Turning Another Page

I was surprised to see that my last post was so long ago – June 20 - and included a photo of a dozen or more boxes of books next to the piano still to be sorted or given away.  Tempus fugit!  Now, by the middle of August, all of those books have been sorted, and other than the occasional picture to be hung (like the lovely Oriental print we found in a thrift store in Brevard last week), we can now say that we have completely moved in.  In place of those boxes of books, most of which were donated to the Bookworm, I have hung all my marathon photos, which in our old house were hidden away behind the fireplace – “The Wall of Dubious Behavior,” I used to call it.  

It has been a long time since my last marathon, and I have not even run a 5-K race this year, but it is inspiring to remember the runner I used to be.  Moving occupied so much time and energy that my running dropped off to as little as one mile per week.  Then, during the middle of last month, I contracted a respiratory virus that hit so hard that it reminded me of having Covid in France in 2022.  And then I gave it to Martha, which made me feel even worse.  Now we are both recovering, although I feel as if I am climbing up out of a hole.   

But I have been here before, and my fitness and energy is slowly returning.  I continue to turn another page in my running log each week and see what I can do.  Yesterday I completed four miles (with plenty of walking breaks), during which I suddenly found the urge to include a single 400-meter “burst” of relative speed, just a few seconds slower than my last attempt at 400 meters in November.  (Has it been that long?)  Still, it is amazing how much only a few seconds, or an additional mile, can inspire and motivate the aging, out-of-shape, recovering runner.

I will not be running the Twilight 5-K this Saturday, but I will be watching from the corner of the road – the course goes right past our home, now – and cheering on other runners, just as I have been cheered on in the past.  I will be an onlooker, a spectator.  I will call out, “Looking Good!”  Words that have often lifted my spirits at the finish line in the past.  And I will turn another page in my running log.

Living Here

“Have you settled in now?” one of our new neighbors asked me the other day.  And it occurred to me that yes, we have settled in.  It has not yet been three weeks, but it already feels like home.  Going into the kitchen in the morning, making coffee, carrying a cup out onto the front porch to listen to the morning birds.  Having lunch at the bistro table out there, too, the one made from the Lazy Susan we bought in that little shop in Duck under the live oak trees, with the tablecloth from France. 

All of the furniture and art that we loved the most found a home here and seemed to magically fit.  Even the cupboard in the kitchen, with some minor woodworking modifications, fit in the space between the two storage closets.  And you might have thought that the three Oriental rugs were specifically chosen for the spaces they filled.  Even the piano, that my Dad used for piano lessons in Florida and that I have enjoyed playing partly for that reason, was maneuvered into the back bedroom that I call my own, where my desk and reading chair are set up.  I still have more than a dozen boxes of books to sort through, most of which will be donated, but that will be enjoyable. 

It is the same with us.  We fit perfectly here, on the quiet end of a Highlands that has changed over the years, that has become a place where the very wealthy can be seen shopping and dining on Main Street.  “All of the botoxed women with blank faces and two-hundred-dollar hats pushing posh dogs in baby carriages are at the other end of Town, where the shops are,” I explained to one of our neighbors.  “At this end of Town, we see healthy, athletic people out walking their dogs, running, or on their way up to Sunset or the Nature Center.”  We are surrounded by Highlands Biological Station and Land Trust property to the south and the east, an expanse of green lawn to the North, and a piece of property to the west that will never develop.  Two houses west is the old Hutchinson house, named after one of the two founders of the Town, in which Martha’s maternal grandmother was born.  We are in fact on property once owned by her ancestors.  It feels, especially for her, as if we have come home.

On Wednesday, Martha’s cousin and her husband, who live in Arden, came to visit, and we hiked up Sunset Mountain and then through the Nature Center and gardens – leaving and returning right from out front door.  Our back yard!  And on Friday night, we invited Martha’s brother Scott for dinner.  Scott helped us move much of the heavier pieces of furniture here, and he was overwhelmed by the transformation since he had last seen it.

That was finally what made it feel like home.  Not just the art we have hung on the walls (most of it, anyway), the final touches of decorating, and the sound of a piano playing, but inviting friends and family to the table.  This week was actually the first time we have dined in the dining room; the rest of our lunches and dinners have been at the bistro table. 

You can finally call a place home when you can extend the gift of hospitality.

Our New Home

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” designer William Morris famously said.   

