Season for Grace Countdown Week Post #1

Carolina in My Mind

by Beth Collins

“In my mind, I’m gone to Carolina.” Homesick for Chapel Hill, where his father was a medical school professor at UNC, James Taylor penned these lyrics which continue to resonate with listeners over half a century later. In 2006, UNC bestowed him with its Lifetime Achievement Award, and the song is considered an unofficial anthem around campus (which is one setting in A Season for Grace).

Although my sister Stacy never lived in North Carolina, in her literary mind she was “gone to Carolina” – specifically, the fictitious town of Briar Creek. Her love for the Smoky Mountains was born during our many family vacations to Beech Mountain and Blowing Rock. (Like many Floridians, we fled to the mountains to escape the summer heat!) 

Getting our feet wet in North Carolina!

From a young age, we enjoyed wading in chilly creeks (pure Heaven for two Florida girls!) and visiting tourist attractions like Tweetsie Railroad, the Land of Oz, Grandfather Mountain, and the Blowing Rock. Stacy and I loved buying old-fashioned candy in general stores and bidding on trinkets at the local auction house. We panned for gold and went fishing with our father at a local trout farm (which was literally like catching fish in a barrel). At night we played cards or board games, marveling at the cool evening temperatures that allowed us to build a fire in July. 

In A Journey for Hope, Stacy brought her characters Hope and Dylan to several of these locations. Art imitated life when Hope and big sister Faith discussed an upcoming trip to Tweetsie Railroad: 

    “Didn’t we go as kids when Mom and Dad took us to Beech Mountain?” Hope folded a 

    soft blanket and put it in the basket. “And the Land of Oz as well?” 

    “We did, I remember sitting on that big plastic brown horse. You and Grace fought over 

    the smaller grey one.”

This anecdote is based on an actual dispute between Stacy and me regarding the relative merits of two life-size plastic model horses. As shown below, we compromised by sharing the grey horse!

Love our matching ponchos!

In A Season for Grace, the title character rents a cabin in Briar Creek while she tries to write her first novel. Finishing a book about someone writing their first book was certainly a unique experience. Was life imitating art, or art imitating life? 

“Carolina in My Mind” is a song about longing to revisit a place from your past and feel the same experiences you felt then. Now that Stacy is gone, it breaks my heart that we can never go back to Beech Mountain or Blowing Rock together. But through Stacy’s writing, I hope her friends and readers enjoy their final visit to Briar Creek as much we enjoyed our family trips to North Carolina.

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You can still buy the ebook version of A Season for Grace for the preorder price of $2.99. Be sure to claim your preorder gift by filling out the form on the publisher’s website. Just have your Amazon order number handy. If you prefer the paperback version, it will be available on August 20th.