Roanoke's Mill Mountain

Tonight, I chatted about the beauty of Virginia with a sometime neighbor and suddenly found myself thinking about summer visits to Roanoke. As a child, I loved Mill Mountain from which a star glowed in the night. For me, the star was a mysterious beacon in an otherwise dark sky.

Several years ago, I went to Roanoke for a friend's installation as a college president. I stayed with my youngest first cousin, who took me on a sentimental journey to important family sites -- my grandmother's former house, the cemetery where she and my aunt and grandfather and many other family members are buried, the family church, my grandfather's bridge, and Mill Mountain.

The drive up the mountain is as beautiful as I remembered it, and the city below glowed gracefully in the setting sun. It was the star, though, that held my attention. Now it is just a large sculpture of glowing neon and metal, no longer a mysterious beacon or familiar talisman of the place my mother's family called home.

It's strange the way the mind works. A glass of wine with two Mississippians and I slip into the smell of boxwood and the flicker of fireflies and rounded vowels and egg cups and a big man-made star on a scar of a mountain. I'm not sure what to make of my memory tonight, but I do know that I enjoyed taking this photograph years ago and remembering Roanoke in the summer tonight.