The Brad Todd Family
We sought a getaway home to get back to the kind of pace and clarity that had shaped our upbringing. We wanted a spot that would keep our son and our then-six-year-old daughter from becoming city kids.
When I was younger, I thought “getting away” was a function of geography. But after our family’s first year as part-timers on the Northern Neck, we’ve realized that “getting away” really means getting not further from where we are but closer to who we are.
The sun had not yet set on our first day in our newly built cottage when our four-year-old son said the words that told us why we had chose n to be “come heres.”
“Can I go back outside?” my son asked, with a grin from ear to ear.
Despite the fact that it was a sub-40 winter day, he’d insisted on bundling up and playing in our yard that morning. “Yard” is not really the right term since a freshly sited septic tank had left the surrounding acre a swampy mess. At lunchtime, he stomped onto the porch, nose running, and said , “I’m cold. I need to warm up,” wholly unconcerned about the clay mud that covered him from head to toe.
A half hour and a change of pants later, he was ready for more. All the time spent making the drive from Alexandria to look at property for sale, to kick the tires on the towns, and then , eventually , to oversee construction, paid off in that instant. The ensuing year, our first on the bank of Mill Creek in Northumberland County, has helped ground our family life and right-size our kids’ horizons.
We moved to the hustle of Northern Virginia as newlyweds in 1999, as certain as most political transplants are that we’d only be in the capital region for a short time. Eight years later, we realized escape might have to come in stages and started poking around the Northern Neck, which we’d first visited for a wedding in 2006.
Coming from Tennessee and Ohio, we are not coastal people by DNA. So it wasn’t the b ay itself that drove us to the Northern Neck as much as it was the solitude and authenticity of the place.
I grew up on the same piece of rural property as did five generations of my ancestors , and my wife spent summers on her grandparents’ Blue Lick Farm just south of the b luegrass region of Kentucky.
We sought a getaway home to get back to the kind of pace and clarity that had shaped our upbringing. We wanted a spot that would keep our son and our then-six-year-old daughter from becoming city kids. Kathryn Murray of Warsaw’s River and Rural Realty listened to our priorities and patiently guided us to the exact patch of ground that fit : space, quality water, a view, and accessible to town.
By our first spring on Mill Creek, my daughter had become a dedicated bird-watcher and chronicler, encouraged by her grandmother, who thankfully got to visit our Northern Neck home twice in the spring before cancer shut down her travel and took her life.
My son, from that very first day, has declared himself a “country boy” and become both a serious fisherman and a proud first mate on our dual console bow runner. He says his favorite pastime is cutting firewood with his dad , and for my part, if there’s a high that’s better than manual labor with my boy , I need to avoid it.
We started the summer with a Memorial Day shrimp boil and ended it with a Thanksgiving weekend oyster roast, both hosted by Chip and Margaret Hudnall, who not only built our house but also took us in as friends and, by themselves, made Wicomico Church our home.
The classic Reedville Fourth of July celebration took my wife back to the neighborhood celebration of her youth that had made Independence Day her favorite holiday. My daughter declared the July concert on the green in Irvington , which we attended with a cooler full of my famous and perfected fried chicken , our new family tradition.
We all got hooked on our boat and all the places it could easily take us, from margaritas at Leadbelly’s in Fairport to ice cream at Reedville’s Chitterchats to prime rib dinner at Horn Harbor Restaurant in Burgess.
To our surprise, we love our river house in winter as much as summer. We build a fire and curl up on the sectional couch and watch the ice melt on the creek, resetting our brains from our overscheduled life in Alexandria.
We knew our kids needed a place to stretch their legs and their imaginations in ways our street-front townhouse would never let them. We got that and more.
We didn’t expect we would need a place like this to grieve, but it made a difference when we did. We originally viewed the two-and-a-half-hour drive as an obstacle, but we now know it’s when we have the best conversations with our kids.
After a year in river country, our only complaint is that weekends are not long enough. We now shorten our work weeks by staying bayside until Monday morning, with a dash back to Alexandria that begins at six o’clock and pauses only for a breakfast pick-up at Montross’s The Art of Coffee, just down the street from where our river weekend s begin on Friday s at Angelo’s Pizza.
We are gravitating to longer visits and look forward to spending two months uninterrupted this summer. And maybe, if we can make our careers cooperate, we’ll someday be able to get away year-round, and for good.
This article appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of The Local Scoop Magazine, pgs. 55-57.