Whenever Genevieve travels to the mountains to visit her parents and siblings, she’s stunned by the beauty of the mountains. She reminisces about her childhood summers spent on the catwalk, being Tom Carter’s daughter, dancing in colonial costumes, garden parties, indians, and “Ham, beans, corn, greens, sweet huckleberry pie…” Oh, the ache. A good one, but nevertheless a wistful haunting of simpler days, brief mountain showers, and living a creative life. Even the Texas dirt doesn’t seem as yucky as it once was to put on each evening. I LOVE that I have these memories.
The mountains hold them for me. So does my husband and family.
P.S. I grew up, every summer, on the stage of Horn in the West, in Boone, NC. My father, Ed Pilkington, directed the outdoor drama for 20+ years.
This quote is taken from the opening lines of the play.
In the evening West, beyond the last mountain peak,
slowly dies the sun in a sea of bronze and crimson.
In its setting is the majestic assurance
that tomorrow will rise,
that a new day will dawn.
Always the hopes and dreams of mankind
lie not in the East,
but in the fiery land of the sunset.
The gaze of man is westward
as if he could glimpse,
somewhere beyond the great golden reaches of Eternity–
as though he could hear, blowing in the distant sunset,
the Horn of Freedom.
