Here’s a gorgeous “What it’s like living here” essay from NC contributor Anna Maria Johnson and her husband, the photographer Steven David Johnson. Anna Maria Johnson is a writer, Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA student, and a lovely artist in her own right. She was a co-winner of the NC Rondeau Writing Contest last year, and who can ever forget her amazing Novel-in-a-Box Contest entry? This essay is Anna Maria’s first post on Numéro Cinq as an official Contributor—we hope for many more like it. And it’s also the first time we’ve had a husband and wife team work together. It’s a wonderful addition to the growing Numéro Cinq “What it’s like living here” series.
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What It’s Like Living Here–Cootes Store, Virginia
Text by Anna Maria Johnson, photos by Steven David Johnson
(Author’s Note: The locals pronounce this place “Cootes’s Store,” though the green road sign omits the possessive.)
At home on the Shenandoah River, North Fork
Home. What’s it mean? By age twenty-one, I’d lived in twenty-one places and thought home was a place I’d never find.
John Denver’s song “Country Roads” refers to western Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River. This northwest corner of Virginia is where I now live, along the river’s North Fork, which runs parallel to Route 259, my road. When I travel alone, I sing the old folksong, “O Shenandoah,” and ache to be home.
Home, for me, is family: a husband and two daughters. But increasingly, “home” is becoming a specific 2.3-acre plot of land with dilapidated sheds, gardens, woods, meadow, and a white farmhouse with a front porch.
Our farmhouse. Its wood plank bedroom ceilings, steep stairs, foot-thick walls, and hand-made plank doors with old-fashioned latches hint at the log cabin our house used to be—and still is, beneath its vinyl-sided exterior and dry-walled interior. The bathroom, an aging plumber told us, was installed only in the late 1960s or 70s; he remembers doing it. The back kitchen was probably added then.
My husband, Steven, wanders down to the river nearly every day to photograph his friends—mink, herons, deer, cattle, water snakes, starlings, swallows, kingfisher, and once, three otters.