Author: Susan Sorensen

When it comes to burying our dearly departed, most of us know what
 to expect: embalming chemicals, expensive coffins, concrete vaults, and other things that may not be so good for the environment. 

But is all that really necessary?

If you ask Stephanie Bonney, the answer’s a hard no. Green burial is “a more responsible way to take care of the Earth—the planet we live on,” says Panorama Natural Burial’s general manager. 

During a Panorama green burial, no toxic embalming chemicals are used, and bodies return to the earth in biodegradable boxes or burial shrouds, because “we are only introducing materials that nature can use to nurture new life.” Bodies are buried at three-and-a-half feet, where “soil is more nutrient rich, and organisms are better at doing their jobs.” (And in case you’re wondering, there’s never been a reported case of a naturally buried body being dug up by predatory animals—the farthest they dig into soil is 12 inches.) Simple river rocks, set flush to the ground with a name and birth and death years, marks the graves.

“We’re essentially going back to that principle in Judeo-Christian tradition, which is literally ‘dust to dust,’” says Chris Murray, whose family has owned Panorama Farms in Earlysville for 70 years. With the “current conventional funeral burial practices, the body basically never turns to dust.”

It was a few days before prom, and a Charlottesville  High School senior was worried. The full-length, midnight-blue dress she ordered online had finally arrived—and, even with three-inch heels, it dragged on the ground. So her mom reached out to her regular tailor, “and they told me I was too late, that there was no time to shorten the dress,” she says. 

On the recommendation of a friend, the pair turned to Kim’s Alterations on the Downtown Mall. Not only did a quick fix save the day, er, night, but the work was beautiful, says the mom. “We were thrilled!”

And the mother and daughter are not alone. According to Alicia Henry, Kim’s “is the best.” Henry says she’s shown up at the York Place shop with “everything from 1920s breeches to modern linen dresses, and [the tailor takes] care of it all with such precision. She [even] helped me with a design idea—repurposing a vintage bustier using 1940s crepe fabric—and she nailed it.”

Lily Casteen was 7 years old when her parents enrolled her in ARC
Natural History Day Camp, on the back acres of Panorama Farms in Earlysville. Now in her 20s and a wildlife conservation major at Virginia Tech, Casteen says the summers she spent at “mud camp,” first as a camper and then for seven years as a counselor, were instrumental in setting her on her current career path.

“I’m now doing exactly what I was doing there,” but on a bit larger scale, says Casteen, who’s in Alaska this summer, surveying a threatened species of ducks. “I learned so much from Kevin, and from the other people around me.”

“Kevin” is Kevin Murphy, a retired science teacher who’s been the camp’s director for 33 of its 38 years. The goal of ARC Natural History Day Camp is to “teach young people how to be observant, inquisitive, sensitive, and resourceful.” And discovery is imperative: Every day, campers explore a different habitat—pond, creek, meadow, or forest—“to see what each area has to offer.” 

One of the most important lessons, recalls Casteen, is to “leave no trace. When you turned a rock over in a stream, you had to turn it back the way it was. I still do that.”

Sponsored by the garden clubs of Albemarle, Rivanna, and Charlottesville (hence the ARC in its name), the camp runs for two weeks every June, rain or shine, because everyone knows that exploring woods and streams is even more fun when you’re soaking wet and covered in mud.

Six individual national wins. Victory in all five relays. National team champs (for the third year in a row!). It was business as usual for the University of Virginia in March at the NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championship in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Senior Kate Douglass won three individual national championships (200-meter individual medley, 100 butterfly, 200 breaststroke), while Gretchen Walsh won two (100 backstroke, 100 freestyle). And Walsh’s older sister, Alex, who along with Douglass medaled at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, won the 400 IM. As a team, the Hoos swept the relays with wins in the 200 medley, the 800 free, the 200 free, the 400 medley, and the 400 free. 

Before the meet, Head Coach Todd DeSorbo said, “Arguably, we’ve got the best team that we’ve ever had here at UVA, so I feel really good.” 

