This coming Saturday, June 6, at 2:00 I’ll be at Joe’s Place,

640 S Main St, Greenville, SC 29601

with my friend, Pat Spears, author of Dream Chaser.

We’ll talk a little, read a little, and mingle a lot. I love the bookstore’s motto: Sit, sip, read! They have coffee, beer, wine, and various munchies. More importantly, some of my best friends and family have promised to come! That means YOU, right?

Greenville is my home town, the place that more than any other shaped me. Each day this week, I’ll post something that I love about the town––in no particular order. There’s so much!

To start with, there’s Paris Mountain. Greenville is a gateway to the Appalachians on this end of the trail. From here, one can access almost every corner of the gigantic chain, one of the world’s oldest mountain ranges.

Paris Mountain is a little monadnock that sits almost alone in this corner of the Piedmont, but from its top you can see very far, indeed. When I was a child, this was my wilderness.

The place where my family gathered for picnics, spring, summer, and fall; where we swam in the cold, clear lake, and hiked around the waterfalls, avoiding copperheads and, when I was very little, bears. I think the latter are all gone from the mountain now, as it’s surrounded by development ( See the mountain from the city skyline, below) but back then, it was truly wilderness.

Long, long ago, part of my family owned a piece of this mountain. There still exists at one end, the ruins of a mill that replaced the mill owned by a 4 X great-grandfather.

As a teenager, my friends and I played all over this mountain, doing all the things (ahem!) that teenagers do.

When my own boys were small, we took pictures of them by a giant rock. They loved it as much as I do.

Today, my family occasionally still has family reunions there.

It is a touchstone of my existence. Below, there’s one of my first publicity photos, taken on the mountain,

Tomorrow:the place where I retreated when the world was dark.