David Cohen illustration
On the way home to Wisconsin from Valdosta, Georgia, one year after spending Thanksgiving with my Air Force son, I took a detour to Narrows, Virginia, to spend a few days with my aunt. I was anxious to get home, but Aunt Dorothy was the favorite of my mother’s six sisters and had recently had major surgery.
I found her propped in a recliner when I arrived, wearing a pair of old shorts and a blouse dappled with large pink flowers, her thick gray hair cut short all around, a lock of it sticking up in a cowlick at the back. She was happily sifting through get-well cards while discussing her operation with someone on the phone.
For the next couple of days, between listening to the details of her operation and watching old Dragnet and Sally Jesse Raphael reruns that she liked, she told me amusing stories about growing up in the hills.
The conversation shifted to the Appalachian Trail, which ran about 30 yards behind her house. She said that one Thanksgiving Day, seeing a hiker slogging past her house, she set the turkey she’d just removed from the oven on the table and ran after him. It had rained that day, a hard, relenting cold rain. Feeling sorry for the young man, she invited him to dinner.
My aunt’s husband had been listening, and thought I might enjoy walking a small portion of the Trail so I could tell people I’d been on it. I thought it a good idea, so he drove me to a trailhead where the Trail winds through town, told me I would come out at their house shortly if I turned left when I got on the Trail, and dropped me off.
I saw no one else as I walked along, and I kept glancing nervously into the trees, looking for trail signs and thinking about the book my aunt told me she’d read about a murder on the Trail years before. She had also read another book about a woman around my age—mid 60s—hiking alone who had wandered off the path, become lost and was never heard from again.
Late afternoon sunlight cast shadows across the mountains as I wound steeply upward through rhododendrons and hemlocks. The muted noise of car engines and horns in the town below hampered the wilderness aspect, yet, there was an aura of solitude, wonder, and peacefulness I had hoped for.
I sat for a moment when I reached the top of a small rise, enjoying the tranquility as I listened to the soft wind moving through the trees—now splashed with fading sunlight—and the sound of some animal scurrying away in the underbrush. No longer anxious about being alone or becoming lost, I was overcome with the wonder of where I was.
As I sat there, I thought about my kind, compassionate aunt. I knew she and my uncle had planned to travel around the country in their small, seen-better-days RV when he retired several years before, but life always seemed to have gotten in the way. Now, with her health so precarious, she would likely spend her remaining years at home watching old reruns on TV.
I also wondered if she had considered the risk of inviting a complete stranger into her home, but that was how my aunt had always been. She spent most of her adult life caring for others. She never had children but had expended much time and financial resources helping various relatives.
I’m not sure how long I sat there on the side of the Trail reminiscing about all these things, but after a while, I rose and walked the remaining few yards to my aunt’s home, coming out right where my aunt had met up with that hiker those many years ago.
An early mist still hung over the mountains as I drove out of Narrows the following morning after hugging my aunt and uncle goodbye. I took Main Street to U.S. 460, crossed the New River, and headed home to Wisconsin, still thinking about my aunt, the ultimate caregiver.