Blue Ridge Dreaming

Wordless Wednesday

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What will they remember of Home?

I wonder sometimes, what my children will remember when they are grown and living lives of their own with families of their own. What will remind them of home? What will call to them, pull at their hearts? What smells, what sounds, what images?

Will they think of the smell of these wooden walls, the logs that give off an almost fresh-cut pine odor when we walk in after being away? The scent of galax in the deep woods where we go hiking? The sound of mountain streams, or of coyotes yipping late in the night? The way the sun rises over the mountain and floods our living room with light? The way the full moon illuminates the field? Fireflies in the trees?

Will it be the curve of the road, the red barn falling down on the edge of the corn field, the big white house and the black barns?

Looking for trillium and trout lily with Mama by the branch on our neighbor's lot? Finding a strong vine to swing on, the feel of it in their hands? Hours playing on the porch? The birds at our feeder, thumbing through the guide books to find their names?

Digging in the garden? Riding in the wheelbarrow as they help Grandpa in the yard? The fresh taste of broccoli, peas, radishes, straight from the soil, wiped on jeans, then popped in the mouth? Kitchen herbs from pots on the porch, stevia and rosemary, cilantro and chives and basil? Fresh cherry tomatoes (tommy-toes, Grandpa calls them)? Small sweet strawberries from our own little patch? Blackberries from vines along the road? Making jam, dipping our fingers in the syrup so sticky sweet after filling the jars?

Pumpkins on the porch? Leaves falling, gathering them up to press into big books and discovered later, much later? Collecting walnuts in the driveway? Chill winds coming up the valley?

Riding sleds down our little hill in winter? Making snow angels? Staying out until their noses are frozen and red, then coming in for hot chocolate, blankets, and a video, our clothes on a rack in the bathtub dripping dripping? Giant flakes falling, silent? Decorating the Christmas tree, the scent of fresh pine, cinnamon and cloves?

Sunday lunches with Grandma and Grandpa Y., aunts, uncles, and cousins? Big family Thanksgivings and Easters egg hunts?

Fishing with Grandpa Bob? Road trips and picnics with Grandma Dallas?

Looking for signs of spring? Crocuses and daffodils, grape hyacinth, tulips and iris? Dipping toes into the creek, the feel of river stone on bare feet? Popsicles on the porch?

Mama cooking, sometimes with Grandpa, sometimes all of us together? Hands clasped, singing "The Lord is good to me..." as we sit down to dinner?

Giggling and all piled onto the quilt in our oak bed? Saturday mornings making pancakes with Daddy? Coffee and listening to "Come to the meadow" or "Wait, Wait" on National Public Radio?

Night Rides? Watching storms darken the sky, rain coming down the valley, hearing it tapping on the skylights and porch roof?

Good night kisses? Reading on the couch before bed? The flowers on the porch, seashells and other treasures on the railing? Working with Daddy to build things (a bench, baby gates)? The sunflowers and daisies Mama loves? Walks up the hill? Mountains in shades of blue and green and purple?

Will they remember? Will they think happily of home?

Images from around my home

Life at home

Despite my complaints about neighbors, I realize that it can't be too crowded if we can sit on our porch and watch our next-door neighbor's "yard" get baled for hay.

Never did that in our suburban neighborhood.

Always home

For all this talk about finding my home here in the mountains, there is one caveat. For the rest of my life, my true home will always be with this man. He is my home, and I will follow him to the ends of the earth.

As it so happens he loves these rolling blue-green mountains as I do.

"Sometimes our life reminds me/ of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing/ and in that opening a house,/ an orchard and a garden./ comfortable shades, and flowers,/ red and yellow in the sun, a pattern/ made in the light for the light to return to./...We are more together/ than we know, how else could we keep on discovering/ we are more together than we thought?"--Wendell Berry, from "The Country of Marriage"

Happy Birthday, my love.

Summer at home

We finally broke down late yesterday. We turned on the A/C. I figured 85 degrees inside was warm enough to warrant it.I put the thermostat on 77.

One of the things I love most about our house is the passive solar design which provides natural heating and cooling (largely cooling). No, I don't mean that there are photovoltaic panels on our roof or that we are off-the-grid in any way (except that we do have our own well, the pump of which is electric).

What I mean is that this house is positioned such that it takes advantage of the heating and cooling features found...in nature. For one, our house is positioned on a slight rise from the valley floor, with a long swath of fields in front and a stand of forest behind. This means that breezes sweep down the valley to gently cool the house in summer. Deep, six-foot covered porches all around means that the sun never shines directly into the house, another cooling feature. Even so, it is never dark, due to skylights and many large windows in each room.

In winter, the skylights absorb sunlight, along with the wide expanse of roof, providing some natural heat. Winter is actually not the best season for this house--the logs have gaps through which cold air penetrates and the breezes that provide summer cooling turn frigid, poking long fingers under the ill-fitting doors and between the logs. And we lack a wood stove or other form of heat outside of electricity.

