England Encore: Home to our Home Away from Home

For most of our four decades together Jan and I have lived in Durham, Wake, or Orange County. However, in 1995-96 we relocated our family from North Carolina to the North Somerset village of Winscombe, near Bristol, England (a city where I spent a “junior year abroad” in 1969-70). Jon and David attended Sidcot School, founded by Friends in 1699, as all four of came to love this part of the world being part of the Sidcot community. Three or four times in the intervening years Jan and I returned to reconnect with British culture and to maintain friendships here. Winscombe is indeed our second home.

That’s why we chose to make it the last stop on our year of travel (although, as it happens, a HUG Your Baby engagement will take us to Amsterdam before we fly back to RDU). We even stayed in Beech Cottage, at "Uplands Cottages," the very place we had called our home nineteen years before!

Winscombe was a particularly fortunate choice because the English summer, which can be unpredictably chilly and rainy, turned out to be exceptionally mild and sunny this year. The hills, woodlands, pastures, buildings and gardens have looked their absolute best for us, lending a backdrop of loveliness to all we’ve done. As I write we are in a “heat wave” here, with temperatures climbing all the way to 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Our British friends are sweltering!

Even more than the pleasant setting and climate, we have enjoyed seeing Quaker friends and teacher friends, musician friends and academic friends, older friends and newer friends. We arrived in time to see the school year end at Sidcot, to take part in Winscombe’s annual summer festival, and to watch the village cricket team—all things we had never done before. Thanks to the generosity of Ruth and Denis Wright, we also got to visit Cornwall and to stay at their lovely Victorian home in Bristol.

It was especially precious for us to share the world of Winscombe with family and friends from home. We celebrated the wedding of sister Nancy and her partner, Kathryn. They were on a honeymoon trip to Europe, and we loved welcoming them to Beech Cottage, just as they had welcomed us to their home in Oakland in the spring. With them we cautiously drove (on narrow, curving lanes, where signs caution, “Oncoming traffic in middle of road”) to Stonehenge and Avebury, to Bath and Wells, and into Bristol to see Ruth and Denis and our mutual friend, the remarkable Dr. Hebe Welbourn (who has been a friend and mentor all my adult life).

Then we got to visit with Dave Smith and Susan Strozier, great friends from North Carolina. The four of us enjoyed the relaxed pace of life that country living affords—especially when others do the upkeep! Together we took walks, cooked dinners, made music, played tennis, watched the World Cup, and opened ourselves to the sacred beauty of Tintern Abbey and Wells Cathedral.

An unexpected highlight of our Winscombe visit occurred while walking out one evening to call on the donkeys of Uplands Cottages. I took along my borrowed alto saxophone, to see if it might entertain the long-eared neighbors. As I played, the donkeys responded. At first they brayed and approached with curiosity. Then, much to everyone's surprise, they exhibited full-on mating behavior. No doubt, this was the greatest extent to which my music has ever moved an audience!

What a joy to find the unexpected in the familiar, or to share the fond familiar with those experiencing it for the first time! Such happiness is a reward of enjoying a long life, of investing in loving relationships, and of daring to “live adventurously” (the motto of Sidcot School)!