My grandparents and much of my paternal family live in south-western Virginia.  The Norman name extends back into centuries from locations in North Carolina and southern Virginia.  My grandparents, after living all over the world and settling for years in El Paso, Texas, finally moved back home in the early 1980s.  Their house is a pre-fab...not quite a trailer since it never had wheels, but not a pier-and-beam house, either.  The land they bought is right next door to my grandmother's sister, and just down the street from two different family homes that date to the late 1800s.

Last time my father and I did this, we met up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and drove the wrong way across the entire state.  The wrong way.  I don't have a good set of reasons for how this happened, but I will say that we drove through the arm of a tropical storm and got turned around.  And it took us five hours to make a two hour trip.

I'm a big fan of my dad.  He's a nice guy, if a little right-wing.  Years of living in California working in both educational and penal institutions has beat the liberal out of him.  I have a feeling that he'd centralize if he lived anywhere else; I keep trying to get him to move to Texas, but he has a pretty good gig right now, and will retire relatively soon due to it.  My dad is a trained chef, but has been a food service supervisor for many, many years.  His job has been to run kitchens in institutional settings.  First it was airports, then prisons, then schools.  At some point he started teaching, and got a teaching certificate from the state.  Now he teaches prisoners how to be short order cooks for IHOP.  Odds are if you go to an IHOP, your line cooks are ex-cons.  IHOP helps fund the training, and in return guys like my dad use their menu to teach them how to do the work.  Then IHOP gets cheap labor.  It has worked fairly well, with trained cooks having statistically lower re-incarceration rates.  My dad has zero tolerance for prisoners, though, and has gained a very specific sort of classicism over the years.  I'm put off by a lot of his more political and societal moves to the far right...but he's my dad, and we rarely talk politics.

Religion, Food, Music.  The three tenets to life in the hills, in order of importance.  I have uncles who preach, aunts who believe that the end times are here, and everyone in the whole darn family is some shade of very religious.  I, myself, am religious tolerant: I do not get offended by religious people or their need to be religious.  I myself have been baptized five times in various religions at various times by various family, starting with a Catholic church that only had Latin mass, and trending toward protestant and pentecostal (Lutheran, Baptist, then Church of Christ, then my uncle's Pentecostal church of the Holy Fire or something).  Once I got to a certain age, I was able to refuse church and start my own path to Hell, but in the interim my family and I have an understanding: I won't go into detail about what I think of the bible if they don't.

That leaves food and music.  Food, in the southern US, has it's own place in the family.  It's our sort of oral history, recipes passed, methods learned at the feet of grandparents and parents.  We all have cookbooks or just collections of recipes passed down from great grandparents, we all have family methods for certain dishes, and we all have at least a knowledge of the basics of our region.  Some of us have old photo albums where at least one picture per gathering is devoted to The Table and what was served.  Food is celebrated in every way.

My family is hillbilly ("we prefer the term Appalachian American") on one side and Cajun on the other, so my upbringing was fairly diverse but deeply white trash, save for the Mexican cuisine brought into my maternal family by the Mexicans in the family.  My mom's father was a cook in the Army, and had secret methods for gumbo, jambalaya, and sausage that he still hasn't spilled but that a lot of us have picked up by reverse engineering.  On that side of the family, the guys cook, and the guys hunt and fish, and the guys are the ones who control the kitchen and the recipes therein.  I was taught how to make a family-specific crawdad andouille by my mom's father when I was five years old.  We had swamp food, even in El Paso (which is crisscrossed by irrigation ditches that make a perfect home for crawdads and frogs).    On the paternal side, my father was the first male in a long line of family cooks; hill folk traditionally have the woman keeping house (handling the food from barnyard to table, etc).  The foods are classic southern: ham, chicken, greens (collard and mustard being my favorites), pinto beans, smoked meats, lots of BBQ, and anything related to breakfast.  My grandmother's buttermilk biscuits are the best in the free world, but any good southerner would say the same.  Since I grew up on the border of Texas and Mexico, I was initially taught how to make Mexican comfort foods (enchiladas were my first real lesson) as well as the basic southern foods.  For my grandparents who started out as children of sharecroppers and WPA workers, who lived through the depression and the postwar lean years in Europe and Japan, who lived in post-war poverty in northeast El Paso, food has near-religious significance that modern abundance has not dulled. It's not just the food, obviously.  It's the gathering to prepare and eat.  It's at the dinner table that we catch up on news and family business.  It's in the kitchen that we socialize and prepare.  Our sense of family, our identity as a people starts with the kitchen and extends out, to church and to work.

Music, though, is the glue.  Gospel and Appalachian folk music, bluegrass, these weird Irish-sounding reels, post-modern Americana, country, western, and country-western...everyone in my family sings or plays an instrument.  Even if it's only at church, they sing.  Hearing a roomfull of old ladies sing Amazing Grace in harmonies not heard outside of the 1930s, you find religion in that moment.  My dad played drums in a rock band in El Paso for twenty years or so.  I was raised with a guitar nearby, was raised knowing that music was what we did, what rounded out our experiences.  I rebelled initially, learning classical on a viola and cello, but I find myself trending toward the sounds of my childhood.  And now, when we get together, someone always shows with a guitar or fiddle or banjo and squeezeboxes and lord knows what else, and we'll have gospel at a picnic BBQ or some traditional folk or country songs, or we'll have old labor or union songs.  Epic songs of mines and disasters, of feuds, of war, of love and hope, of God and country and tradition.  Family in chords, family on eat downbeat, on each minor and major.  Family in every note.

Ultimately what happens is by day three I exhale, I wake up to a sparkling morning, I remember bare feet and what Home feels like when you're where your roots are, and I let go of work, of my life here.  Even if we drive the wrong way for hours, even if we argue about the fine points of belief or lack thereof, even if the world seems to be darkly turning, I wake up and breathe that mountain air and feel it, deep in my heart, that I am home, and I can stop worrying so damn much.  There's food to make, there's family to feed, and there's a guitar around somewhere, and to hell with the rest of the universe.  Ultimately it all comes back in one breath, and I remember who I am.