acting on a whim

      Another in our series on decisions that have changed our lives. For previous installments, see here, here, and here.

We’ve all reflected on those “Sliding Doors” moments in our lives, when we faced an important decision and chose one path over another. We’ve asked ourselves, “what if I had chosen this other path rather than the one I chose? Where would life have taken me? Who would I have become?”

      Many times, over the last 40 years, I have thanked the stars for aligning as they did in 1984 when I moved to Chapel Hill, NC, to attend graduate school. I applied to the master’s program in the University of North Carolina’s geology department knowing absolutely nothing about the program or its professors. All I knew was that North Carolina was a beautiful state—it had mountains, and I wanted to live there.

      For nearly 10 summers as a child, my family drove from New Orleans to Cashiers, NC, the third week of June to vacation at an old family-run inn. The first time we pulled up in front of the inn, covered in chestnut bark siding and surrounded on two sides by a huge wrap-around porch, my mother took a deep breath and said, “this is rustic!”

      My parents had seen an ad for the inn in “Golf Digest,” and after finding out there was a children’s program that ran for several hours each day, freeing them up for golf and cocktails, they couldn’t make reservations fast enough.

      We had not traveled much outside the Deep South, so experiencing the beauty of North Carolina’s mountains was transformative. The only “hills” we knew were the levees that kept Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River from flooding our city. The cooler temperatures were a welcomed treat for us: the very idea we might need to wear sweaters on June mornings was nearly mind-blowing.

      I first saw lightning bugs in these mountains, swam in a freezing cold lake, learned to ride a horse, hiked up a mountain. My brother and I still remember some of the college students whose summer job it was to be our “counselors” while our parents had time to themselves.

      I loved this place so much that when I was looking for a ticket out of Louisiana after college, I decided North Carolina was where I needed to be. I must have thought Chapel Hill would look like the mountains and I would experience the same positive feelings living there that I had visiting the mountain inn each summer as a child. Although it astounds me now that I chose a graduate program for such a silly reason, I’m so glad I did.

      Chapel Hill didn’t have mountains or a freezing cold lake, but it had its own charm, and I quickly grew to love it. Landing in North Carolina led me down one path, which then branched off onto another path, which eventually led me to a great job and a husband, two wonderful sons, lots of great friends.

      Had I not followed a whim—one founded on wonderful memories of an annual family vacation—where would I have ended up? Staying in Louisiana? Forging a career as a petroleum geologist? Who knows?

      Later in life, my family and my brother’s family vacationed at the inn in Cashiers every other summer. My brother and I hoped our kids would establish foundational memories of this place, as we had. Each time we arrived and entered the lobby to check in, the smell of the lodge—woody, smokey—sent me back to summers in the 1970s and the excitement my family felt as we started our vacation in the mountains.

      In 2017, the family that had owned the inn since 1922 sold it to a corporation located in another state. It has been changed radically, or so I hear. I don’t want to see it in its current state. I care to remember it like it was in the ‘70s and to reflect on the role an old inn played in determining the course of my life.