By Traci Hoover
As an awkward middle schooler (we called it “junior high” back then), I found myself in a church youth group that planned a fall retreat just a two-hour drive from my hometown in the North Carolina foothills. That place was Valle Crucis. That weekend we did what middle schoolers do on youth retreats: roasted marshmallows, went on hikes, snuck out on the fire escape, square danced, and took turns soaking in ancient claw-footed bathtubs (well, maybe that is not something middle schoolers normally do on retreats!). I can’t remember if I went on more than one retreat there as a teenager, but my memories are so vivid I feel certain I must have, or maybe it was just the kind of place that left that deep of an impression.
You can imagine my surprise and delight when in the fall of 1992 I started attending Blacknall and learned that their Women’s Retreat happened each November at Valle Crucis! I must admit that it wasn’t too hard a sell to get me to sign up. Before I went and even when I first arrived, I didn’t feel that different from that awkward middle schooler who’d warmed herself before the same stone fireplace just a little over a decade before. I didn’t really know many people. Okay, I didn’t know anyone except the people in the car I’d just ridden up in!
What do I remember about that first retreat and, really, all the ones that successively followed it and have now merged into a collage of Valle Crucis memories? I remember laughter. Turns out I had landed among a group of women who loved to laugh and sometimes my sides hurt and my eyes spilled out tears from the laughter we shared while we sat by the fire, ate delicious food in the dining hall, hiked, and yes, shopped at the Mast General Store down the mountain.
But the laughter was simply the sapling, the tiny little sprout that put its roots down and caused something else to grow in my life: a tree, which now 30 years later sprawls and, because of where it was first planted, is always covered in beautiful fall foliage in my mind. It was the beginning of three decades of friendships richer than I could have ever imagined. Over the years, many women come and go from Blacknall. It’s the nature of who we are as a community, an outpost of God’s kingdom in this vibrant but transient place called Durham. For me, though, when I consider this sprawling beautiful tree of friendships that I have had because of Blacknall, I recognize that it’s no coincidence that the sapling was first planted in a place known as the Valley of the Cross.
Come on the retreat! You will not regret it even if there’s no longer claw-footed tubs to soak in!
Traci is a member of Blacknall.
The Women's Retreat is Nov. 11-13 at the Valle Crucis Conference Center in Banner Elk. The cost for the retreat is $150. Scholarships are available. Questions? Email Becky bgould@blacknall.org. Register now. The deadline in Nov. 1.