Hometown

Actually, I was born in a small town in California...Pacifica. My parents moved us here when I was 8. It was hard on my brother who was about to start highschool. We were very familiar with the bustle and attraction of San Francisco. For me, I kind of knew right away that they’d made the right choice. Sometimes I’ll be walking from my car to my house, and I’ll be brushed by the air with a sensation identical to the ocean breeze; the salt, the chill, everything. But, my hometown is here, in Virginia, where I look up and the leaves have changed color, or they’re not there at all. Where the grass is so plush and so green that you don’t even need a blanket to lay in it.

This land in Marshall, Virginia... 9 miles away from town.. (Warrenton) for us, this, I believe is my hometown. We drive the same road to town it used to take my husband’s grandmother almost an hour to get to. Here people care about each other, or they don’t and they’re not afraid to say it. Here, small businesses band together and lift each other up, check on each other, support each other. I’ve started my family here, and I’ll be honored if we end here too.

There are parks only miles within each other. We crave the air more than we crave the internet. Here I’ve learned there’s one thing they don’t make more of, and that’s land. If “Home is where the heart is,” then I hope everyone finds a place that feels like home. People drive one, two hours to go to work, just to come back home here, everyday. We do have struggles, just like everyone and everywhere else. The worst issue is communication. Maybe some pride. Some folks have their noses pointed way too high, and need to climb down from their horses sometimes, literally. But, all in all, I think a lot of us feel the same way about this town. I say Marshall (and) Warrenton because it’s really the whole county, “Homecounty” if that was a thing, and these two towns right next to each other might as well be one in my opinion.

During the pandemic, small businesses did everything they could think of to allow people to continue enjoying what they had to offer. One local bakery donated 400 loaves of fresh baked bread. One restaurant offered completely free meals for a period of time. Another lady, with no reward or payment spent a ton of time and energy promoting small businesses of the town - setting up “Front Porch Photo Sessions” with local photographers (including me) to let the community know what we could do to keep going, how they can help the businesses and share their positive outlook on a public platform. When the local magazines come out, it’s rare you don’t recognize someone in it. Sometimes when we leave the county, we forget how different everywhere else actually is. Tall buildings, taking numbers, traffic on top of traffic. I could be wrong, but I think Leonardo DiCaprio was actually caught in Warrenton back in 2011, and my brother-in-law totally swears Jennifer Love Hewitt approached him at the county fair years ago, (we’ll see what they both have to say about that!) A lot of really cool little things happen, just by the people of the town being themselves, living the lives they’ve come to know. Maybe it’s just a small town thing. I hope it’s something everyone gets to experience in one way or another. Sometimes that means tending to the cattle, checking on the chickens, scraping the snow off of the car before God wakes up. Sometimes that means going to the food bank, buying school clothes at the Salvation Army, or meeting a friend for coffee at the shop. I think in a lot of ways a lot of us are actually blessed with poor internet, because it forces us to remember how much Mother Earth has to offer us.

Whatever the course is, we love our town. This photo was taken by me of a friend and her kids at Rady Park. When she received her photos, she said she wasn’t expecting to cry, (happy tears!) To know that I’d personally made one of my own dreams come true, even just by taking a few photos... that makes me want to bloom here, where I have been planted, and I hope other do too.