My family moved to Asheville from Chapel Hill in the late ’80s when I was 2 years old. My parents were drawn here because of Asheville’s natural beauty, charm and incredibly well-regarded medical community. They both spent 30-plus years serving our region’s health care needs up until their recent retirements. We lived in North Asheville, and I have vivid childhood memories of hiking Craggy Gardens, camping at Graveyard Fields, rafting down the French Broad and Nolichucky, sledding the Grove Park Inn golf course, and driving through downtown amidst abandoned buildings. This was around the time of the Asheville Renaissance of the early 1990s, when a group of determined visionaries saved our city and created the Asheville we know and love today.

I loved growing up in Asheville. Ten years ago, when my husband, Ben, finished dental school at the University of North Carolina, we knew in our hearts that we were meant to come home, and it has been a joy raising our two kids close to their four grandparents and in our home communities. So many of our closest childhood friends have also moved home to raise their families. There is something here that is special, something that grounds us to the earth and lifts our spirits toward the mountain peaks above us. There is something divine about our Blue Ridge Mountains. We all feel it.

In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastation to our city and to the WNC region, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened here and how I’m feeling. I think we’ve all been struggling.

I’ve been reflecting on my memories of the city and our mountains from my childhood, and what it means to be an Ashevillian and a Western North Carolinian. Part of Asheville’s allure is that we get the best of both worlds — the city and the mountains. We all get to live in a thriving mountain city, surrounded by incredible smaller towns and communities, all with their distinct traditions and charms — Black Mountain, Marshall, Canton and our favorite, Brevard, Ben’s hometown.

And then the mountains — the billion-year-old Blue Ridge, filled with forests, rivers, creeks, waterfalls and lakes that beg us to explore our limits and heal our souls. How are we so lucky to have all the most beautiful things in the world?

Ben and I didn’t meet each other until our senior years at UNC–Chapel Hill, even though we grew up 45 minutes from each other and had plenty of mutual friends. At Carolina (and honestly, this included NC State and Duke kids too) something funny happened — all the mountain people found each other. In high school, we’d had our factions and rivalries; T.C. Roberson versus Asheville High soccer felt pretty seismic at the time. And then, while at Carolina, the kids from AHS, TCR, Reynolds, Owen, Brevard, Carolina Day (the 828) — we just found each other and sighed in relief, “Here are my people.” Because again, there’s something special that happens when you are raised in and by these mountains. They hold us. They ground us. They call out to us when we drive back west on I-40 and see that first peek of the hills: home.

Part of what I’ve been struggling to process is the grief I feel about these very hills that have always made me feel safe, held, loved. When part of our identity is based on our relationship to a place — to a mountain, to a river, to a holler, to a majestic 100-year-old oak tree — and that place gets swept away, that ground moves from under our feet … it is emotionally, not just literally, destabilizing. For years we will be discovering the ways in which this storm has altered our favorite places, has changed the land and rivers that have defined our lives, traditions and memories. We will need to challenge ourselves and each other to learn to love and trust again the things that brought us meaning and joy — a babbling mountain stream, a forest of strong white oaks, even a late-summer thunderstorm.

I also want us to remember that the individual people of a city, of a neighborhood, of any community truly matter and we will all be called to help Asheville and our WNC neighbors recover. I’ve never felt more acutely that we truly belong to each other. We will likely need yet another Asheville Renaissance. We will need to reimagine ourselves as we rebuild, and I hope we make our kids proud of the new world we create together, in our beautiful mountain home.