Mother's Day

Martha had wanted to go somewhere different this year on Mother’s Day and decided that an overnight visit to the Fryemont Inn would be just the place to go.  We read about their Covid protocols on the website and it seemed like one of the safest destinations, with large rooms that could be aired out and a spacious lodge and dining room.  

The Inn is located on a hill overlooking Bryson City, just a little over an hour from Highlands, and although we have never stayed there we had heard good reports.  Constructed a hundred years ago by Amos and Lillian Frye (thus it’s name) it is listed on the National Register. 

Amos Frye had access to some of the best timber in the Great Smoky Mountains at the time, and he used it on the Inn – oak and maple for the floors, locust for the beams and columns, poplar bark for part of the siding, and interior paneling from the great American chestnuts that were at the time being killed by the chestnut blight.  Martha’s grandmother’s home on Fourth Street in downtown Highlands, where we briefly stayed 38 years ago when our home was being built, had similar paneling, come of it rare clear chestnut (as opposed to “wormy” chestnut), and when we walked into the lodge it reminded us of that wonderful old home.  It featured a huge rock fireplace in which a fire was blazing.  It seemed to be a laid-back place; a group of guests were playing a spirited game of Scrabble on a big game table, and someone was curled up with a book in front of the fire.  

The Fryemont reminded us, too, of the Historic Brookstown Inn in Winston-Salem where we have often stayed on our way to the Outer Banks and Atlantic Beach.  A converted cotton mill, the Brookstown has that same quirky layout, uneven floors, and crooked corridors.  The Inn has been owned by only three families, most recently the Browns since 1978.  We met Hotel Manager Monica Brown when we arrived – her husband is the Executive Chef and her daughter works there during the summers.

We wandered down dark corridors and peered in unoccupied rooms that were open, some of them containing old-fashioned sinks with separate hot and cold faucets, like the historic old Blue Swallow in Tucumcari, New Mexico, where we stayed on our trip to California in 2016.

Historically interesting, but a bit of a challenge when washing up!  (Do you want ice cold water in your face, or scalding hot water?)  Unsure about some of the rooms in the Main Lodge being musty, Martha had arranged to stay just a short distance away in one of a group of comfortable and more modern rondettes called the Balcony Suites, where hot and cold water commingled in a single spout thanks to the miracle of modern plumbing.

It was a great place to stay, quiet and airy, with rocking chairs on the back deck.  We had arrived early enough in Bryson City to spend some time walking around, but now it was appealing to sit and relax under towering shade trees in those rockers waiting for dinner.  Dinner was in a spacious dining room, and we sat at a table with a window facing a stone terrace; the only other diners were on the other side of the room in front of the fireplace.  The menu included trout prepared six different ways, and we each tried a different way, the apricot-ginger glaze and the white-wine-and-mushroom sauce equally tasty.  While we were eating, Martha remarked that this was the first time we had dined indoors at a restaurant in well over a year.

The next morning, we returned to the same dining room for a bountiful breakfast, and then left Bryson City on a rambling, circuitous route, warm enough to put the top down on our Mini Cooper.  We stayed on two-lane roads to Robbinsville, then back over to Topton and a beautiful drive down the Nantahala River gorge to the Nantahala Outdoor Center (the NOC), popular with tubers and kayakers across the country.  

 We had a little picnic across the river, watching the water cascade over the rocks.  It was a little early in the season for venturing out in the water, but we watched a single kayaker expertly maneuver his craft upriver.  The Appalachian Trail actually crosses the Nantahala River on the bridge alongside the NOC, so after we had walked across the bridge we were able to say that we had hiked on the AT for Mother’s Day. 

It was a good Mother’s Day despite being tempered by the sadness of such holidays.  Martha heard from our own daughter, and she also heard from her sister and her brothers, who were united in missing Martha’s Mama who died last June.  But we were fortunate to have our mothers for as many years as we did, weren’t we? - my own mother lived to be over 90 – and it is a comfort to know that we tried to love them as much as they loved us.

