SLOW ROAD HOME

A Blue Ridge Book of Days

Author: Fred First

ISBN #  First and Current Edition is 978-0-9779395-0-3
ISBN # Second Edition will be digitally printed after the first of the year and
the ISBN # will be 978-0-9779395-1-0

Copyright 2006

Published by  Goose Creek Press, Floyd VA

Back Cover

Excuse me. Where does this road go?

With a naturalist’s curiosity, a photographer’s eye, and the heart of one who knows that he lives at least where he belongs, Fred First, in Slow Road Home invites the reader to join him on a field trip through time and place.

Following the sudden realization at fifty-four that his working life had left him unfulfilled in those needs that mattered most, First leaves that world behind. Tracking the quiet turns of solitude’s seasons, these short essays capture the daily miracles of an extraordinary time in a beautiful place.

First finds himself home at last in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, and most especially in one narrow valley along Goose Creek in Floyd County. Why, he wonders, do some places call to us so strongly that we cannot ignore their pull? What does belonging to a place mean? Can it be felt fully, apart from a reverence for and deep connection with the ordinary just outside the back door?

It is that connection you will find in the particulars here, in a book best read the way it was lived: slowly, a day, a moment at a time.

About the Author

Fred is a lifelong biology watcher, photographer and teacher, with MS degrees in vertebrate zoology and physical therapy. In 2002, Fred temporarily left his former professions and began to write from his home in the remote corner of a rural Virginia county that needs only on traffic light. Since then, he has recorded more than a dozen essays for broadcast on the Roanoke NPR station, WVTF. He writes a biweekly column called The Road Less Traveled for the Floyd Press; and he has pieces published in journals and magazines including Birmingham Arts Journal, Greenprints, Pet Life, Flow, Blue Ridge Country Magazine and Nantahala Review. He credits his weblog, Fragments from Floyd, for the discipline of daily writing-the story that has now become this book.

After a brief time away during which writing was his focus, Fred has returned to teaching biology at Radford University and to physical therapy practice in a nearby clinic. When he isn’t teaching, treating patients or writing, he enjoys gardening, natural history, digital photography and – as long as his journal lasts – gathering the firewood to heat their restored farm house on Goose Creek. Fred and Ann have two grown children, on grandchild, and always at least one Labrador retriever.

*