It’s April, whence the prologue of The Canterbury Tales (CT) sprang, and at the beginning of my trip to Pennsylvania, I considered myself more a traveler than a pilgrim. Enter unexpected magic.
Take this version of The Canterbury Tales, left as offering in a house in Pennsylvania that I trudged through as a potential buyer. I won’t be buying the sweet house, but have a look in case you would. The dear seller left this book among others on the dining table with a note, “Please, take one.” I immediately thought of my friend Susan because I seem to recall how much pleasure she derived from the Tales. Having packed hastily for my trip, I failed to add a book to my suitcase, and so I indulgently claimed this one for my own.
Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, I don’t often stay in a hostelrye, and now I realize my folly. At small inns there’s the pleasure of making the acquaintance of fellow travelers. Upon our arrival in Pennsylvania, we entered the Franklin & Marshall guest quarters and were greeted by a New Yorker, recumbent on a sofa, watching an NCAA game. He later shared that his family was giving a lecture on campus about the movie Defiance, which was based on his father’s story.
The next morning, when the person behind door number two rose, we learned that he had slept the whole previous afternoon because he had just arrived from Egypt. He was visiting the college for a high school academic advising office.
The greatest object of curiosity for me in the guest quarters was in the manager’s office—a Fender. I hadn’t brought a guitar with me, and though I was twitching to pick it up, I’ll never touch another man’s guitar without his permission. The morning I left the house, as I exited the door, who should share the doorstep with me but the manager. Our eyes locked as we did the dance of my walking forward while he waited for me to step past him. I saw a kindred spirit in this fellow guitar player. “Did you see how he looked at me?” I asked my husband as I took my place in the passenger seat. He told me he always notices.
The next day at an open house at a day school, the headmaster chatted with me about his hometown in Carolina, his university days at UNC, and his tip for the trip: Visit Wilbur Chocolates.
When we headed home at the end of the week, we averted interstate traffic by finding a road less traveled—29 South. Of all the pilgrimages I’ve ever wanted to take, it is to return to the Virginia home of my family, the Blankenbakers, originally known as the Blankenbuchers. To my astonishment, this trip down 29 South was that very pilgrimage. Our car passed through the county of Madison where the family settled in 1742, past the birthplace of the Revolutionary War soldier Nicholas Blankenbaker (likely a member of the Culpeper Minute Men Battalion), past many roads named Hebron this or Hebron that (the Hebron Register was the source of my genealogical study a couple decades back at the Filson Club in Louisville) and past the town of Nicholas’s muster, Culpeper. Finally 29 South became NC86, and then Old Fayetteville Road, which enters my neighborhood and changes names until it is my street. All these eight years in Carolina I have lived on a direct route to my ancestral homeland in Virginia without ever knowing.
My first week back from this accidental pilgramage, I accompanied my son to his art show. His class exhibited masks, and I took a shining to one and just may make it my new Facebook profile pic because spring has got a hold on me this April. Like the small fowls making melody in the prologue of the CT, I find myself at night with open eye, yet not sleeping as they somehow manage to do, because I’m down with a bad case of pollen fever.
But if this spring finds you “longen” to “goon on pilgramages,” I wish you pleasant company and magic along your way. Upon your return, offer up your acoustic memory, pilgrim.
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