The struggle continued this week, winter contending with spring, and neither willing to cry "Uncle!" It rained all day on Wednesday, and when I drove to Franklin to turn in a license plate on a vehicle we had just sold, I noted that the Little Tennessee River was out of its banks, spreading brown mud across the bottoms where the grass had just turned green between Dillard and Franklin along US-441. But that night the rain tapered off and a cold front swiftly moved heralded by high winds, and temperatures plummeted into the 20s. We could hear it moaning through the night, the tall pine trees swaying dizzily overhead all around our house.
I had learned about the Beaufort Scale while we were in Atlantic Beach this winter, developed over 200 years ago by Sir Francis Beaufort, which classified wind speeds and their appearance on the ocean from CALM (Sea surface smooth and mirror-like) to NEAR GALE (Sea heaps up, waves 13-19 ft, white foam streaks off breakers) all the way to HURRICANE (Air filled with foam, waves over 45 ft, sea completely white with driving spray, visibility greatly reduced). Tuning in to Asheville's WLOS-TV weather on Thursday morning, I learned that our local meteorologists have devised a new scale, the Trash Can Wind Meter. They described Thursday morning as a "Neighbor's Yard" kind of day.
Missing, I thought. Is that even possible? We do not use trash cans - I take our trash to the Macon County transfer station on Rich Gap Road on the way to Town when needed - but I did note on the Betz Birdhouse Scale that Thursday morning was a "Birdhouse Blown Over" kind of day.
Friday morning again saw temperatures in the 20s and wind chill even lower, but by Saturday it was in the 30s and the wind had tapered off again. So we went ahead with our plans for that day arranged several weeks in advance, an Easter Parade in Dillsboro, a little town about an hour away. The annual event included a contingent of Mini Coopers, courtesy of Appalachian Mini, a group to which we belong, as well as several vintage cars and an Easter Bonnet contest.
We showed up at the appointed time in our Mini Cooper and joined nine others assembling on the other side of the railroad tracks belonging to the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad, a heritage railroad that operates between Dillsboro and Bryson City and contributes greatly to tourism in both towns.
They were a friendly, gregarious group of Mini enthusiasts and they welcomed us warmly to the first event we have attended. We enjoyed chatting with several of them - especially a burly-looking, heavily- tattooed man who had restored his 2003 Mini from a rusting cast-off found in a junkyard - and I realized that this was the first real event that we had attended in a year, since the Covid pandemic had stopped everything in its tracks. And the first socializing we had engaged in for several months. It reminded us, on a much smaller scale, of the "Mini Takes the States" tour we took in 2016 from Atlanta to California and back home again, memorialized on this blog at the time for those who might care to read about it. That event had included hundreds of Minis (and no two exactly the same!) compared to this contingent of ten cars. But it was the same feeling of camaraderie bound by the simple theme of common car ownership.
I crossed the tracks while we were waiting for the parade to start and looked over the dozen or so vintage cars, including Model A's and fine old Pontiac GTO's, and one especially nice MG roadster.
I spotted several interesting Easter bonnets while I was strolling down through Dillsboro, and took a photo of this automobile-themed specimen.
We did not stay for the Easter Bonnet Contest awards and so don't know if License Plate Man was recognized for his original hat. Perhaps it went to one of two women who had the largest straw hats I have ever seen, or that belonging to the terrified little girl who was forced against her will to sit on a bench alongside a six-foot talking bunny. I returned to our Mini, and before much longer, someone shouted, "Let's go, we're holding up the parade!" And we crossed the railroad tracks, turned left, and drove down the entire two-block length of Dillsboro, waving our hands and wishing "Happy Easter" to everyone who had come to watch.
I suddenly realized that I had never been in an Easter Parade before today! It was all over in five minutes or so, and we returned to our parking lot to undecorate our cars. Then we all left Dillsboro and drove along the scenic Tuckasegee River through Webster to Cullowhee and Sylva, a road on which we had never driven before. What fun! One of the organizers of the event posted this great photo taken through the rear-view mirror of his very fine 2015 Mini roadster on Facebook. Minis feel frisky on two-lane roads like that!
The rest of the group drove into Sylva to Jack the Dipper, a popular ice cream place that has thrived in the college town of Cullowhee (Western Carolina University) for years. We chose to forego the ice cream and took a turn up Highway 107 to Cashiers, and then back to Highlands.
It had been a good day, a day that seemed to mark a return to some conditional kind of normalcy after the Covid pandemic. It has been a long time - over a year - since we have gone on a purely pleasure drive like this one. And for the first time in our lives we had participated in the Easter Parade that I have always heard celebrated in the Irving Berlin song:
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