I didn't know about Boston drivers, which would have destroyed my initial rationale. I'll simply say that this city was a compromise, offering an abundance of energy and culture, but with a smaller-town feel. "I hope you get a little more arthritis," we heard an angry white man tell an old black woman our first week here. He pointed his finger at her like a curse. "Just a little more." Was that the type of new perspective we'd come for? The conversation was far more edgy and direct than what you'd typically hear in the South. I naturally projected their bitter demeanor onto all New Englanders. I once swore I could be happy anywhere, with the exception, maybe, of Florida. I lied. I desperately missed Blacksburg, which was still, in my mind, Perfect Town of the World, and I found things here that I was determined to hate: trash in the streets, the vacant stare of subway riders, the accent, which hopelessly misplaced the letter "R." In truth, the Boston accent exists only among the natives, and most of the people we meet came from someplace else for the new-technology jobs that are now drying up. I don't know yet if it's the same as in Southwest Virginia, where you're considered a newcomer unless your grandparents were born there and you know how to give directions using landmarks that burned down in 1953. The grocery stores, appallingly, don't stock a respectable amount of Dr. Pepper here (Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew were both invented in Virginia, about an hour southwest of Blacksburg.) But they do have more Goya products than I ever knew existed. Here, people are too busy to wait for you to give them exact change. When you shovel out a snow-covered parking space, a garbage can or beat-up lawn chair will reserve it until you come home, unless someone gets pissed off and hurls said garbage can into the bushes. You cannot eat the snow here because pollution has a flavor. I used to be a big snoweater. As a kid I mixed it with milk and vanilla; as an adult, with margarita mix and salt. I found myself losing my appetite for snow, anyway, after watching it sit, gritty and gray in front of my thin-walled apartment building, from December until the middle of April. Time and sunshine heal, though. As days turn into months, I've started to see a clearer picture of my bucolic hometown. Even the flaws, not the least of which is the departure of the doughnut shop, which this spring will be moving away from downtown, leaving behind the orange vinyl stools. I still miss it. I miss the welcome of the redbud trees. I miss spring, which seems not to exist here: winter becomes summer becomes fall. But there are things here that I'm starting to like: the public gardens, the architecture, restaurants that serve green-lipped mussels and a million things I cannot pronounce. There is a proud tradition of protesting things here, which dates back to the Boston Tea Party. And there is a progressive, liberal bias that is a relief after the conservatism of the South. At election time in Jamaica Plain, George Bush came in third, after Ralph Nader. I saw my first frozen river here. I spent years driving along Virginia's New River, geographically the second oldest, after the Nile, and one of the few that flows north. But I never saw it crystal with ice, coated with snow, as I saw the Charles this year. My friend Eric says people used to race cars on it. I find myself smiling now at the vacant faces on the subway, just in case they turn my way. I find comfort in clam chowder - a substitute for my mother's monthly batch of Brunswick stew - and in the Grapenut pudding they serve at the bar behind my house. It was another culture's comfort food, but now it is mine. I swallow bite after bite, getting used to the fact that this is here; this is home. Some people live their whole life in one place and until last summer, I was always sure I would. Now, as I wander past the bonsai house at Jamaica Plain's arboretum, or count the empty liquor bottles that lie between the subway tracks, I try to decide: what is here that will someday have the poignancy of Alan's compost? What will make me homesick when I leave? 
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