A day in my life keeps coming back to me, which means it must matter somehow.
I don’t know when exactly it happened during the two years I went to preschool at the First Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. The teachers, Mrs. Ball, wife of the chief of the city’s fire department, and another kind woman, Mrs. Smith, organized us all to visit the dairy farm attached to the Biltmore Estate, a Loire-style chateau erected by the Vanderbilts in 1895 and nestled within rolling foothills and hardwood forests. They even built a small village to house the original estate workers and, in the 1970s, Biltmore Village stood incongruously near the Asheville Drive-In and flea market, out-of-time and out-of-place, its half-timber wattle-and-daub cottages housing what passed then for boutiques and fine shops.