Professionals

Construction continues nearly every day on our project, and it reminds us how fortunate we were to be able to contract with a team of hard-working and very competent builders during this busy time for construction in Highlands.  They show up early – 7:30 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. – and work until dark, as I have mentioned before in this blog.  And they have no compunction against working on Saturdays and even Sundays, which used to horrify most folks in this part of the world.  (“It’ll never last!” Martha says her grandmother used to say about such work).  I don’t much like working on Sundays, but mostly because I appreciate the wisdom in observing that ancient Sabbath tradition and the benefit to body, mind, and spirit that it promotes.

Yesterday, Sunday, we had understood that a pair of carpenters might work for half a day, so we planned to drive to Asheville for a reprieve.  There was a vehicle in the driveway at 8:00 a.m. and they quickly cranked up the air compressor.  “Adios!” I said as we left.  We were gone until 5:00 p.m. and were surprised to find that the carpenters had been replaced by roofers, who had nearly completed installing the metal roof on the entryway and garden shed.  They did not seem to mind the rain-slick conditions, and they had Mexican music playing at an audible level.  “Sorry about the music!” I told our neighbor, who was out on her front porch.  “Oh, it’s not bothering us at all.  We kind of like it!"

Despite the Sunday work, a language barrier that is more apparent with some of the workers than others, and the inconvenience of scrap lumber accumulating in the driveway, we are thankful for these men, who are invariably polite and helpful.  I served as building inspector in Highlands when we first came here 38 years ago, and I can testify that their workmanship is excellent.  All of them also seem to have the best equipment and are driving brand-new and very large pickup trucks.  It is a wonderful thing to see that our country can still welcome and reward hard-working immigrants, and to see them thriving and getting ahead.

Last week, I was discussing with the crew of carpenters the placement of a six-inch column on a footing (the one which had caused the inadvertent cutting of the phone cable).  The column had to be directly below the point where two roof joists joined.  I dashed down to the basement and proudly returned with my venerable plumb bob, unwound the string, and held it up to the joint.  “See?” I said.  They grinned at each other and one of them returned from his truck with a little black box that beamed a green laser beam directly where I had held my plumb bob.  “Mine is better,” I insisted.  “No batteries!”  They thought that was funny.

Today, between the time I left home to go running in Town a little after 8:00 a.m. and my return two hours later, they had installed all of the windows on the entryway, a project that would have taken me the better part of a week.

I was reminded of what I told the plumber Tim Gibson a couple of years ago when we called him to install an especially difficult faucet on our new kitchen sink.  “A smart man knows how to do a little plumbing,” I said.  “But a wise man knows when to call the professionals!”

Summer Days

After an unusually cool and dry June (we actually had to water our gardens nearly every day), we had a week or two of more or less daily rain.  And now we have entered that season in Highlands when it is hot and mostly dry but afternoon thunderstorms are ever-present.  As I am writing this post, it has begun to rain again, one of those cooling sweet-smelling summer rains, and in 15 minutes the sun will likely be shining again.  As a result, the humidity remains high and the yard is soaking wet most of the time.  My seven-mile run this morning was difficult with the combination of high humidity and the Code Orange air quality because of the fires burning in distant California and Oregon.

The rain has been good for our gardens, though, and especially the zucchini.  I have had to give much of it away, and I am beginning to think that Karen and Vicki are growing wary on Saturday mornings when I hand them more zucchini.  “Oh no, not again!” they must be thinking.  But it is nice to have enough to enjoy and also to share.  Yesterday I picked my second batch of green beans, three more zucchini, and my first tomato of the season, a perfect bright-red beauty that we had on BLT sandwiches for lunch today.

There were enough beans to blanch and freeze – only three quarts, but they will be enjoyed this fall and winter, perhaps even as a part of Thanksgiving or Christmas Dinner, made tastier by the knowledge that we grew them in our own gardens.

After a lull of several days, work has resumed on the three-part project that we are undertaking this year.  The painting and the carport were completed in good time and the workmanship is very good.  Now the covered entry from the carport to the front door is underway, and progress is being made every day.

The only mishap so far was that on Wednesday, the phone cable to our house was cut while workers were digging a footing for a column.  It was not their fault – the cable had been buried in that location 38 years ago when our house was built and I simply forgot where it was.  I probably should have had it “located,” as the repairman pointed out yesterday, and he was right.  We quickly realized how dependent we have become on a slim black cable buried in the ground when we lost Wifi/internet service as well as cell phone service – we no longer have a land-line phone, and we do not have cell phone coverage except through our Wifi.  

I had a Kafkaesque experience reporting the outage, driving five miles to Highlands where we have cell phone coverage.  “Please enter your date of birth, last four digits of your social security number, or your PIN number to authenticate your account,” a recording demanded when I called Repair.  A woman with a heavy foreign accent of indeterminate origin then got on the line and I found that the phone company does not know my date of birth or SS information.  She referred me to a second woman with an equally indeterminate accent who patiently told me exactly the same thing.  “My PIN number is somewhere at home in a filing cabinet five miles away!” I kept explaining.  Finally I had to drive home, rifle through a file folder, unearth the elusive PIN number, and drive back to Highlands.  This time I got Maria on the phone, gave her the PIN number, and Bingo!  A tech team will be here Friday afternoon, she said.

The next day I went out to examine the cable, which had been not cut so much as nicked by a shovel.  I was startled to receive a sharp electrical shock, but found that when I returned into the house our internet was working, although slowly and intermittently.  (The first thing I did was Google, “Can a phone cable electrocute you?”  Only if you have a pacemaker, I learned.)  The repairman was friendly enough on Friday.  I thought he might have charged us for his time, but after chiding me for not having the cable “located,”  he spliced a new section in place and we were “good to go,” as he said.  