Over the years, we had accumulated a lot of things that we thought were both.  But as I have said, there was not enough space for all of them in our new home.  Do I really need a pizza stone for baking bread? (no).  Do I really need a pasta machine? (yes).  We made a lot of choices over a short period of time, and sometimes we realized that we had been too hasty or ruthless about giving away or selling things.  I missed my tools most of all, because although I had retained some hand tools and a cordless drill, I sold all the rest, which made installing drapery rods and towel bars and the like more challenging.  I found myself one afternoon using the railing of our back porch as a workbench for hacksawing a towel bar and missed my old workbench, vise, and power tools.

We were fortunate to have a good contractor to help us, a young man who had installed a shower stall in our other house who had actually lived in our neighborhood at one time.  (He remembered me once giving him a ride to school, which I had no memory of at all.)  Whatever we asked Josh, the answer was always “Yes.”  (Can we have another electrical outlet here, and here?  No problem.)  The first change we made was to remove the wall between the kitchen and dining area, which a previous owner had for some reason thought was a good idea.  That's where the breakfast bar we salvaged would go. 

The second biggest project Josh tackled was enlarging a storage closet by the back door into the rear bedroom and installing a stacked washer and dryer.  Those appliances ended up moving from here to there, always in the way, until the installation was finally completed after an electrical sub-panel had been added and plumbing lines run under the floor.
 

We had already arranged for new carpet in the bedrooms by a company we had used in our other house.  The owner's dad had actually installed carpet there 43 years ago and he remembered tagging along with him when he was a child.  It is good to have reliable professionals to call on, and as someone who has done much of the work on our own house, I appreciate skilled workers.

But even before all of this work had been done, we did some work of our own, the first steps in calling this new place “home.”  We hung stained glass windows that had hung high above the balcony of our other home in the front room.  Things we believed to be beautiful.

And Martha put some planters on the back porch and a small patio tomato plant, and planted a clematis by the front door.  We moved our St. Francis and stone lantern to the small area on our side of the sidewalk, our new “garden.”

Day after day, we carried boxes of books back and forth, moved furniture, hung drapes and curtains.  It was rewarding work, but physically exhausting, and my running dropped to as little as one mile during one hectic week.  But I knew that when we had finally settled in, running and walking and hiking would be right outside the front door.  We could hike up Sunset Mountain anytime we liked, walk to Town, walk to the Saturday market where my fellow runners still meet on Saturday mornings.  

 It will be nice to finally be up here.  In Highlands.

Emptying

Slowly, we began to empty out our house.  Furniture was sold or given away.  I discovered that I did not need a wardrobe with so many drawers; my small oak bureau with the mirror was sufficient.  That’s part of downsizing:  what is sufficient? 

A surprising benefit of downsizing was discovering things that I had forgotten I owned.  In sorting through dozens of T-shirts, mostly from the 220 races I have run since 1993, I discovered some that I had forgotten about.  Martha found two lovely little miniature books of Hiroshige prints and poetry and couldn’t remember where they came from.  Even in our relatively small house, we had so many possessions that we had forgotten what we already had.  That sentence alone is a good reason to downsize, to simplify, to get back to what is truly important.

We had a lot of hard work to do before we put our house on the market.  The wainscoting in the master bedroom, which we had discontinued last fall, suddenly became a priority again.  We decided to take the breakfast bar in the kitchen with us (just right for two people but probably an inconvenience for a buyer who would want a larger kitchen table), and so we removed it and replaced the wainscoting there. 

I sold almost all of my tools, and wondered what to do with my Body Solid exercise machine in the basement, when at the last moment my friend Gil contacted me because he had seen it on Facebook, where Martha had listed dozens of things for sale (and generated thousands of dollars in profits).  I used to work out with Gil years ago in the gym in Highlands, and was glad to sell it to him for a song, provided he dismantle it himself, which he did (I helped carry some of  the weights up to his truck). 

We wrangled so many pieces of furniture down those stairs, maneuvering around the landing, that I lost count.  With the help of Martha’s brother Scott, with his pickup truck and trailer and (most importantly) his willingness to help, we began transporting the furniture and belongings that we really wanted up to our new home, which was only five miles away.  Some of our things, mostly books and décor and winter clothes, went to a storage warehouse a mile out of Town, to be sorted through at a later time.  And finally, on the very last day of May, a Sunday, two men showed up with a big trailer and moved out the heaviest and most unwieldy things, like the piano and the big oak buffet table and the bed.  How strange it was, to walk through our empty living-dining room with the high cathedral ceilings, and hear our voices echoing through the emptiness. 

Our first night in our new home in Highlands was May 31, and it coincided with a full moon. 

In the fullness of time,
in the fullness of the moon,
we came to a new place,
a new beginning. 

