URBANNA — Realtor Ed Ruark was waiting for me when I arrived in Urbanna the next morning. Off we went in his car to see the little 1940s-style cottage for sale at 291 Kent St.
We pulled into the driveway, which was really a right of way, which I didn’t know about and later caused a kafuffle of sorts. Ed and I got out of the car and walked to the cliff overlooking the Rappahannock River.
Something happened to my brain which is imaginative even on normal days but in front of the Rappahannock River, it went immediately to overdrive.
I saw in front of me while gazing at the great mass of blue on a perfect July day, not the Rappahannock River but Lake Erie! There was just enough mist on the river that morning to hide Lancaster on the other side of the river and so I could easily dream I was looking out at “Oh, Canada!” in the distance.
On my right was the rock pier jutting out from Urbanna Creek that I saw as the pier at the port of my hometown, Vermilion, Ohio, which led not into Urbanna Creek but into the Vermilion River that ran almost to Columbus. Well, maybe not that far. But one knows writers tend to exaggerate when they are on an imagination high.
Oh! Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I was home! Or so I imagined, as the view in front of me suggested I was standing on the cliff next to the flagpole that father kept the American flag aways waving free in the Lake Erie breeze. I could hear Father now pointing out the shoreline and the rising levels of the lake that had covered the flagstone pier he had built to build back our eroding beach.
“I’ll take it!” I said to Ed who was astounded and could not hide his shock.
“Don’t you want to see the inside of the house?” he asked. I assured him it wasn’t necessary but he insisted and we met the owners who graciously showed me the house and offered me a glass of iced tea with sprigs of mint from their garden. It was the best iced tea I had ever had. They picked more mint for me to take back to the city and for me to remember Urbanna.
Ed and I wrote a contract in pencil on the hood of his car and it was accepted and the seven Richmonders hoping to see the cottage that day must have been disappointed.
I went home to tell Chip the good news that we had bought a beautiful place on the river. He was ecstatic. Well, maybe he wasn’t so ecstatic but worried, but to put his concerns at rest the next day, July Fourth, we drove back to Urbanna for him to see our new home. We soon closed and we began coming to Urbanna each weekend and bringing our son, Wake, who was in high school by then and the dogs with us.
In those days I was what might be labeled today by cat fanciers…”a dog nut.” I especially loved golden retrievers and had in my short life already bred two litters of these marvelous creatures. At the present time I had both parents, Brandy and Honey, and two of their adult sons, Nick and Buck, that I simply could not bear to have sold.
It wasn’t easy driving back and forth from Newport News to Urbanna with Wake, Chip and the dogs, so I often came up on my own with the dogs. I had a convertible at the time so I would breeze into town, Honey in the passenger seat and the three boys in the back, their eight ears blowing straight back in the wind.
As soon as we pulled into the “Shoebox” (what I called our cottage,) the four dogs would each leap out, each from a corner of the car. They headed for the river until it was time to return to the city and then it was drag and shriek until they were back in the car, the top was up and we were headed home.
On one of these visits to Urbanna I popped a canoe into the water and paddled to Perkins Creek. I was immediately horrified because I saw a dead deer trapped under a low hanging tree. I paddled home and wrote a story about my sad adventure.
The next day I took my story into the Sentinel where I met Fred Gaskins who ran my story under the title “Journeys” the next week.
Once I started writing about the world around me, covering everything I saw, heard, did, and thought, I never stopped. The next 40 years passed as quickly as my pen strode across the pages of my columns. And that was when my real education began.
© 2024