I have spoken to the owner of the local bookstore and arranged for a book signing to take place in a couple of weeks for Bells in the Night.  There will be a notice in the local newspaper in a few days alerting the local public of the poet in their midst and the book that he has just published.  Many locals know me as a runner, retired Town Administrator, and retired real estate broker, but have no idea that I am a poet.  So it is a little unnerving that in a short while my book will be in the hands of local readers, who will discover things about me that they never knew.  Martha announced publication of the book on Facebook and it quickly received many comments, and now I meet people in the Post Office and grocery store who say, “Congratulations on your book!”

One of my Facebook friends is a woman we came to know in real estate and then socialized some with before she and her husband moved away.  She commented when she read the announcement that she was going to order a copy from Amazon, and she apparently did so and posted a photo of it.  One of her friends asked her if she liked it, and she replied, “Read the first poem last night. Love it.”  And then she said something that made my day.  “Reading a poem each morning with my coffee. Savoring them one by one.”  So wonderful to hear that!  That is really the only reason I published this book:  perhaps a handful of people, here and there, now and then, might read a poem and enjoy it in the same way.

I received some free author copies and have mailed them out to a short list of friends.  At the top of the list are two aunts whom I mentioned in the Acknowledgements.  They are among a handful of regular readers of this blog, and I hope they receive their copies soon and enjoy them in the same way.

And now the sun is shining again!  Summer days. . .

42nd Anniversary

My apologies to those few readers of my blog who came to rely on more frequent postings while we were in Atlantic Beach this winter.  Since returning to Highlands in March, it has been difficult to find the time to write.  My running (the ostensible subject of this blog) has stagnated during these warm, humid weeks, although I am still managing to complete nearly 20 miles most weeks.  And there has been little to document in the way of travel.

A recent exception was a trip to Snowbird Mountain Lodge to celebrate our 42^nd Anniversary.  I have written in past years about this historic lodge where we have spent so many of our anniversaries since our first visit in 2003.  The lodge is a very special place of scenic beauty, peace, and serenity, located only three hours away in Graham County on the crest of Snowbird Mountain.  It overlooks rolling mountains on the horizon and Lake Santeetlah deep in the valley below to the south and east, and is also close to the Cherohala Skyway and Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.  We have enjoyed canoeing, cycling, and hiking in all of these nearby places over the years.  

The drive to Snowbird is a pleasant one through relatively undeveloped Graham County.  We took the scenic route in our Mini Cooper, stopping at the Stecoah Valley Center on the way, where Martha took this photo of us parked on a covered bridge to a private home.  I would have been worried about the bridge, with its wide cracks between the boards and the sight of rushing water below, if the vehicles parked in the driveway had not been pickup trucks much heavier than our little Mini.

We have stayed in one of the detached cottages in the past, but recently we have enjoyed one of the twenty or so rooms off the main lodge building with its big windows, excellent library, and dining room where we have enjoyed some excellent dinners.  I like to think that if I can’t sleep in the middle of the night I can tip-toe down the corridor, take a book from the shelf in the library, and settle down to read for awhile, enjoying that unmistakable fragrance of a wood-burning fireplace that lingers even in July. 

We have not stayed at Snowbird for three years, but the owners are continually making improvements.  The new feature this year was the spacious, beautifully-designed Forest Chapel a short way down the path west of the lodge.  What a great place for a wedding!   

 

The grounds have some nice walking trails and there are plenty of quirky little statues, yard art, Tibetan prayer flags, and inspirational signs all along the way.  We have drawn much inspiration from the lodge and its yard art in our own home over the years.

 

At the end of the trail to the east is a platform called Sunrise Point overlooking Santeetlah and there is a tall cylindrical gong, which traditionally we ring in celebration of our years of marriage, the sound ringing out over the valley below. 

This year we did not do quite as much hiking as we have in the past due to the threat of rain, and likewise we did not take a canoe out on the lake.  We did, however, take a long ramble on the Cherohala Skyway on Tuesday in our Mini, stopping along the way for short walks.  We found our way over to Fontana Dam and tranquil Fontana Lake and we ate our lunch nearby.  Snowbird provides breakfast and dinner at the lodge, but for lunch they pack a picnic lunch in a little backpack from a menu selected the night before at dinner.

The next day we enjoyed spending most of the afternoon reading in the Summer House, a covered and screened building not far from the lodge, where we found two or three other couples quietly doing the same thing.  Reading somehow seems to be more enjoyable when you can hear rain on the roof, the cool breeze blowing through the screen windows.

We left on Thursday morning, stopping in Bryson City for our picnic lunch on the way home and arriving to find that several packages had been delivered by UPS.  One of them was something I have been awaiting for some time – five author copies of my book of poetry, Bells in the Night, which has finally been published after weeks of back-and-forth galley proofs and revisions.  I discovered a few days ago that I could go to the Amazon website, type in my name, and have my book appear on the screen (Paperback, $17.95).  But now for the first time I was able to hold an actual copy of my first published book. 

In the coming weeks I will organize a book signing here in Highlands, but in the meantime I have a short list of people to whom I will be sending copies.  At the top of the list are two of Martha’s Aunts, prominently mentioned in Acknowledgements in the book:  “I would also like to thank a sharp-eyed nonagenarian aunt, Anne Sellers, for proof-reading the final manuscript.  Another generous aunt, Lizette Pryor, made it possible for us to spend an annual sabbatical at her beach place, where much of my inspiration and writing took place.”

Thank you Anne!  And thank you Lizette!