Our Iffy Gardens

It is always nice to see our gardens take shape in May - my "main"garden down in the raised beds that I built several years ago, and Martha's "backup"garden up on the deck, protected on high from deer and rabbits.  The time to plant gardens in this part of Western North Carolina is not before May 15; otherwise a late frost can arrive overnight and put a swift end to early planting.  Although a little early, the temperatures looked good for the next week, so last week we set out most of our plants.  

I planted red bell peppers, tomatoes (several varieties), zucchini, and blue lake green beans in the raised beds, which after several years contain loose soil amended with composted fall leaves that don't even need tilling.  I expect them to do well if I erect the deer netting around the raised beds, if it doesn't rain too much this summer, and if I can keep slugs under control with "Sluggo," a product that always reminds me of that old cartoon strip that only we old-timers still remember.

But what's in a name?  Sluggo, tiny pellets that bait and kill slugs and snails, is very effective if I distribute it in time.  There are a lot of other "ifs" in the sentence before, but it is well worth the effort.  Of course, we realize we could buy fresh vegetables all summer at August Produce, but where's the fun in that?  Is there anything better than a tomato grown in your own garden?

Martha's backup garden takes place in several very clever planters known as "Grow Boxes," which you can fill with water so that they water the plants (mostly herbs) below, from the roots,  She ordered six new ones this year, and has planted them with the herbs that make our summer cooking so wonderful - basil, parsley, chives, and rosemary.  She has also planted some roma tomatoes, green beans, and summer squash.  My garden, exposed to the elements and the predators, is not always reliable, but her backup garden rarely fails.

So we have planted, fertilized, and watered.  And now we wait to see, in that "if" of the gardener's held breath, what happens this season.  In the best of conditions, we will be rewarded with that most wonderful gift, real produce from our own gardens.  And if it fails, we have at least gotten some dirt under our fingernails and experienced the age-old wonder of sowing seed and cultivating and hoping for the magic of growth.

More Projects Underway

"It is good to be working on something physical again, sore muscles at the end of the day and the satisfaction of seeing plans become reality."  That's what I wrote in my last post about the demolition of the steps to our front porch and various fences that will interfere with the planned covered entryway to the front door.  Work continued this week with the removal and replacement of two rotten boards on our deck.  What seemed like a relatively easy task turned into a brutal contest against rusty screws with crowbar and circular saw. 

Wednesday morning, after two days of hard work, I learned that my running was impacted in a big way.  I had run three miles on Monday, but fatigue is cumulative, and I felt it in my heavy legs.  I have also come face to face once again with that uncomfortable truth:  "I am no longer as young as I was!"  I ran until I was tired, then walked, then ran some more.  Fortunately I met my friend Fred half-way through the run and I turned and finished it with him.  82-year-old Fred is actually planning on running in a track meet next weekend and had been running intervals, so we paced each other back to the park at 12-minutes per mile.  A track meet!  What an inspiration.

Thursday I put the finishing touches on the deck, adding another decorative horizontal beam for hanging flowers this summer, something I had been meaning to do for some time now.

And what is a deck without rocking chairs?  Our last remaining rocking chair finally succumbed to old age and rot this winter and could no longer be repaired with hose clamps, screws, or new runners cut with my jigsaw, so I sadly took it to the landfill.  Martha had identified some acacia-wood rockers at Walmart, of all places, so on Friday I took an extra rest day and we drove to Clayton and bought two of them.  I unpacked and assembled them, challenged by the claim "Easy Assembly:  Assemble in 30 minutes or less!" (21 minutes 52 seconds - hah!)  We were heartened to learn that acacia is "100% wood from well-managed forests," and surprised to learn that they were made in Vietnam.

