So, why did we move here, anyway? I hope to tell you many reasons, many stories. Here is one of them.

Last year, maybe May. My husband Louis had spent the winter here, doing research on his family. I was visiting from Florida, or perhaps by May, from New York. We had gone to an early dinner with a couple of friends, call them Janet and Beau, to a place called Wade's Southern Suppers. Buffet, so it must have been Wednesday: fried chicken, fried vegetables, potatoes, red velvet cake, coffee. De-lethal!

Janet and Beau are not a couple. Beau doesn't drive, so we three others took him home. He lives in the country, in a rambling old clapboard house with a name, two chimneys, a family graveyard, and a magnificent magnolia tree under which he gives parties in the summertime.

It was a mild, sensuous evening. The sun was setting as we drove and had gone down completely by the time we arrived at Middleplace. The moon had risen and it was full. There was a silver glow across the broad yard, the gate, the white sides of the house, the roof, the chimney, and the peacock sitting atop the chimney, silhouetted against the sky.

Beau keeps peacocks.

If there had been music -- and there should have been music -- it would have been something soft and swelling, violins and saxophones, under the peacock's screech.

We had the moon in our eyes. When we woke the next morning , we still had the feeling we had gone someplace else, to some land beyond reality, to Brigadoon.

Edgefield is a real place. But once in a while, in one corner or another, it becomes mystical .