Witty Road
A personal geography of Summerfield and a southern gothic
I've been spending a lot of time in my hometown lately. My parents still live in Summerfield, so I've been back for many many visits since I left North Carolina twenty years ago (my God, that's a long time) and, like anyone visiting a familiar place after time away, part of being home is noticing what has changed and what hasn't. I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia and how it used to be treated as a malady--not just homesickness, but a real illness. I typically make a concerted effort to avoid being too nostalgic, knowing that it is a tantalizing frame of mind in which to sink, but also a trap: after all, you can't go home again (to paraphrase another North Carolinian).
An experience that always makes me feel instantly nostalgic, though, is driving around Summerfield with the windows down. Part of it is that the town is still very pretty. When the weather is nice and the wind is blowing and a good song is on, it is very easy to feel like I did as a teenager in my white Jeep tooling around on my own for the first time: momentarily carefree.
Summerfield is impossibly green with expanses of farmland, gently rolling hills, and woods peppered with old tobacco sheds and dilapidated red brick structures overtaken with kudzu. After dusk you have to slow down in places that dip low with fog because of the deer that are likely to be grazing. Here nostalgia is shading my description; there is also a lot of new construction as old families sell off their inherited farms, which are quickly replaced by non-descript McMansions popping up in developments with names like “The Farm at Lake Brandt” and “Tuscan Estates.” Because, sure.
Naturally, whenever I drive certain roads that I've traversed literally thousands of times in my life I get these flashes of memories of people who lived there or experiences in my life or just stories once I heard. The other day, I drove from Horse Pen Creek road to my parents’ house and marveled at just how much stuff is there. Whole strip malls, new stop lights, added lanes on 220. As I drive, ghosts of the past are there along these new additions, temporal and geographic markers that are only meaningful to me. All these landmarks that shaped me in ways so imperceptible I couldn't explain them if I tried.
If you were to take that route, you'd enter the outskirts of Greensboro where the Dollar Trees, Harris Teeters, one-off Mexican restaurants and non-denominational evangelical churches give way to more green space. The entrance to Bur-Mill Park is on the right (off the whimsically named Owl's Roost Road.) It's where as a kid I spent a whole summer going to week-long sports camps, which I hated. Every week they gave out a different colored t-shirt. By the end of summer, I had a drawer full in every hue. During one soccer lesson, the instructor took turns throwing a ball at each of our foreheads so that we could practice heading a ball (this was before they figured out concussions=bad.) So basically, an adult threw a ball at my head and since I'd never played soccer I didn't understand the mechanics and got whacked in the nose, eyes involuntarily filling with tears. Humiliating. Later, I would return to Bur-Mill for the rehearsal dinner before my wedding, reclaiming the locale from its earlier more painful associations with the accompaniment of an oompah band.
Passing this site of sports injuries and happy nuptials past, you head over the bridge at Lake Higgins, where the water is always so low, and where one Halloween my mom took my brother and me to a haunted woods that scared him so much he walked the whole trail with his face buried in my back so he wouldn't have to see the horrors.
Make a right onto Strawberry Road, and you'll follow a big curving elbow of horse stables and giant homes spilling out to “old Summerfield” on 150 where small but well-kept homes prevail with their green tulip settees guarding porches hung with potted impatients.
Off Strawberry is Alley Road, named for the family that presumably used to own a farm there before the land was parceled out to all the relatives. In elementary school, I thought Katie Alley was the prettiest (read: blondest and tannest) girl and wasn't it amazing that she had so many cousins who all lived next door? During art class one day, she and Matt Boggs drew with crayons inside the art textbooks. I was quietly horrified and refused to do the same despite them peer pressuring me. At the next class, the art teacher discovered the defaced books and asked who did it, but I had been warned by Katie and Matt that there was nothing worse than a snitch (“Don't rat us out”), so I kept my mouth shut. I was, therefore, punished along side them and racked with guilt that the art teacher--the teacher I'd most want to impress--thought I was a bad kid. We had to stay late in the art room and help the teacher clean up art supplies, a penance I was thrilled to accept.