But spring and summer (and fall) in our home are actually quite lovely. I don't feel the heat. Honestly. Anyway, I'd rather have the windows open to the summertime sounds and the amazingly low-humid air (when we lived in Raleigh the humidity was unbearable even at 75 degrees), than to be shut in and cool.

So, once it cools down to 77, I'll probably turn it off again, throw open the windows, turn on the ceiling fans, put the box fan in the window, and enjoy. Until the temps creep back into the upper 80's. This will be our habit for summer at home. (Maybe I'll throw in a little sprinkler play in the yard when it gets really hot, or pack everyone up for a hike in the cool forest and a dip of our toes in a mountain stream).

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Photo by my husband, Paul, in a place that feels like home.

Our neighborhood, an update

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about our neighborhood (first here, then here). More specifically, about our neighbors. It's time for an update.

Our Florida neighbors, E.R. and his wife, finally made the plunge this spring, folded up their business, sold their other properties and moved with their 30-something year-old daughter into this house (the one in our neighborhood). E.R. is not a man of leisure. He has been spending much of his retirement clearing the vegetation by the branch (spraying tons of round-up into the branch that flows into the creek which flows into the river which is our regional water supply). He burns things often--mostly vegetation he has cleared, native river cane and underbrush and the occasional large tree limb that wasn't angled exactly right. He mows, weeds, plants, fertilizes. His yard is a showplace. He has also, it seems, staked a potential foundation for the garage he told Paul he wants to build: four-car with an apartment above for his daughter. And he's turning his nice screened porch (which is not entirely necessary in the mountains but is a lovely thing to have in the evenings I would think)...into a Florida room. Oh, yes. Bringing a little Florida with him to NC.

The schoolteacher's brother was able to get into his house very quickly, as it was a modular and went up fast. He has also built a large storage shed right on (and possibly over) the lot line. In the middle of his back yard he put a good-sized gas tank, with which to supply his appliances and furnace. It's not up next to the house or buried underground or in an out-of-the-way spot: it's just out there in the back. Next to the dog pen. Not far away are a trampoline and a badminton net. These are for the kids (she has one from a previous marriage, he has two from a previous marriage; his visit on weekends, hers is there all week), which is good, except that the kids spend most of their time (my formerly quiet weekends) riding dirt bikes and ATVs up and down the road.

He also keeps his huge power-washing equipment (his side business) and several vehicles in his driveway. To his credit, the man is a hard worker--he's gone from early morning to dinner six days a week and works constantly around the house in the evenings and Sunday. He has added front and back porches himself and created planting beds around the porches and the gas tank.

In fact, he's created a bit of a competition for his sister and brother-in-law. Since the brother moved in, sis has been sprucing up her place. After six years of doing no more than planting three small trees, they've put in their own back deck, a new shed, planting beds, flowering planters on the front porch, hanging baskets and all.

I say it's a competition because it all has a one-upmanship quality to it. Brother put in a shed and porches. Sister put in a shed and deck. Brother put in planters and hanging baskets. A couple of weeks later sister has new planters and hanging baskets.

It goes further, and this I find kind of funny. Sister has a pontoon boat (has had it for a while). After being away for Memorial Day weekend, Brother came back with a brand-new, much bigger pontoon boat. And topped it off with two new jet-skis. (When Paul told him a while back that he was lucky to have a boat in the family, the brother said that one wasn't big enough. I suppose not.)

Of course, since our view is into their back yard, we get to look at all that stuff, instead of the wildflowers that once grew there. Sigh.

Now, on top of the hill behind us, there are two more new houses. One is not quite three lots away (our extra lot and a vacant one, and then a good portion of their lot was unbuildable). It's a nice enough house, a lovely Cape Cod with a porch. They're high up, so they have an incredible view, especially with all the clearing they did. But that's okay, I guess, since they're replacing the native forest with many cultivated plantings (I'm being sarcastic, but they really are trying to make it look nice with flowering trees and a split-rail fence). They seem like decent people, and they throw up a friendly wave when they pass by. My only complaint with them is that they drive by way too fast for our tiny road, our children, and our dog. But then again, they may not like that our dog is loose much of the time (he's really an indoor dog, but we let him out regularly for his rounds) and barks at them as they go by so fast.

Then much further, nearly to the top of the hill, on the lot that Paul and I were interested in when we first discovered the neighborhood, another house, under construction. A nice house, which is taking a very long time to build. I think the man is building it himself--not just contracting himself but actually building a good portion of it himself with the help of his friend/brother/I'm-not-sure. He is a builder by trade for one of those large scale building companies working on neighborhoods full of grand vacation homes and so this house, for his family, must be done in his spare time. He should be nearing completion in a few months, though, or so it appears.

Our quiet, peaceful neighborhood of three houses, only two of them with full-time occupants (including ours), has become a neighborhood of six houses, five of which are occupied full-time.

