Last year, I visited the Thomas Wolfe museum in Asheville, North Carolina, with a good friend. Thinking about that trip brings me back to a handful of words:
“A stone, a leaf, an unfound door.”
Those words appear in Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. A Stone, a Leaf, a Door also became the title of a posthumous collection of passages from his writing, selected and arranged as poetry. (thomaswolfe.org, thomaswolfe.org)
There is something about those three ordinary things that invites you to slow down.
A stone holds its place while the world changes around it. A leaf has its season, then lets go. A door offers the possibility of stepping into something you haven’t yet known.
That’s my reading of those images. Together, they make me think about what we carry, what we release, and what we’re still hoping to find.
The Thomas Wolfe Memorial preserves the boardinghouse his mother operated—the home that helped shape his life and his fiction. It is a place where a writer’s beginnings remain connected to the words he left behind. (historicsites.nc.gov)
I’m grateful I made that trip. And I’m grateful I shared it with a good friend.
Books become part of our lives in unexpected ways. Sometimes a few words bring back a whole journey—and the person who was there beside us.
A stone. A leaf. A door.
And a memory worth keeping.
—JC
