Randolph County, NC

My uncle, Bill Lineberry died earlier this month, and once more I returned to Randolph County, North Carolina, the ancestral home of the Lineberry family.

A brief family history from my memory and without any fact checks: Sometime in the 18th Century, Johan Jacob Leyenberger settled in Randolph County, changed his name to Lineberry -- presumably to sound less foreign -- and proceeded to have twelve children that survived into adulthood. None of my ancestors moved out of the county until my father, Weaver Lineberry moved away after college. He never moved back.

My father and his brother led different lives. We moved around a lot growing up, until my father finally settled down and got divorced in Athens, GA. He stayed there until declining health drove him to an assisted living facility and eventually into the rehab facility where he died in 2018 at the age of 78. His funeral was the last time I was in Randolph County.

It was my home and is not my home. Now, I live in Atlanta and for the most part, I think of this city with familiar streets and a host of friends larger than anywhere else I have lived, as my home. Yet something about Randolph County still calls back my childhood, which was pleasant enough, and a strange world that I could have been a part of had my father not pursued success in some other place. I am thankful to this day that he left. Our ancestral home was a small world for him and it would have been a smaller, less fruitful world for his children had we stayed.

After the service for my uncle at Mt. Lebanon United Methodist Church, my brothers and I walked the adjacent cemetery. It was a hot day, clear sky, bright sun, and I carried a parasol. No one else was bothered by the sun. Lineberry headstones stretch back centuries. It's the most familiar part of Randleman to me now: grandmother's house has been remodeled, the Rose's where she used to buy us cheap toys, indulgent at the time, has shut down, and my cousins have all moved to other, nearby cities and towns.

The drive home was more than six hours and it will never feel shorter than it did that day.