Don't blink, or you'll drive right past Wallburg, North Carolina on your way to the much bigger metropolis of Winston-Salem, home of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Wake Forest University and musician Ben Folds, before he wrote a song called "Brick" and moved away. To the untrained, outside eye, this town isn't much. In fact, it couldn't even be called a town until 2004, when it was finally incorporated and an impressive town hall was built right down from the fire station.
It was a dry town until two years ago, thanks to its impressive and growing number of old-school farming families who think the best thing to sip on a Friday night in the summer is a Cheerwine slushie from the only gas station in town, Kelly's 109. You won't find any retail outfitters along the main, downtown drag. Rather, it's peppered with a coffee shop, bakery, hair salon, animal hospital and the local diner, which was refurbished and reopened five years ago after a 10-year closing that left residents scratching their heads for a decade wondering where to go grab a hot dog or hamburger in the middle of the afternoon.
I grew up right down the road from our Methodist church. My mother and her siblings each inherited 12 acres from our grandparents, and they built right beside each other along a rural road covered with corn and soybean fields. So I was raised right beside my cousins, a creek separating our adjacent properties. Of course, this was the era before smartphones, when dial-up internet was just gaining its footing and was so complicated and time-consuming that no one really bothered to mess with it. We spent our days outside, playing capture-the-flag until dusk. We'd catch fireflies in the summer evenings, get lost in the woods when a blanket of snow covered the ground in the winter, and rode our Trek bikes up and down our half-mile-long driveways every spring as soon as it reached 75 degrees outside and mama deemed it warm enough to put on shorts.
I made my closest friends in this town, and in middle and high school we vowed we'd remain that way forever. Then, as it tends to do, life happened and time took a hold of us. We went to different colleges, chose different career paths, and lost the things that kept us close as children. Most of the people I knew as a young student, the ones I cheered with, studied with, and had sleepovers with, now live in major cities around our state. Some are in Raleigh, some are in Charlotte, and one moved halfway around the world to study biology in Rome.
Me? I went off to Raleigh for college, following my high school boyfriend there a year after he made the move. When it came time to graduate, I did so in three years rather than four just so we could get out together and start the life we wanted to. He had a family plumbing business back home and I had my sweet family, whom I couldn't fathom living apart from for much longer.
We decided coming back to Wallburg was the best move. We found a rental home, went to work at our first real jobs, and came home every evening to our bichon frise, Pablo. We were only 21 and 22, but we were suddenly adults, making decisions about our future, figuring out how things like 401(k)s, utility bills and life insurance actually worked. It was a confusing time, but a critical one. I would come home every evening and put a simple soup on the stove and we would stay up far too late watching King of Queens, still figuring out how to spend our evenings and nights as newlyweds who were finally back home, but still felt a little unsettled.
We were happy there, it's true, but were we totally satisfied? It took a while before we could adamantly say "yes." My husband especially dreamed of finding new and better job opportunities somewhere else, and I ached for unclaimed farmland of my own, which was scarce in our little town. Still, over time, as our circumstances began to shift and change shape, we began to realize and remember exactly why we came back here. He got a better job that made him more fulfilled. I had our two babies. We bought that little rental house and spent two years pouring love into every corner of it, remodeling it into the country cottage of our dreams.
Those two babies are now two and four years old. I took them outside this morning and we put new birdseed in the bird feeder. They helped me pick hydrangeas to put in a vase. We're taking those flowers over to my parents as soon as they get home from town. We'll drive down that same driveway that held so much of my childhood. Now, it's not me riding my bike up and down it, but my children. They're on their training wheels, the wind in their hair and the sunrise in front of them, moving upward in the sky behind the house that built me. It's their arms reaching out, grazing the blueberry bushes planted beside the basketball goal. It's their height we're now measuring against the corn. We thought we came back here for us. Turns out, we came back here for them. So they can see, touch, taste and experience life in a small town. We're firm believers that good things come from Wallburg, from any place really, where love is allowed to lead.