We had our house pressure-cleaned by Martha's nephew last week and he did a great job, making our green metal roof shine as if brand new as well as the boards on our deck (above).  Now we are planning to have our house painted.  It is a good time after a thorough pressure wash and painting is long overdue.  We had agreed on a new color scheme, a shade of tan or beige instead of gray, the same green window frames, but brick-red accent colors on the window sashes and doors.  We found the exact colors for the windows on the first try, but we went through four shades of tan for the siding before finally (with some remaining trepidation) settling on a shade.

We had already sampled, among other colors, Shakespeare Tan (is that based on the color of cottages in Stratford-upon-Avon, I wondered?) and Woodstock Tan ("By the time I got to Woodstock . . .?") before settling on the comparatively unglamorous Grant Beige.  

Now to find somebody to do the work.  Construction (and painting) is booming in Highlands this spring; Covid-19 restrictions are being lifted, everybody wants to build a house in Highlands, and there is more than enough work for everyone.  As a result, the cost of lumber has gone up 200% since last year and contractors who are not tied up all summer are hard to find.  Our first painting contractor told us he might be able to get to our job by August.  Now we are waiting for the second estimate from a genial Latino who spoke excellent English and whose truck ran out of gas in our driveway, where I gladly gave him all the lawnmower gas that I had on hand.  Maybe he will remember the favor and find time for our project.

The extra rest day paid off, and Saturday morning I was able to complete six miles.  "I am no longer as young as I was" is a condition, I have found, that can be treated by another truth I am learning more and more about every year:  "I need an extra rest day!"

Bells in the Night

It has been a busy time in our lives, so busy that I have neglected posting to this blog.  Every day seems to require us to drive out of Town to appointments - doctors, tax professionals - and to continue preparing our house and yard for spring.

At the same time I am excited to have finally sent my book off to the publishers.  Proofread many times now and ready to publish since last November, I was waiting until this month on the slim chance that my book might have a chance to win the Academy of American Poets new book prize.  Had I won this prize, it would have included publication of the book as well as an all-expenses-paid six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center, a castle in the Umbrian region of Italy. 

In all honesty, I could not really see myself lounging on the lawn in such a bucolic setting with other poets and artists.  I might instead of tied on my running shoes and explored the nearby Italian hillside roads.  In any case, the award went to the deserving young poet Kemi Alabi, and I look forward to reading her book.  My own book - Bells in the Night - will be published sometime this spring or summer.

While it will not have as wide a distribution as Ms. Alabi's book, I do hope that somewhere a reader or two might lounge on the lawn and enjoy reading it!

On top of everything else, we have decided to embark on a new construction project at our home consisting of a carport and a new entryway to the front door.  We have discovered to our disappointment that every contractor in Highlands seems to be busy (it is a project which I will need some help to complete) and lumber prices have doubled in the past year.  Still construction began yesterday with demolition, as it sometimes does.  Taking advantage of a clear, cool afternoon, and with the help of crowbar and circular saw, I removed the front steps and fences along the walkway and hauled them away to the landfill.  It is good to be working on something physical again, sore muscles at the end of the day and the satisfaction of seeing plans become reality.

 

Sunday, we decided to take the entire day off, and early in the morning we drove to Brevard, then up US-276 past Looking Glass Falls and the Cradle of Forestry, finally climbing to the very crest of the mountain range and the Blue Ridge Parkway, that lovely 469-mile long park that holds so many sweet memories for us both.  We spent our honeymoon at Pisgah Inn nearly 41 years ago.  And that is where we ended up on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Wedding Bells

We were so happy to learn last week that our daughter Katy and her long-time boyfriend David got married, on their 10th anniversary as a couple.  Martha posted the news on Facebook:

"She was piped in to the sounds of Highland Cathedral on the bagpipe, where they exchanged and pinned their tartans. Due to the pandemic, it was a lovely, private ceremony, with just the two of them present."

