It is two weeks past Mother’s Day, late afternoon, when I see a doe on the neighboring pasture. Light slices across the grass from its peach horizon, nearly blinding. Around the fringes of haze, I see there is also a tiny fawn with noodle-like legs behind the doe, and a few feet away, the neighbor’s small bulldog bluff-barking the two of them. The doe does something that I’ve never seen her do before in her elegant tiptoe strolls—she lifts one leg and hooves the ground, then the other leg, same motion. Her head thrusts forward toward the dog. She repeats the controlled stomping several times then makes a mock charge toward the dog.

Every time I think I know this place where I’ve lived for forty years, it up and shows me something new. I recall vividly my first crossing of the Blue Ridge after leaving Tennessee, how descending onto this plateau, the heavy basil-boxwood scent and bluish air spoke in some familiar old voice. The area’s colonial history was palpable, and Jefferson’s university was strung with whispering ivy. It was magical, so of course I found reasons to hate it. I was confounded by its lack of country breakfasts, (biscuits and gravy, grits), its influx of snappy northerners.

Above all, I was shocked by the prevailing prejudice against people from the southwest end of the state and over the border into Kentucky and Tennessee. Yes, like where I came from, like where nine generations of my family established themselves. During my first interview at a medical center, the nursing director explained to me that the patients from the Appalachian end of the state had poverty and violence “bred into their genes.” The doctors I worked with laughed at what they called the “276 accents.” This was the area code down around Bristol.

One year after another, I planned to leave central Virginia. After my baccalaureate. After my master’s degree. After retirement. But then I’d drive out toward Madison or Appomattox or Jamestown and Chesapeake and the blue wind that called me back in 1984, called again. Something I couldn’t identify pulled at my hand, pulling me deeper into rural Virginia. A family of wood thrush made their home in my yard and the first time I heard their call, fragile as blown glass, I wept.

Now I understand that more than inertia holds me here. After some hefty genealogy work, I discover my straight matrilineal line begins right here in Albemarle. My sixth great-grandmother Isabella Bodby Abney was born here in 1740. Likely the first of my maternal line born on this continent, she sleeps in Virginia soil, possibly in Augusta though locating her is another leg of the journey, through thirty-pound deed books and shifting land boundaries (Albemarle was formed from Goochland, Augusta from Orange). It is the story of a nearly untraceable branch of maternal ancestors who were not allowed to own land except as widows, recipients of a husband’s good will. It is the story of land grabbing and the Irish/Brit diaspora, where my grandmothers’ assumed migration patterns from northern ports through the Cumberland Gap and Shenandoah valley opens into the mystery of Isabella and her presence in Albemarle, where six generations later, she still shadows the ground and moves through the trees.

Cast a wide enough net and you’ll find several ports of belonging. I want to feed the wood thrush but discover (another new thing) they are insect feeders. I make piles of leaves and watch them peck underneath for worms and beetles. It’s all in the dirt, rich and loamy, everything they need. I will miss their song when I visit my parents’ graves in southeast Kentucky this summer. But I’ll be assured by the presence of the ancestors and when it’s time to return to Virginia, ringed by the mountains, my eldest grandmother who first called me across the Blue Ridge back in the eighties will call again: Come home, you who are weary, come home.

Wild Onions

My 6th great grandmother
rests in Virginia dirt, wild onions
on her grave. She lived a good

life, so declare the stringy tops
who archive deeds of the dead.

Daffodils grow close by, but what
can a flower ever know
of things a woman will do to survive?

Ubiquitous as rain, the bitter
greens; onion, mustard, dandelion,

offer a slim bite at winter’s end,
fill apron whisperings of wool
on mud. A maid’s harvest of mostly

skin and translucency, ghostly
snap of a radish. Trees, still leafless,

stoop at river’s edge like the back
of a gathering woman, rooted
in her measure of shadows,

stains of grassy light on the tips
of her fingers.

Sharon Perkins Ackerman’s poems have appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Places, Kestrel, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Salvation South, and many others. Her second poetry collection, A Legacy of Birds (Kelsay Books, 2025), is available through New Dominion Books or Amazon. She is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.