A Love Letter to the Town We Almost Lost

Last spring, my husband and I decided to move away. Not because we didn’t like it in Mentone. But because moving to a bigger city in Tennessee seemed to have lots of checks in the pros column: being central to several family members, lots of amenities, and no labor-intensive farm business to tend to and tie us down.

A recent meeting of the Long Meadow Farm Coffee Club

So off we moved — with well wishes from friends, customers, and our church family — away from the rolling pastures and fences we’d looked out on day and night for nearly a decade.

Our new place was perfectly nice. Smaller and more manageable for the two of us. The city was nice. But from the get-go, it just didn’t feel like ours.

Sitting on the front porch of our perfectly fine Tennessee house, I compared that porch sitting to the one I had had in Mentone just one week previous. I lamented that I hadn’t heard the hysterical group conversations of coyotes. I hadn’t heard the faint sound of a train passing through in Valley Head. There’d been no fog suddenly surround our house after an evening rain. That fog was unnerving to us when we first moved to County Road 106, but over the years I’d found it comforting, like a fleece blanket. It meant we really shouldn’t get out unless we had to, and that was nice.

In this new, bigger city I could get to my choice of grocery stores and retail shops in minutes. But I missed being able to settle in and listen to a good 20 minutes of music or an audible book or just plain silence to think before reaching Fort Payne — glancing beyond the rock wall on 117 as I descended and seeing one of four views: waves of green hills in summer; the reds, yellows, and browns of autumn; the stark, black branches in winter; and the tender leaves appearing in spring. I missed the bitter winter wind on our hill and the fact that at least one person at the Mentone Market gas pumps would wave.

The things I got sappy about seem silly now. I thought with sadness of the little old fellow who, for the entire seven-and-a-half years we’d been in Mentone, had puttered past our farm in a small, loud pickup truck, his ball cap slightly upturned. He’d never turned his head to acknowledge us or wave, but we could count on seeing him inch down our road. I wondered if he had even noticed our farm was vacant.

I found myself reading “Neighbor to Neighbor” on Facebook much more diligently than I ever had before and feeling ridiculously nostalgic about everything on the page: the almost daily security-cam photo of a black bear on someone’s property, accompanied by several suggestions for how to secure one’s garbage can; a tree down over 117 — whose power’s out?; anyone know the owner of this dog?; did anyone else hear that big boom up on 89?; a photo of Fontana’s handwritten menu for that day. All those things you get used to around here. They seemed so far away now and so dear to me. Only those of us who live here know these things. We know them. I wasn’t part of any we in the new place.

I knew we were in trouble when, one weekend we buzzed down here to check on the farm and I burst into tears when I got out of the car and spotted the woodpeckers on the oak tree in back. I was fraught with homesickness. Mentone and our place were in my blood. I’d heard that said by others, but let me tell you, it’s real.

The summer rolled on, and we tried to feel at home in the Volunteer State (my native state). But we found it hard to start anew. It just didn’t feel like home.

My husband is a quiet thinker, and he had refrained from making any judgements or statements about our new location. But one day, as he looked out the window onto our new road, he said, “I believe we just belong down there.” It took me approximately 1.2 seconds to open my laptop and click on UHaul.com. Even our families are happy we moved back, as though a puzzle piece had fallen into the sofa for a while and was now back in place. Things make sense again, even though the magic of this area is something almost impossible to nail down in words.

This morning I sit on the front porch of our farm, convening my coffee club (chubby cat, old dog, and me) for the first time in five months. The air is so fresh I can’t wait to inhale. The neighbor is cutting hay across the road. Then I hear the rattle of the little old man’s truck. As he turns left from Bankhead onto 106, I see it: an almost imperceptible wisp of a glance toward the house, then a quick return to his usual forward stare.

“He’s glad we’re home, too!” I said aloud to the other club members.

We left for awhile. But you can’t lose what’s inside your heart.