Among the dozens of comments of congratulations was one from acclaimed nature photographer Kevin Fitzpatrick, for whom Katy worked as an intern while she was in High School.  Martha told him, "I know you will be interested to know that they took their own photos using their iPhone cameras with tripods and remote controls, and still managed to make everything look natural." 

Just in time for the wedding, our Carolina Silverbell (Halesia carolina), just off our deck, began blooming. 

 

Wedding bells, hanging in the sweet April air.  It is the season for new beginnings!

Easter Sunday

It was a beautiful Easter Sunday, and in  the past we would have attended an Easter Sunrise service, or at least some church service.  Over the years, we have attended sunrise services at the Kitty Hawk Pier, in Elizabeth City, and here in Highlands at the Nature Center.  We have attended church in places as far away as Alexandria, Virginia and Myrtle Beach.  It seems that we have often been traveling at Easter, and so it has been interesting to worship in far-flung locations.  I recall that the church in Alexandria, where we stayed while visiting Washington D.C., was Christ Church and we sat in a box pew which the ushers went down the aisle and closed at the beginning of the service.

But church options this year are still limited, so we decided to drive to the N. C. Arboretum in Asheville, which some might say can also be a place of worship.  We had called ahead and found that the Bent Creek Bistro was open at the Arboretum and was serving very good, healthy take-out, and that's where we decided to have our "Easter Dinner."  It was outside dining only but nobody sitting in the sunny courtyard seemed to mind.  We ordered, and when someone called our name we carried our smoked turkey and provolone sandwiches to a nearby bench.

It was a memorable Easter, perhaps as nice as that time in Washington D.C. where (once they had opened up our pews) we had afterward gone to the Smithsonian and enjoyed dinner on white tablecloths while someone played classical music on the harp.  Instead of harp music we had birdsong, green grass, and trees just beginning to blossom as families strolled by on their way to the gardens.

After lunch, we walked along one of the many garden trails, which began under this arch near the Bistro.

We did not expect to see much in bloom in early April, but some of the flowering trees were just beginning to show pink and white buds.  And a little farther along the path we came upon this extravagantly overflowing Spring Snowflake.

The Arboretum is filled with some remarkable sculpture, too, from a humble carving of an owl that seemed to be growing out of a rock, to this shining silver-oak-leaf creation.

We circled around through the Forest Meadow and climbed the steps to the larger-than-life statue of Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture and designer of Central Park and the Biltmore Estate.

The formal gardens are laid out between the Visitor Center and the Educational Center, and there is also a very fine Bonsai exhibit.  The central feature of these gardens is a spectacular Quilt Garden, which we have seen in full bloom in July but in April was just beginning to take shape.  Still, it was nice to walk through these just-awakening garden beds before their inhabitants had yawned, stretched, and sat up into the full splendor of summer.

The Visitor Center always has art on display, and today there was a large collection of photographs, mostly of flowers.  I have always appreciated two of the quotations written on the walls high above the art exhibits.

Our only disappointment on this beautiful day was that as we exited the Arboretum and turned right, planning to return home on the Blue Ridge Parkway - the top down on our Mini, the sun shining warmly - we discovered that it was closed.  I later found that Pisgah Inn, where we had intended to stop and watch hawks glide over the valleys below before returning down the Davidson River to Brevard, had opened on April 1, but apparently road conditions were not good along the Parkway.  They do not use snow plows or salt, and in the shade it takes a long time for ice to melt at 5,000 feet.  But the drive home along the French Broad River, and then on winding Highway 64 through Cashiers to Highlands, was absolutely beautiful, and our brief disappointment evaporated in the warm sunshine and the open air.

At the end of the day, we felt just as we had on Saturday in the Easter Parade.  It seems as if we are turning a corner, that there is healing and solace in a new season, that as Rachel Carson said, "dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

Easter Parade

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:

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,
You'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade.
I'll be all in clover and when they look you over,
I'll be the proudest fellow in the Easter parade.