My Father Sings . . . Country Roads

My youngest sister is having contractions -- a week or two early. She needs her mother by her side. My mom is headed north and I am headed south to keep my dad's spirits up so his recovery keeps rolling forward. I was already there with my parents third weekend.  I ccxve barely had a night at home when I turn around to head back . .  Home.  Because no other home has ever quite taken the place for me of the home my dad grew up in.

Through all our many moves, following the vagaries of American agriculture and the disappearance of family farms, which affected the market for the submersible irrigation pumps my dad designed, when we used to sing to Dad's guitar about "the place that I belong," it was never our various houses in Indiana, Ohio, California, or Wisconsin we thought of. It wasn't even our first houses in Utah, but it was the steep-roofed, pale green siding and white-trimmed house standing between two pine towers alive with birds' voices where my grandparents lived. This was the place where we came in my early childhood whenever we had a free weekend, where we still always came for Thanksgiving when we could after moving farther away, where we returned every summer without fail. This was the place.  Home is still that house I'm headed now . . . though it's a pale warm stucco now with a new garage, though the towering pines have died and been replaced by young blue spruce. The road still runs through familiar country to take me there.  To take me Home.

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Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze.

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong:
West Virginia, mountain mama,
Take me home, country roads.

All my memories gather round her,
Miner's lady, stranger to blue water,
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky,
Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye.

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong:
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads.

I hear her voice, in the morning hour she calls me.
The radio reminds me of my home far away.
Driving down the road I get a feeling
That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday.

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong:
West Virginia, mountain mama,
Take me home, country roads.

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong:
West Virginia, mountain mama.
Take me home, country roads.

Songwriters: Bill Danoff / John Denver / Taffy Nivert Danoff