ABSTRACT
When Patrick was young, his mother’s mother lived in a small town in North Carolina. Every year at Thanksgiving, his family would make the long drive from Birmingham to his grandmother’s house, where they were treated like strange visiting royalty. As they drove through the Blue Ridge Mountains each November, he would watch out the window at the shapes the hills made against the darkening autumn sky, and wonder what kind of miracle it took to make them look like reclining bodies. They were immaculate, far more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen sleeping in real life, and they stood in sharp contrast to the lazy, rolling hills of Birmingham. These mountains hid secrets from the drivers who carelessly passed them by; and as the family car made its strained way slowly through their mysterious paths, his father would forget where he was, and hum or occasionally sing along with the station he had found on the radio tuner: Ink Spots, Lettermen, Shandrelles. The soundtrack for their slow ascent up into the Appalachians was doo-wop, unchained melodies, early R&B. They covered their ears with those sounds, peeking out from under the tin roof of the battered old Chevy, hoping they wouldn’t be swallowed up into the endless forests and bottomless caves that make those mountains feel like exclusion and like home, all at once.
