When you have lived in a lot of different places, subtle differences jump out at you. Almost twenty years ago, Roanoke, Virginia provided our re-entry into the South. We found far more than just a moderate climate nestled here in the mountains.
Sometimes I think that I spent most of the two decades after I got out of college running from the South.
Of course there were some family issues in mix, but whatever the reasons, we ended up living in Canada for seventeen years, and then we came home to the United States and parked ourselves in Maryland.
A lot of people, especially who have not lived in Maryland, consider it to be part of the South, but other than the warm temperatures, I would have a hard time vouching for Maryland's southern credentials.
We spent a couple of years in Columbia, Maryland. Columbia is a beautiful spot. in fact it is so beautiful that car dealerships and lots of other things have to be found outside of town. It is not a huge thing, but along with the idea that gasoline stations should be hidden, it makes for a little inconvenience unless you know the area well.
Columbia is also home to a lot of type A personalities. While the whole town was built on the idea of neighborhoods where children could walk to schools, we found many children went to private schools. In Halifax, Nova Scotia where our children had last been in school, they did walk to school, and even came home for lunch. More importantly, we found that making friends with children who are driven to a private school is pretty hard when your children are on a bus to a public school.
I grew up in Lewisville, NC and the elementary school was at the heart of the community. With continuous redistricting in Howard County where Columbia sits, and with a majority of neighbors sending their children to private schools, it did not take us long to decide that we wanted some place else to raise our children.
Eventually my job and that desire combined to give us a great opportunity. I was working for Apple Computer and having great success at developing Virginia Tech into a major Apple account. I would leave Maryland on Monday morning and often not return until Friday afternoon. Sometimes I even went down to Mount Airy, NC where my mother lived and spent the weekend if I had an early appointment at VT on Monday morning.
The drive to Mount Airy was less than two hours compared to the often five to six hours of driving required to get back to Maryland. Even a company as hard headed as Apple saw the financial wisdom of moving me closer to one of our fastest growing accounts. So in 1989, Apple paid to move us to Roanoke, Virginia, and we ended up on this wonderful mountainside where we have been blessed to watch so many sunrises while our children grew up in a wonderful neighborhood environment.
If you are not familiar with the geography of the area, you might think that moving three hundred plus miles south and west might be a bad climate trade off. That turned out not to be the case. While Roanoke definitely has it periods of heat, the humidity of Maryland is rarely matched here in the Blue Ridge mountains. Roanoke is blessed with a mild climate that usually has a good taste of all four seasons. Depending on where you live, there is also a fair amount of benefit from being on a mountain.
This morning in Roanoke, we are waking up to a very pleasant 62F while Columbia, MD had a much less comfortable 46F. Of course more moderate temperatures had little or no part in our moving to Roanoke, but they are a nice bonus.
We wanted to be closer to our families and to have a better place for our children to grow up. I think the first clue that we had made the right decision came we bought the appliances for our new home. We were getting ready to pay for them, and the store clerk casually said to not worry about writing a check until sometime after we took delivery.
In Maryland I was pretty sure you had to write a check before a store employee would even talk to you. Our move to Roanoke proved to be a wise one which made the journey to adulthood a little more manageable for our children.
While our mountainside home in a new subdivision did bring some isolation with it, the neighborhood schools and churches helped greatly in making us part of the community. We had some challenges along the way, even to the point of fighting with the local school board to get buses to come up our hill, but all in all, I think Roanoke was the right spot for us.
We found Oak Grove Elementary, Hidden Valley Middle School, and Cave Spring High places where our children had enough good teachers and opportunities to thrive.
No place is perfect, but the opportunity to see teachers in the grocery store or neighborhood made it far easier to know what was happening in school. It was also easy to become involved with the Roanoke County Schools.
We found a sense of community in Roanoke that was absent in Columbia in spite of Columbia's designed neighborhoods.
The Roanoke area has grown and changed a lot since we came here over twenty years ago. Our local hardware has been driven away, and a new high school has been built. I also think children have changed even more.
Our children, who were born on a farm in Canada, were used to being outside a lot. They made have been the last generation of children who enjoyed the freedom of building forts in the woods. I have watched as new families move into the neighborhood. Often the children are never seen outside.
Their outside activities are all organized ones, and then there is the lure of computers, games, and television. In one sense the world of electronics has made the children of Roanoke more like those of Maryland by removing some of the after school social interaction that naturally happened here in the mountains of Virginia.
Still if I had to pick a place to raise a family, there remains some subtle differences that makes the Roanoke area a great refuge from parts of modern life.
There are still socially cohesive neighborhoods in Roanoke, and people are still open. It does not take much encouragement here in Roanoke to learn someone's life story, and that is a good building block for a close community.
Of course now that the children have gone, our needs and goals have changes. Many of my favorites places and things to do seem to have relocated along with me to North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.
Change is one thing you have to embrace in life.