It's not too bad, however. I can still see Old Man Stephens hay the field next door. I can walk up the hill and at times not see a single house. I can sit on the porch at night sometimes and listen to the creek and the peepers, look out at the fireflies in the trees in the knoll behind E.R.'s, and watch every morning the changing cloud-and-light show on the mountains above Moses Creek.

It might be a little more crowded, but it's still home.

Feeling at home

  

We've been back in the mountains nearly three years now. In this house almost two years. Can you believe it? I can't. I still feel as if the whole experience is new, as if we are newcomers to the area, just returned to our childhood home, not really at home again.

We don't actually live in the town that was our childhood home. We are in fact an hour or so West of that town, deeper into the mountains, surrounded by higher peaks, and more of them.

Actually, this town where we live consists of three towns pushed together and running into each other in a way that makes them one.

There is the tourist trap, fed by tour buses and a recreational railroad line that now exclusively uses the tracks that once created the town.

Then there is the working-class town, the county seat, home of the paper mill which serves as one of the area's largest employers (second to the State of NC) with a tiny but quaint downtown area of three blocks and then a string of ugly commercial development (a Wal-Mart, a Lowe's Home Improvement Store, Sonic, Ryan's, car dealerships, Radio Shack, couple of drugstores, banks, a regional grocery, fast food).

Pass through this town and for a moment, you believe you are heading to "the country", until you come to a University. This University basically digested any remnants of the third town, which now consists solely of a barbershop, a cafe, a tattoo parlor, a spate of ramshackle apartments (so awful I can't believe anyone actually lives there), and a real estate office.

There are plans to grow the University, to recreate (or create for the first time ever) a town square here, but I find it difficult to envision such a thing taking place. No one seems interested in investing that much into the area (a large number of homeowners of this county are seasonal--vacationers and summer people from Georgia and Florida--the mountain folk are too poor to do much beyond subsistence living, and the University holds itself above the commoners in a way that creates separation--a "towns-and-gowns" situation).

Beyond the towns a buckshot scattering of development, mostly clustered around the old farm communities, which grew in the place of Cherokee settlements in the valleys created by the many creeks that flow into the river. The river the common denominator of the area, of all three towns, even of the University.

We live in one of these farm communities, along one of these creeks, our neighborhood cut from bottomland beside the creek and into a knob that rises above it, a mountain above that, like steps.

Perhaps corn was grown here, as in the adjacent field. Perhaps it was always wildflowers and hay. Perhaps livestock were grazed here, fattened before being driven over the mountain. Perhaps a Cherokee clan rested here, or summered here (this Spring we found a quartz arrowhead in our garden, a real treasure). Perhaps a more ancient tribe spent time here (not far from our house there is a rock with writings of an ancient tribe, pre-Cherokee, the language now lost, the peoples unknown to us). Perhaps, as my four-year-old daughter once mentioned, there are dinosaur bones beneath the soil and this was their Great Valley.

Daily, I look out over this valley and I feel at home. At peace. I look toward Moses Creek, toward Black Mountain and Double Top and Cooper's Mountain, and I see the ever-changing patterns of sun and clouds and vegetation and I am dumbstruck by its beauty.

To tell the truth, I don't love the town(s) we live in. They hold little charm for me. I'm slow to feel kinship among many of the people here. We've made few friends.

But when I drive along this valley road, wending my way beside Caney Fork Creek, catching glimpses of pools of light and shadow, of wildflowers and wildlife, of the deep folds and rises of the blue-gray blanket of mountains...I feel at home.

June::Home

"One's native ground is the place where, since before you had words for such knowledge, you have known the smells, the seasons, the birds and beasts, the human voices, the houses, the ways of working., the lay of the land, and the quality of light. It is the landscape you learn before you retreat inside the illusion of your skin. You may love the place if you flourished there, or hate the place if you suffered there. But love it or hate it, you cannot shake free. Even if you move to the antipodes, even if you become intimate with a new landscape, you still bear the impression of that first ground." --Scott Russell Sanders, in Staying Put: Making Home in a Restless World (1993, Beacon Press)

"Only by understanding where I live can I learn how to live."--Scott Russell Sanders, in Staying Put

"How do we decide where to dream a life into existence? On what scrap of this vast planet should we hammer in our stakes and say 'home'? How do we live there with our neighbors? What level of commitment to the landscape is acceptable? What lack of awareness is unacceptable?" -- John Lane, in Circling Home (2007, University of Georgia Press)

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This month's theme for NaBloPoMo is Home. Seeing that I thought: "I can surely think of 30 posts about Home." And so I will try. I hope that you will follow along.

One quick technical note: My About page seems to have disappeared. For those of you who may be new to my blog and wish to learn about me, please go to my other blog and click on the About page there. I should have this one back up in a couple of days.

Also, I am still adjusting to Typepad's new compose window, so my apologies to anyone who reads this blog in a feed. Sometimes, I have to post more than once to get the formatting right.