New at BRT as Spring embellishes our Blue Ridge with pink blossoms and bluebirds: Virginia Reflections, Franklin County Scrapbook, Blue Ridge Backyard, and Across the Kitchen Table. We invite all of you to share especially meaningful Virginia memories and traditions that you have experienced in the Virginia Reflections column. Based as we are in Rocky Mount, our Franklin County Scrapbook aims to attract similar recollections from our local families. 
 
Artistic Bedford County naturalist Sue Martin offers illustrated articles on backyard flora and fauna: bird life, wildlife in a Virginia backyard, gardens, and more for the cheery Blue Ridge Backyard. 
 
A Franklin County husband’s fascination for sampling and roasting exotic coffee beans and his wife’s collection of cookbooks and antique kitchen implements inspired BRT’s Across the Kitchen Table article and a church-supper-favorite oatmeal cake dessert. Premier Williamsburg hostess Cindy Masek offers up decadent dessert recipes as complements to a cup of coffee. Unusual recipes and food-related hobbies and collections are needed. Send us your favorites, be they recipes from your great-grandmother or some musing about family china, a teapot collection, heirloom tablecloths. You get the idea! The kitchen table is a hub of news and projects (and chocolate!) here in the Blue Ridge region.
 
Working several issues ahead at all times, we are pursuing stories along RT. 11, the Shenandoah and James rivers, and some of the history that shaped small towns, western expansion, heroic events, and artistic life in our Blue Ridge region. 
 
Soon, expect revelations about the 2nd Virginia Cavalry (you know which war!), enchanting letters about Malcolm Bryan’s grandmother as a girl at The Greenbrier in the days when travel was by carriage and serendipity could bring marriage. As you drive along the twisty roads and rivers, think of all the young artisans and writers BRT will be showcasing who work right now in workshops, studies, and studios scattered amongst the mountains and towns. There’s poetry in these hills. BRT celebrates well-crafted history, tales, crafts, furniture, art, and lives. Culture. 
 
BRT is being sold all over the Blue Ridge region and beyond, with new places being added to the list all the time. If you know places that you think would carry BRT, tell us! Gourmet kitchen shops, museums, flower shops, art galleries, motels, tea rooms, country stores, restaurants, drug stores, and bookstores are among the many spots now selling BRT. See the list here and on our website. 
 
Our readership is varied, from the farm family to the philanthropist vacationing on a mountaintop. We are fast approaching 1000 subscribers. BRT is filling a cultural vacuum. Perhaps I could say that BRT is a beautiful alternative to, ummm, bodice-ripping “musical” performances and provocative world news. We all need real beauty in our lives. Try BRT. 
 
Inspiration, information, (and chocolate!) exist all around us, and we spend quite a lot of time on the roads of Virginia finding such for BRT. On an unusually frigid day, I headed up the Mother Road, Rt. 11, to Lexington while my Senior Editor headed up truck-choked I-81 for Buchanan, both in search of old books, coffee, chocolate, and good conversation. She found a Mary Johnston expert at Fireside Books and coffee at La Tasse across the street, and I hit gold (and chocolate!) in Lexington, first in The Cocoa Mill Chocolate Company (for energy and warmth) and then up the street at The Bookery. Tucked into a tottering pile of Virginiana, much of which I bought for BRT, was this treasure, an especially lovely quotation from Wallace Nutting’s 1930 sentimental but eloquent Virginia Beautiful. 
 
Virginia is at the portal of a future which expands fanlike, spreading like the dawn of a grander day. When all her people are open to the appealing of the past, as they may be, when all of them by a nobler system of education grasp, as so many have done, the heritage of the ages, who will set a limit to what Virginia may show in a hundred years, where beauty may reign over the home, the thought, the works of her people.
 
Virginia is again at that portal. Celebrate its culture with us here at Blue Ridge Traditions.

 - Ibby Greer

<< Back to Archive