Afton Inn (2007)

Melanie and I were married four years ago, on April Fool's Day 2007. A month later, we took a brief honeymoon to Albemarle County, in my home state of Virginia, where I had attended law school, to enjoy the Shenandoah Valley, grits at Sarge's, and Crozet Pizza. In the 1950s, Holiday Inn built a striking Modernist motor lodge atop Afton Mountain, where the Blue Ridge Parkway intersects U.S. 250. Time has not been kind to it. Holiday Inn dropped the franchise, and now it lives on as the Afton Inn. We arrived at night in an impenetrable fog. Once the fog cleared, the view was magnificent. But the rooms were threadbare, the mildew masked by plug-in air fresheners. I took this photo of Melanie the morning after we arrived. This morning, four years later, I walked through our offices and ... what's that smell? ... my colleague plugged one of those air fresheners into his wall, redolent with memories of Afton Mountain.

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