The land came to us in waves of mountains, crests of forests, embracing\u00a0us as we moved across it.<\/p>\n
I drove and drove and drove. More than eight hours of driving, through North Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and finally Virginia, to the place where Tom’s birth parents<\/a> met.<\/p>\n Although we were on interstate freeways, the ride through the Appalachians was scenic. Plenty to rest my eyes, in glimpses from\u00a0the 75\u00a0mph watchfulness. Plenty for Tom to roam with his eyes and mind – familiar routes from his own youth.<\/p>\n Every road trip I’ve ever taken in the United States has helped me to understand our country a little better.<\/p>\n Driving is the way I’ve developed a visceral sense of how big the U.S.\u00a0is. So much land that is still undeveloped, so much wealth in natural resources, so much space for people to sprawl across. And all so beautiful.<\/p>\n Geography is destiny. Because the U.S. is so huge and so rich in resources, we had room to take in immigrants from every nation and room to accommodate every kind of belief and lifestyle.<\/p>\n In America, if you don’t like your neighbors\u00a0or your family or your opportunities, you just move somewhere else. Mobility allows us to live up to our potential as individuals.<\/p>\n It isn’t always that simple, of course. If you were a single woman in a small rural town in the early ’60s and you wanted to have a life of travel and adventure, you didn’t just leave home unless it was for college or a husband.<\/p>\n That’s the context in which\u00a0I see Tom’s birth mother.<\/p>\n She\u00a0was in 5th grade when Richard and his sisters arrived in her town, from England. Their school was tiny – less than 150 kids in\u00a0five upper grades – and the foreign newcomers surely caught her attention. Richard was a crossing guard; maybe he stopped cars for her as she walked to school.<\/p>\n After two years, Richard’s family moved to a bigger town nearby, but she\u00a0easily could have kept track of them. Richard’s\u00a0sisters ran a dress shop and traveled to New York for the runway shows; that, too, offered her\u00a0a window on a larger and more exotic world far from the Appalachians.<\/p>\n She\u00a0was in college in 1963. It\u00a0was an accomplishment\u00a0for a woman in the early 1960s – less than one-third<\/a> of the women who were her\u00a0age that year enrolled in college.<\/p>\n The cost of her\u00a0education must\u00a0have involved some sacrifice for\u00a0her working class family, and that had to be part of why they were so disappointed in her for getting pregnant.<\/p>\n She told the social worker at the time that “she had known your birth father for awhile and he meant a lot to her,” the adoption records note.<\/p>\n Perhaps she\u00a0secretly hoped that Richard would marry her. As his wife, she’d still get away from home, following his Air Force career.<\/p>\n But that wasn’t to be. By the time she signed the papers relinquishing rights to her child, on December 30, 1963, she and Richard “were not very close anymore.”<\/p>\n At the end of today, when Tom and I finally arrived at the hotel, we were exhausted from our journey. But we had passed the town where his birth mother\u00a0was born, where she met Richard.<\/p>\n Tomorrow, we will meet him.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 1964, the year that Tom was adopted, on January 22.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The land came to us in waves of mountains, crests of forests, embracing\u00a0us as we moved across it. I drove and drove and drove. More than eight hours of driving, through North Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and finally Virginia, to the place where Tom’s birth parents met. Although we were on interstate freeways, the … read more Big and beautiful<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[1102,386,82,385,732,1280,20,135,1279],"class_list":["post-9480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inheritance","tag-1102","tag-adoption","tag-beauty","tag-birth","tag-driving","tag-geography","tag-tom","tag-travel","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9480"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9743,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9480\/revisions\/9743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}