The Valley is Home

Looking east to the Blue Ridge Mountains and my home across the Valley

From Julia Davis's, A Valley and a Song ~ The Story of the Shenandoah River, published in 1963:

The Shenandoah is also a legend, and it deserves to be. . . . the Valley is loved not only for its history, but for the earth itself. The fields roll from the Alleghenies on the West to the Blue Ridge Mountains on the east. Blue is the color of the Valley--hazy blue mountains, blue sky, cornflowers as blue as the sky itself.

The Valley is the old brick houses, set among their tall trees. It is the smell of boxwood in the gardens, or of honeysuckle in the summer night. It is a sense of permanence and peace. The morning sun shines there through groves of oaks which were old when white men first saw them. . . . Time moves slowly in the Valley, as summer changes to fall, as winter changes to spring. Some people live on land where seven generations of their family have lived before them. The earth still feeds its children, for they have taken care of it.

In the Valley the oak leaves and the doves have time to set up their music in the heart of a child. The Valley is home.

Indeed it is. It is also a shelter from the turmoil and strife of this world.