BY HURRICANE HELENE
…as its downpour threatened to flood us out until we found ways to divert it from the house. Too bad we couldn’t divert what turned meek little Sugar Camp Branch into this ferocious torrent. It coursed from the streambed to the roadbed and gouged it badly, leaving us stranded.
Stream bed diverted onto road bed equals trouble.
We were lucky compared to most folks, though. After a week our power and road were restored. A few weeks later we climbed the ridge to renew our marriage vows on our 40th anniversary. Soon after, we were ready to pack up and return to Mississippi to wind up our affairs there.
BY BIDDING MISSISSIPPI FAREWELL
…after living there all of our married lives and nearly all of our lives since birth. It’s a lot to pack up two lifetimes of things and disentangle two lifetimes of relationships and commerce. It’s a lot to repair and upgrade all the problems we had learned to live with in our house, and then say farewell to it when it’s in the best shape we have ever known. It’s hard to say goodbye to our beautiful back yard after it undergoes a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm onto our old and tall camellia bushes with all the Southern charm they possess. It is very bracing to go through all the accumulated papers of our lives and burn 90 percent of them, to give away loads of books and records, architectural salvage and furniture, and then pack up what remains with the help of Three Guys and a Truck and travel ten hours to the mountains. It is sobering to see a lifetime of effort to make a house a home reduced to a number typed on a lawyer’s trust account check. Oh, and a week before we were due to move, I underwent GI surgery and was released under strict instructions to avoid lifting heavy weights.
Camellias in snow
Even the Buddha allowed himself to be moved
BY A NECESSARY SIDE PROJECT
… for our younger daughter trapped as a renter in an area plagued by Mississippi’s most acute affordable housing shortage. At the same time as we prepared our house for sale, we purchased land and a house on the edge of Water Valley. The house held promise but required a bottom up renovation because it had a soggy bottom thanks to a poor foundation. This required us to use funds and spend time we had planned to devote to our new North Carolina home. To replace these funds we pursued refinancing which we couldn’t put into place until our daughter could move in. So we took turns going to Water Valley to keep the renovation on track and in line with our daughter’s vision. All this occurred in parallel with our toil in Handsboro to upgrade and sell our own house, and move to the mountains. In mid-October, as the Smoky Mountain fall foliage approached its peak, I was in Water Valley pushing this effort across the finish line, hosted by generous friends. The end result left our daughter smiling from ear to ear, surely a parent’s happiest reward.
Water Valley
Water Valley
PAINTING INTERRUPTED, TOO
…but a few opportunities came along. I took my paints up to Eden for a weekend with friends from college and started a pair of landscapes. I went to a plein air paint out on Dauphin Island. I also signed up for two workshops in Nashville taught by Maggie Siner, my art teacher from my time in Aix-en-Provence. Attending the second workshop was threatened by a dispute with the contractor in Water Valley (who capitulated to my terms), by an Arctic blast snow storm (which melted in time for me to leave), and by a lost easel with all my supplies (which I replaced at Jerry’s Artarama in Knoxville). I sketched out a poster for my high school class 50th reunion. Thanks to another health setback, I had to revert to an AI generated substitute based on the sketches. Finally upon my return, I applied some of the lessons from the second workshop to sketch out a self portrait.
Eden
Eden
Dauphin Island
Dauphin Island
workshop
workshop
workshop
workshop
poster (AI generated from sketches I made)
