In 1990, Barbara Holland inherited her mother's summer cabin in the northern Blue Ridge Mountains. She quit her job in Philadelphia, said good-bye to friends and family, and moved into a different world. On the mountain she wrestled with winter isolation, stoked the woodstove, and learned to live with bears in the trash and mountain lions on the lawn.

Lonely, she found a part-time job at the county newspaper down in the valley and earned the right to sit on a barstool in the tavern, where she listened to the people whose families had always lived there, in the little country towns and their outlying farms.

It was good, rich land, where dairy cows and peaches, corn and wheat, had always flourished. Everyone knew everyone else, and generations stayed settled within hailing distance of aunts and brothers, sons and daughters. The population figures hadn't changed since James Monroe was president. Crime was a toolbox stolen from the back of a pickup truck. Money, in a world where people could do so much for themselves, had nothing to do with status; capability counted for more than cash.

Then just as she settled into this gentle, anachronistic world, it began to change. The suburbs were moving in. Malls and highways began to grow where pigs and peaches had been. As the strangers from metropolitan Washington outnumbered the natives, the bedrock of community began to crack. Villages were overwhelmed by development, and, at the newspaper, the once-idle cops-and-courts reporter was swamped with work.

Holland suggests that it may indeed "take a village to raise a child" - or to nourish a peaceable, sturdy, self-reliant people. And if so, what shall we do with our villages gone?