Thomas, my boy:

I am writing this from the kitchen of our new house in Sylva, and I’m writing it exactly one month later than I intended. This letter, the sort that I write to you and your sisters exactly once every three years, is somehow overdue, but I feel that if you look back on this time—and goodness, what memories you’ll have of it going forward—you may very well understand.

The kitchen is a good enough place for writing because Mom bought a trio of barstools after she dropped you off at your new school, the one you started four weeks ago after break. Millie is stretched out on a bathroom mat spread out in the den floor; it’s comically too small, but somehow it ended up there, and it’s the right size for our young pup.

There are still boxes and boxes left to unpack and a couch and a bed down in the detached garage that we don’t know what to do with. We are still learning how to pull into and out of the steep driveway without scraping the bottoms of our cars. 

All of which is to say, your ninth birthday fell in a maelstrom of life. In the last 80 days, the world you’ve spent your entire life in was turned upside down, then packed away, then upended once more. 

It’s my fault.

A new job—new jobs for both Mom and me, for that matter—and with them, a new house and a new school. The letter-p neighborhood circuit you loved lapping on your bicycle is far away now, not to mention the house where we brought you home from the hospital. Far away, too, are the friends you’d grow up to call upon, and your family, and the creek behind your uncle’s house. 

You’ve had to give up a lot to accommodate your parents’ ambition. We have tried to reward you with a comfortable house, set up on a hill on a steep narrow lane with a vigorous brook at the bottom. All around us are the mountain tops that enchanted me as a young man, the peaks and their shadowy valleys called with ancient names.

In truth, my greatest fear in all of this change is that somehow I would mess things up for you and your sisters, that prying us out of our deep seated comfort would accidentally nudge somebody off course by half a degree, and in the span of decades and generations, we’d whip around to realize the uncorrectable consequences of our actions. 

However, my son, for all of my worry there is the assurance of  you. While I know this season of change hasn’t been easy for you, I have seen you tested in ways that life hasn’t challenged you before. And without even showing the effort, you’ve righted yourself in these stormy waters, paddling along as if the weather was sunny. At supper this weekend, you shared that you’d aced your midterm math test check-in; your teacher announced to the class that if anyone had any questions about their math, they needed to ask Thomas Hogan.

And last week, when the pair of moving trucks arrived with all our things, you leapt back on your bike and raced down our steep hill, all the way across the brook and up to the mailboxes at the end of the road. Your inherent Thomas-ness is alive and well—and of course it is. Picking up and moving into a rural, national forest couldn’t blunt the boy wonder you possess.

The sun doesn’t rise over the ridge at our house until a quarter past nine in the heart of winter. If you want to feel the warmth of the sun on your face before then, you have to weave down the mountain road, around some of these ancient rocks, and find your way along the valley floor. And even then you’ll only find scattered beams peeking around the mountains’ shoulders. 

The painted light, though, is magnificent—the Great Smokies live up to their name every clear morning: the kind of haze produced only through great distance, touched now and then by mist coming off the river, with puffs of wood smoke here and there from the chimneys hidden among trees. 

There is a part of me that I know belongs here, something I felt deep inside when I came here in college. I felt it immediately, as soon as I stepped out of the car as a teenaged high school kid. I pray that you find that same spark inside you, my son, that same connection to this noonday sun forest, the beckoning burble of the river down the road, the strength of the exposed rockface jutting about. I love you deeply, deeper than I can even muster or express sometimes, and as we both grow into our new home here, I cannot wait to see the ways you take on all of this new-ness.

Love,
Me