Downsizing

We are ready for downsizing, for simplifying our lives, I said in my last post.  By some standards, our home in Clear Creek would already be considered a modest one.  But as I said, we have grown accustomed to spending winters in a condo at Atlantic Beach, and the smaller size suits us well.  I wrote a poem about downsizing in my first book, Bells in the Night, which was based in part on our friend Barbara moving into a smaller space.

It reminded me of Barbara, who wanted less and less,
Who gave away everything these past few years,
Quietly and without a fuss, starting at the attic
And moving downward floor by floor, leaving

A gentle trail of broom-swept emptiness behind;
First her knitting, then her china; boxes and boxes
Of photographs of Italy, friends who were gone,
And finally – most difficult of all – her books.

But giving up comes easier with use, like any skill;
The rooms seemed to empty themselves, one by one;
Sunlight streamed into the curtainless house
And the floorboards gleamed brightly with loss.

We have lived in smaller spaces for days and even weeks at a time, both at Atlantic Beach and when traveling in France and Italy.  In 2024, we rented a small apartment called Studio Michelangelo in Florence, right around the corner from the Duomo, and it was lovely.  How much space does a person really need, after all?  I am not prepared to sell everything and live in a Winnebago as one of my friends did several years ago.  But lately it seems that we are happier with less:  fewer possession, fewer commitments, less property to maintain.  More time for the things that matter.  I told one of my friends recently that I really didn’t need that much:  a desk, a reading chair, a piano.

Downsizing.  Giving up comes easier with use, like any skill.  So in April we began giving things away, selling things, donating things.  Our daughter in Greenville, who has a big house, gladly accepted some of it, like the rocking chair that my grandmother once rocked my Dad in when he was a baby. 

Our daughter also inherited all of my dahlia bulbs, some of them given to me by Martha for my birthday years ago, others given to me by Barbara James, grown by her husband Herb with whom I worked at the Town for years (and I never knew he grew dahlias!), which in turn were given to him by his mother, and perhaps her mother.  Dahlia bulbs can be passed down through many generations.  Now I receive "Dahlia Dispatch" updates on the bulbs, which like us have been transplanted but are sprouting anew in a new environment.

 
We  found that the more we gave away, the lighter we felt, the more liberated.  And the “things” went to friends and relatives, like the blue birdbath we sold to Lisa and the garden bench to Karen.  It was like giving away puppies:  we enjoyed knowing that they went to good homes.  In the end, it is the memories that we keep, and they mean more than the possessions that we accumulate over a lifetime. 

A New Chapter

Two months have gone by since my last post to this blog on March 16.  We returned to our home that we designed and built 43 years ago on Sassafras Gap Road.  The power and water were on this year, unlike in the past, but it was very cold, with temperatures in the twenties and formidable wind chills.  It was good to return to the beautiful home that we expanded and improved over the years, to the comfort of the familiar.  

As much as we love this home, for several years now we have considered moving closer to downtown Highlands.  Martha’s aunt Anne owned a condominium at Highlands Townsite until recently, and stayed there during the summers until she moved to an independent living and then an assisted living retirement home in Clemson, South Carolina.  We enjoyed many wonderful hours on her front porch, sipping wine and visiting, enjoying hearing all of the stories about her travels and her friends.  It was “Anne Central,” and in the late afternoons all of her neighbors would drop by with drinks and snacks.  The location was perfect for her, on Horse Cove Road, which is really an extension of Main Street and is the quietest road to Town.  Her grandchildren sold the place two years ago, in part to help pay for the cost of her assisted living, and that made us wonder if we had missed an opportunity to move to Highlands.  Condominiums are the only affordable options anymore, but they rarely come on the market, and especially at Highlands Townsite where most of the owners are second-generation, retired second-home owners.  Wouldn’t this have been a smart move for us?  We are ready for downsizing, for simplifying our lives, and the chores of weed-eating and maintaining a one-acre property had become a distraction from the pursuits that we enjoyed.  Staying in a condo at the beach for ten years had made us realize that we were happy with less.

In March, while we were still in Atlantic Beach, Martha learned that a unit in the building had become available, downstairs but at the opposite end where Anne’s had been.  We always do a lot of thinking and planning while we are on our “Sabbatical.”  In the past we have planned trips to Italy and France and month-long road trips out west in our Mini Cooper.  As we thought about it, it seemed to be an opportunity that we could not ignore, an open door through which a new chapter in our lives might begin.  Martha had wanted to move to Highlands for a year or two, while I was not quite ready.  But I agreed to look at the condominium with an open mind when we returned to Highlands, which we did within a week.  When we walked inside, I admit that I was pleasantly surprised.  Anne’s unit, though filled with her beautiful artwork and treasured belongings, had always seemed antiquated and dark.  This place was filled with light.  New flooring had been installed, along with a modern HVAC system.  I could see ourselves living there.
 

