By Dawn McNutt
Special to THE DAILY

Strawberry Plains is a tiny hamlet in East Tennessee where “everybody knows your name” whether you want them to or not. There’s always someone who knows someone else who knows your family.

That’s just the way it is in this rural, tight-knit community. You can grow up, go away to college, and have a high-profile job in Washington, D.C., but when you come home to visit, you are still just the daughter of the beloved town doctor.

Carolyn Jourdan graduated from The University of Tennessee with degrees in biomedical engineering and law. She went on to become a well-known lawyer for the U.S. Senate Environmental Committee.

Black-tie events

This high-powered position included black-tie fundraisers, a designer wardrobe and a Mercedes, but most important, opportunities to influence top-ranking senators and their decisions regarding our environment.

While she is enjoying her lifestyle and all the perks that come with such an occupation, the unthinkable happens. Her mother suffers a heart attack and Carolyn returns home to Strawberry Plains for a quick visit to ensure her mom is recovering and to help out at her father’s medical practice.

What begins as a planned two-day stay turns into 20 years as she becomes entwined in the daily lives of the residents of this working-poor community. As the weeks turn to months, she finds herself falling in love with this place she once again calls home as well as with the people who inhabit it.

Rough transition

In the beginning, the transition is anything but smooth. As her mother slowly recovers, Carolyn works each day in her father’s medical practice at the front desk. “For forty years, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, Momma and Daddy ran a homemade, low paid 911 service. There was no such thing as a day off ever,” she writes.

Her father’s devotion to his patients and his community has no limits and his passion for medicine and improving the lives of his friends and neighbors is both admirable and astonishing at the same time.

Carolyn herself begins to realize just what an amazing man her father is as she struggles to keep pace with him while also learning the position of medical secretary, which her mom, known as “The Sarge,” seemed to perform so effortlessly.

Alternately funny and heartbreaking, this memoir is anything but dull. Carolyn writes with such honesty and compassion, it’s hard not to sympathize with her as she struggles with loyalty, courage and trying to find her place in this world.

Luckily for the reader, she also has a wonderful quirky sense of humor that is a pleasant reprieve from some of the unavoidably grim parts of the book, like the loss of favorite patients and the treatment of addicts.

One of her most compelling qualities is her respect for everyone who comes through the door. She’s better educated and dressed, and has made more money in one year than most of the patients will see in a lifetime, yet she never dismisses or patronizes.

Every person is treated with the same compassion and respect as she listens with an open heart and patient ear.

Naturally there are plenty of days Carolyn wants to run away back to Washington, where she feels her work matters, but something keeps her in Strawberry Plains for better or worse, as she wrestles with what it means to truly “serve the people.”

If it sounds like one of those feel-good Hallmark movies that unavoidably pop up around the holidays, it’s not. “Heart in The Right Place” is the story of a woman who wholeheartedly accepted a major lifestyle change and all the positives and negatives that came along with it.

She embraced her surroundings and all who inhabit them, and ultimately came out on top with a satisfied smile and a satisfying book.

Email This Page