Turns out DeSorbo had reason to feel good: By meet’s end, Virginia’s nearest competitor, the University of Texas, had scored 414.5 team points to UVA’s 541.5. And in case the Cavs’ foes thought they had a chance to catch UVA, the 400-meter freestyle relay team put an exclamation point on the Hoos’ performance during the competition’s final event with a time of 3:05.85, which set a new NCAA and American record. It also made UVA the first team since Stanford in 2018 to sweep all five relays at the national championships. 

After the meet, DeSorbo talked to C-VILLE about saying goodbye to the seniors on his team. “They believed and trusted immediately, and were just really excited to be a part of the potential rise of our program. And they’ve all just been such great people and influences and leaders on our team. … They’re definitely gonna leave a lasting legacy, and they play a significant role in where we are today.”

But Gretchen Walsh, who will be a junior next year, is already looking toward 2024, when she hopes to help UVA match Stanford’s 1995 feat of winning four straight NCAA Swimming & Diving titles. “I think we can do it,” she said in April. “We’re creating a legacy, and that’s one of the coolest things about this experience.”

To help make a four-peat a reality, Walsh pointed to her list of individual goals for next season: Hit 20.5 seconds in the 50 freestyle and 47 seconds in the 100 backstroke—and add another American record by beating 45.56 seconds in the 100 freestyle. Then there’s that Olympic rings tattoo: Silver-medalist Alex Walsh refuses to get her rings tattoo until her sister, who failed to qualify for the 2020 Olympic team the summer before she arrived at UVA, also medals at the Olympics (Gretchen’s fourth-grade self-portrait was of her standing on the Olympic blocks).  

“Since coming into UVA, having this change and this new environment, I feel a lot more confident going into next summer, in my abilities and my training, all around,” Gretchen Walsh said. “I think [an Olympic medal] is definitely feasible.”

If you’d told a young Anna Williamson that one day she’d be atop a ladder at the John Paul Jones Arena, making the final snip to cut down the net after the UVA men’s basketball team won a share of the ACC regular-season title, she’d have thought you were pranking her.

But that’s exactly where Williamson, a then-fourth-year student manager who’s been an uber-fan fan of the team her entire life, found herself last March. 

“When [Associate Head] Coach Williford came up to me and said, ‘Anna, you’re gonna finish it off, take the rest of [the net down],’ and handed me the scissors, it was so special,” Williamson says. “And to look over and see my family on senior day … I thought about my little self, who’d go to games and watch UVA beat Carolina schools.”

Watching Williamson, the daughter of two University of Virginia alums, climb to the top of that ladder was especially moving because she was born with spina bifida, and is paralyzed from the knees down. A North Carolina native, she has undergone more than a dozen surgeries and wears a brace on her right leg to help her walk. Inclines are difficult for her.

Before last spring’s ACC Tournament, few UVA basketball fans knew much about Williamson, other than that she was one of 10 student managers whom they’d occasionally glimpse on the sidelines—that is, until ESPN reporter Holly Rowe shone a light on her. And that’s when Williamson says parents of children with spina bifida, a birth defect in which an area of the spinal cord in a developing baby doesn’t form properly, reached out to her on social media, looking for reassurance that their children were going to be fine.  

Williamson, who graduated in May and will open Revival coffee shop in Charlottesville this fall, is more than fine. 

“It’s a mental game,” she says when asked about the often grueling work of being a student manager for a D-1 college basketball program (she estimates that she worked eight hours on game days, and another three or fours on practice days). 

“I can do a lot more physically when I get my mind right about it,” Williamson says. “I’m 5-foot-4, and I’m not as strong [as other student managers], but I did the job to the best of my ability, which is what was asked of me.” 

That “ask” came the summer before she started at UVA in 2019. She was working as the first female coach at the Tony Bennett Basketball Camp, when Ronnie Wideman, associate athletic director for men’s basketball, spoke to her about being a student manager when school started in the fall. After considering her strengths and weaknesses, and thinking about what she’d bring to the program, Williamson said yes—and never looked back.

Her job was to “do whatever made the [members of the team’s] lives easier day to day. To oil the machine, do behind-the-scenes work, and watch [the team] shine,” she says. “UVA was my dream school since I was a kid, and I’ve always admired [Head] Coach Bennett,” who Williamson says taught everyone about much more than basketball.

“He taught me a lot of perspective on life, and about hard stretches, and how caring for your friends and family is more important than basketball.”