ALMOST CARRIE ~ Almost Home

One of the best things about living in a city like New York is leaving it.

—Carrie Bradshaw (Season 1, Episode 3— “Bay of Married Pigs”)

My husband and I are leaving New York for the holidays, renting a car and driving to Elkton, VA to spend Christmas with my brother-in-law and his family on their farm.  Elkton—population 2,900—is tucked deep in the Shenandoah Valley, flanked by the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Massanutten Mountain Range, and the MillerCoors brewery and distribution center.  The farm is a composite of every cliché you could ever imagine: chicken coop, pig pen, shelves of jarred pickles in homemade brine.  There’s a rooster that crows at dawn, and a horse named Scarlet who noses up to the porch as if she were the star of a goddamn Disney cartoon.  It’s wonderful.

Beyond the blue-grey beauty of the mountain range and the furry new calves that dot the hillside, beyond Scarlet’s red-gold mane and the smoky wood-burning stove, there’s another, more immediate reason why I love Elkton.  By some stroke of pinch-me luck, my brother-in-law married one of my oldest and dearest friends—the Almost Miranda to my Almost Carrie, if you will.

The two of us grew up in Maine, far from our North Jersey brother-husbands.  My husband and I began dating in college, and I was soon introduced to his only sibling, a Daniel Boone-type who had fled the suburbs to homestead in God’s country.  When faced with the prospect of attending his whiskey-and-pig-roast themed birthday weekend, I begged my friend to come along.  I dangled the birthday boy before her as the bait, stressing that he loved canoeing and John Wayne, two of her non-negotiables.  I thought there was potential for a weekend romance; never did it occur to me that they would mate for life.  Now all family functions—holidays and baptisms and golden wedding anniversaries—come fully equipped with her.

As I get ready for Christmas in Elkton, I know that some things will never change.  I’ll poke fun at the red soccer shorts that my Miranda’s been wearing to bed since 1995, and she’ll tell me to stop furrowing my brow because the wrinkles will one day start to stick (after all these years, it turns out she was right).  She’ll say her hair is a wreck, and I’ll say it looks great, and our husbands will roll their eyes when we get tipsy and loud.  Some things, though, will change completely, not least of which is that fact that there’s a baby now—a little girl—who is not only my friend’s daughter, but my niece.  One day, she’ll be my children’s cousin.

And so a trip to rural Virginia, such a far cry from my existence in New York, ends up bringing me closer to Carrie’s world than anything the city can offer: it brings me home to that kind of friend.

The Shenandoah River

Scarlet

Emily Sproch is a writer and a Sex and the City tour guide.  Each Friday, she chronicles the fine line between reality and fiction in her column “Almost Carrie.”