Inspiration Thursday! Missing home.

It seems like I just wrote about our vacation - stealing those last warm, sunny days - and fall blew into DC. I'm not complaining, mind you. Fall is one of my favorite seasons. Fall is when I acquired new school supplies in anticipation of a new school year. Fall is when the air becomes crisp. Fall brings the kind of sleeping weather where you can leave the windows open and wake up perfectly snug in a quilt.

Although I've lived in the DC area for 15 years now and have a home of my own, I tend to long for "home" this time of year - West Virginia is the home I long to see. When I was in college, our choir sang "My Home Among the Hills." There's a land of rolling mountains, where the sky is blue above. And though I may roam, I hurry home to the friendly hills I love... there autumn hill sides are bright with scarlet trees....

That's what I miss the most in this season, the rolling mountains of color. It's a sea of reds, greens, yellows, oranges or the harder to define colors like a coral or chartreuse that give my hills life in autumn. The color blankets the hills in undulating waves that coat the Appalachians like my quilt covers me in warmth. Although it's the end of their cycle, those leaves give a last burst of life that even now I see in my mind long after they're dust on a forest floor. It's life. It's comforting. It's home.

And so as it turns chilly, my feet itch to return to my home among the hills so I can tuck away another WV autumn in my heart.

Vintage Wednesday: Social History

There are moments in life where a word or phrase opens a new door - one you'd not known existed before - into a world that delights you with it's rightness. College was full of these moments for me. Things I knew in their randomness suddenly started finding order. Much of this order I attribute to a history professor named Bill Mahoney.

Professor Mahoney - as we called him when we first met him - was still finishing up his doctorate so he was still close enough to being a student that he seemed to identify with us just a little better than the other professors. Most of the other history professors were in the latter stages of their careers, which made Mahoney a breath of fresh air. His classes were FUN.

History had pretty much been a part of my life. I joke that we've probably seen every fort on the east coast, but I don't really remember going to the beach until I was 14 (I don't count the trip that happened when I'd just turned 4 because it's a little hazy). I'd dressed up in 18th century costumes and traveled to rendezvous since we celebrated the bicentennial. Daddy is a huge American history buff we'd often hear stories of how our neck of the woods was settled. "It was down on the other side of the Cheat River, when we came up on this meetin' in the middle of the night...." History was everywhere. Taking history classes was inevitable.

The thing that Dr. Mahoney taught me, the thing that brought randomness into order, was the concept of social history. Now, there's a high falootin definition of the theory of social history, but to break it down into layman's terms, social history takes into account the way people lived. It's not just a series of dates and the study of wars. Social history values the entire picture of life as our society evolves.

Social history doesn't just mark the industrial revolution. Social history looks at the way people lived before the machines, the threat the machines brought to their way of life, the emotional reasons the Luddites rose up, the art and architecture that resulted, the population movements that ensued. It looks at the entire picture. And suddenly Mama talking about the lines of furniture or the designs in dresses changing from the 18th to the 19th centuries fit into Daddy's talks of battles and freedom. And every antique began to tell a story.

Even though I wasn't a history major, those classes opened my eyes. Instead of seeing a corset cover, I can tell you the class of person from the fabric and cut. Instead of seeing stitching on a sampler, I see the precursor to home schooling. Instead of seeing a wooden bowl, I see how that bowl fit into a family's life. I identify antiques by thinking about how we developed as a society. I probably couldn't tell you the important battles of the civil war or dates of international treaties, but I probably could tell you how people lived, what they wore, the kind of music they played and how they fed their children in a particular period of time. History is relevant to me in a way it wasn't before I took those classes.

Dr. Mahoney is still at my college teaching history - and I'm pretty sure he's still sharing obscure Irish and Czech punk music with students like me (I doubt I'd ever heard 3 Mustafas 3 without him). I don't know if what he's teaching as revolutionary to them as it was to me. I do know, however, that I'm very thankful he chose a little college town in WV to ply his trade.