There's no rhyme or reason to the patchwork of development along 150: a Joanna Gaines inspired remodel here, a defiant rancher with 8 cars in the yard there. I'm alarmed now by the number of businesses at the corner of 150 and Lake Brandt, which used to stand in my mind as some kind of mythic crossroads, where you might make a deal with the devil in exchange for virtuosic musical talents. It was the final pass to the truly rural and for me, the home stretch.
When we first moved to Summerfield, at one corner there was a Texaco, formerly the Belco (I still call it the Texaco even though the name has changed twice since) and an old unoccupied brick building on the other. Now there’s a Domino's! The idea that pizza could be delivered to my house during childhood was laughable. I mean, you couldn't even get cable where we lived until a few years ago and our well water tastes like gargling pennies. Domino's? How cosmopolitan.
The fire station on Lake Brandt was built sometime while I was in high school, and the hemp fields across from it were wheat or some other “respectable" crop. It's where “Timmy" as we called him lived. He was a red-headed kid a few years younger than me who went to our church and rode the school bus with a bunch of us from youth group. One day, he had just gotten on the bus when someone spotted a dead dog by the side of the road. It was his collie, and he screamed until the bus driver reopened the doors to let him off. I remember watching his face turn as red as his hair as he ran home, a red streak across the field.
Facing Timmy’s property was the home of Heather Howardton, a girl a year older than me who I took gymnastics with and absolutely couldn't stand. I can't remember why, but we both hated each other. One day by the uneven bars I pulled my hand back and fully slapped her across the face like you'd see in a soap opera. I think I was just as shocked as she was. It’s the only time I’ve ever slapped someone. Honestly, it was pretty satisfying.
The last house on the road is a small green clapboard cottage now almost entirely overtaken by kudzu and vines. It's where the one-eyed hosta lady lived. (She sold hostas and had one eye. Some things are straightforward.)
Down the hill where Lake Brandt intersects with Witty Road (yes, I lived off Witty Road) is the “swamp," thankfully still buzzing with buggy humidity. Some land can’t be reclaimed. At the corner, there's a gravel turn off where people used to dump trash. A few years ago someone dumped the body of a teenager whose car had been found burned across town a day or two before. Now there's a cross and flowers marking where he was laid.
Just a little further on is a sharp bend in the road where the father of one of my childhood friends lost control of his motorcycle, skidded off the road, and died in the woods yards from our neighborhood.
The entrance to my parents’ development used to feel like a kind of blink-and-you-might-miss-it parting of the forest, but it is now flanked with two enormous homes, the most egregious is a monstrosity of “modern farmhouse" so blank and poorly designed that it looks like a vertical double-wide. My dad refuses to look at it.
On the right as you enter the neighborhood is where a very nice couple from Mississippi used to live. Their border collie Chip and my dog Pepper used to chase each other in circles around the house. The first time I went inside their home I discovered that the decorating theme of their downstairs half bath was Mammies: dolls and old kitchenware, advertisements for turn-of-the-century foods and cleaning products. I remember being shocked and thinking that North Carolina (or at least my experience of it) and Mississippi must be two very different souths.
When they moved away, a family with three school age sons moved in, one of whom drove a blue Camaro and almost immediately impregnated the 15-year old daughter of my bus driver. They used to drag race up and down the street in front of our house. When we first moved there, you didn't even need to stop at the intersection to look both ways before turning onto our street, but there are enough houses now that you might actually pass another car, which still surprises me.
Our driveway is the same shady tunnel of encroaching woods, a St. Francis statuette barely visible among the trees, where my dad buried our dog Pepper the summer before my senior year of college. I pull the car onto the spotty grass and red clay next to the driveway. The basketball hoop is covered in moss and looks like something pulled from the Titanic wreckage.
The spot where I park is the same place my dad once burned the Christmas tree, the flames licking so high and hot that I felt it before I saw it from my second story bedroom window. After that, they started throwing the Christmas trees in the woods behind the house. One year, my mom walked me back there and pointed them all out like it was an episode of Law and Order and she'd just discovered a serial killer’s favorite dumping ground: “we caught another one!”
The woods that hug the house are magic, though. I can feel my blood pressure and pulse drop just looking at them. The way the light filters through the trees has an instantly soporific effect; in the summer, it’s always shady inside. I sleep in late like I’m still a teenager. Everything is a little hazy and dream-like, quiet except the ceiling fan, waking up like I don’t know when in history I am.