So, by the middle of March, and not without a lot of soul-searching and weighing of the pros and cons, we had decided to buy a new home.  A home in Highlands, on property once owned by Martha’s ancestors, in the Town which I served for 26 years, on the corner of Horse Cove Road and Sixth Street, which I have run past for four decades – in fact, it was on our regular daily running route.  We decided to list our home of 43 years on the real estate market as soon as we could – the target date was June 1, which gave us only a little over two months to take this leap of faith into the future, this new chapter, this adventure.

Winter Sabbatical Recap

The national news was so grim in January that, when we arrived in Atlantic Beach this year, I promised myself that I would not keep up with it for a month or two.  A Sabbatical, for both of us, is a time to distance ourselves from such things for a short time, to reevaluate where we have been and where we are going – we have often made big decisions out here, away from the routines and responsibilities that seem to bind us at home.  Martha began a new exercise routine that involves intense morning exercises and a challenge to walk many, many miles, and as a result she has lost weight and is as fit and strong as I think she has ever been, so much so that, has she not given up running races, she would surely place first in her age group.  I had ambitions of running a race in January, which never happened, and of beginning to build a base of winter mileage, which also never happened. 

Part of the reason we winter in Atlantic Beach is that it is about twenty degrees warmer than in Highlands, so we are usually able to hike (and in my case) run and spend time out of doors.  But in our last snowstorm – and any snowstorm is a rare event in this part of the world – Highlands received ten inches while Atlantic Beach received fifteen inches.  I did not run at all some weeks, which meant fewer miles than ever before, although I did manage to go to the Sports Center to lift weights twice a week or so, and I completed, toward the end of our stay, a five- and a six-mile run.  

My promise to distance myself from the news did not last long:   ICE agents were murdering Americans in cold blood in Minneapolis, our military kidnapped the president of Venezuela (and his wife), and most recently the failed reality-TV show President and his FOX weekend news host “Secretary of War” started a foolish war with Iran.  On the first day of the war, more than a hundred innocent schoolgirls were killed by a tomahawk missile.  

I did manage to write some poetry, another one of my Sabbatical goals, but much of it was bleak and filled with outrage and sadness. 

It is midwinter all across our weary nation,
from Minneapolis to Washington the hard cold
has settled in, and we have to wonder if the
bright summer birds will ever wake us
with their hopeful gentle songs of peace.

Walking on the beach is always a balm, and like going for a run or attending a yoga session, it never fails to calm and settle the troubled mind.  The last couple of days (as is always the case) were unusually beautiful, warm and sunny, and we took full advantage of them.  On one of them, we walked to Oceanana Pier, and along the way we met a man walking with his three young daughters, who had kicked their shoes off and were wading in the icy cold surf.  I asked the little girls if they would like a shell I had just found, and one of them eagerly took it.  Then the father asked, perhaps as payment for my gift, "Would you like to hear some beautiful music?"  We did, and it turned out that the three were accomplished young vocalists, and they proceeded to belt out a gorgeous version of the gospel song "The Sweet Holy Spirit" in perfect three-part harmony, holding hands and beaming with happiness.  Beautiful!  You never know what treasures you will come upon on the beach. 

"Sweet Holy Spirit, oh how I love Thee
For being a comfort so many times and for strengthening me
For I could not make it across life's troubled sea
If the sweet Holy Spirit should ever leave me."

As I write today, we have returned to Highlands, the place where Martha was born and where we have lived for forty-three years, although there were many changes over the winter.  The beloved Highlands Playhouse building, the Holt corner and Stone Lantern, and the Bank of America have all been torn down, the latter to be replaced with an unattractive hotel.  And although we saw flowering red bud trees and forsythia all along the way on our return trip, temperatures tomorrow are expected to (as the meteorologists all insist on saying) “drop like a rock,” into the twenties with single-digit wind chills. There are reports of snow flurries up in town. 

 But unlike past years, we walked into a home that had power and water, and our furnace came on immediately.  We have much to be thankful for.  We carry with us memories of many days of beautiful sunrises, walks on the beach, hikes at Fort Macon, good times with good friends, and continuing health and fitness.  For which we can always be thankful, through time and tides and comings and goings.