Favorite Form of Friendship

We had a lovely day of outdoor play with Richard repairing the tree house. Well, not necessarily repairing it, but beginning the process. The floor supports had started to collapse, as they were made of sapling trees. This was not Richard’s design, but it falls to him to repair the various projects I encourage others to build on our “Granny Camp” land. The Huck Finn comes out in most who spend any time here. This tree house looks very much like the raft on which Huck and Jim traveled downriver, except it’s up in a tree.

As is usual with Richard’s repair projects, a great deal of interesting engineering went into this effort. The ground beneath the tree house is on quite a slope, and his task was to shore up the collapsed end of the platform. With a very elaborate system of stacked cinder blocks, boards, and the jack from his Bronco II, he was laboriously lifting the deck, a few inches at a time. As he got enough clearance to insert a pillar, he needed a second set of hands to hold the new support while he lowered the platform and repositioned the jack. I was to be that second set of hands.

I puttered on the porch, transplanting the various vegetable plants that Mary and I had scored at the Future Farmers of America sale. Every so often, I’d hear Richard calling me, and I’d mosey on over to help him. It’s really fun to observe his ingenuity. He once jacked up a huge deck at our house on the lake, all by himself using a similar system – only two days after having a stent put into an artery.

Why I’m the one needing a nap after this effort is anyone’s guess, but I did. (I really have to get my hammock out of storage and hang it between its trees.) As I snoozed in preparation for going to scoop poop on Mary’s mountaintop, Richard played with his new belt sander making “chick sticks.” These are simple sticks, a set of several hundred of which is the most marvelous toy we ever owned. I’ve been mourning their loss ever since Katrina, and Richard is now well on the way to completing a new set for our house in the holler.

Upon awaking, it was off to Mary’s to man the muck rakes. It can actually be fun to scoop horse poop as long as I’m with people I enjoy. Mary, Richard, and I made short work of it while Mary gave us an education on various items of interest to horse people. As Richard and I unloaded the barnyard booty onto our garden at Mamie’s house, I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of the rich black “garden gold” that will soon feed our tomatoes, beans, and corn cobs.

Not only did we get organic fertilizer, we were able to further bond with Mary over shared labor -- my favorite form of friendship.

The Rewards of Rural Life

Mountaintop Mary and I had a most marvelous adventure in her big blue truck on a perfect spring day in the southeast Tennessee mountains. She picked me up at eleven, so we could start our day of dawdling with dining. This entailed a leisurely lunch on the Tellico River at my favorite Panini place, Kat’s Deli. Of course, because I’m doing Atkins, I had to forego my own Panini; in its place having a chef salad. But Mary’s Reuben made my mouth water just looking at it.

We met a bunch of Coker Creekers hanging out there, and had a grand old time making their acquaintance and inviting them to our First Friday supper. Mary never met a stranger, so it was easy getting involved in conversation with this bevy of “boys.”
One of the guys with whom Mary struck up conversation was telling her how to catch trout on the Tellico. Mary was very interested in this subject, as she wants to learn to fly fish. She says her favorite part of fishing is casting, so fly fishing would seem to be perfect for her.

Since Mary and I are planning on joining forces for Granny Camp this summer, I was interested in the fly fishing subject as an activity to add to our “keeping kids busy” repertoire. Our informative friend, Joe, suggested that we buy worms from the service station across the road. Mary and I found this funny, as we both know that we could keep the kids busy all morning with unearthing earthworms, with which her manure piles are quite literally crawling.

When I asked Joe whether he lived nearby, he allowed as he lived in the house with the dragon. The dragon he referred to is a huge topiary that faces the Cherohala Skyway. I connected his name and the dragon and almost jumped out of my skin with excitement. I was talking to Topiary Joe, the world-famous topiary artist. I’d been wanting to make his acquaintance ever since I got to these parts. Who knew he was so approachable?

We then wandered over to McMinn County to purchase plants from the Future Farmers of America program at a local high school. What a find that was! These kids start seeds in their school greenhouse, and raise them until someone adopts them. Mary and I scored all kinds of well-on-their-way-to-fruition vegetable plants for a fraction of what they would have cost at a nursery. Mary is just a wealth of win-win information.

While we were focused on farming, and we were so close to the Mennonite community farm in Delano, I asked if Mary had ever been there. I was amazed that she hadn’t been, so we took a little detour. Even though it was still early in the season for their farm stand to have much in the way of garden goods, I was able to purchase some of their outstanding baked bounty.

The sights that we saw were worth the trip all by themselves. There is probably not a more pastoral picture than that of the Mennonites and their beasts of burden plowing and planting in the spring. We were even rewarded with a parting pleasure of finding some of the children playing near their parents in the newly plowed and planted fields. The rewards of rural life…

The Daring Dandelion

I’m sure God has reasons
For the daring dandelion.
I hear that their leaves make good eatin’,
And that their flowers make fine wine.
Richard says their latex
May be used for industry.
Any useful thing that’s done with them
Would be just fine with me.

When we lived in the city,
It was considered quite absurd
To allow the plants to come to seed
To feed the hungry birds.
We’d attack our lawns with Round-up,
And hunt for the offending critters.
Here, the spent seed spore sentinels
Are our lawn bugs’ babysitters.

Fairy Wings and Webs

The snowball bush is blooming
At our home in Coker Creek.
The azaleas will need pruning
When their blooms have peaked,
Except for the wild ones
That grow among the trees.
These are always nice surprises
That never fail to please.
There are trees with fairy wings
That drift down on the deck.
I know that I should sweep
Them off, but oh what the heck!
It’s not often fairies come to play
In one’s own back yard.
Last week they were spinning webs;
I have to thank the Lord
That I am here to see this spring
The dandelions and dogwoods.
I’m such a creature of nature’s whims,
The seasons are my moods.

Technology Tantrums

Now, I’m not ragging on the performance of all technology, all the time, but I do have a few bones to pick with the cyberspace invaders. My GPS did get me to Nancy’s house, which is a good thing because my cell phone only works in areas that are well-populated, with lots of places to stop and ask people for directions. Fat lot of good that does me!

Nancy doesn’t have internet service, probably because the only kind she could get would be dial-up, and that’s almost as good as snail mail -- But not quite because snail mail doesn’t tie up your phone line. This fact makes it necessary to meet with Nancy in person to complete her book set-up. This is good because I really enjoy her company; she’s a very peaceful lady, unlike yours truly. She and her husband call their woodland home “The Sanctuary” for good reason. It does, however, create some interesting challenges.

I downloaded all the templates that we needed to finish formatting her beautifully illustrated book of poetry and prose, and headed over to her neck-of-the-woods with full confidence that we’d simply drop her pages and cover into their respective templates; I’d email the files to Gayle for final edit; and we’d be good to go for our initial printing. But, nooooo.

It seems that some of my programs don’t function properly without an internet connection. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll simply copy Nancy’s work onto my laptop and upload everything to Gayle when I get home.” This appeared to be an easy solution. Except, as Richard says, “There are so many ways to get busted.”

Nancy was good enough to completely format her work in Word. It was even in an older version of word than what’s currently available. This would make it easy for Gayle to work with it, no matter what version of Word Gayle has. Ha!

Because Nancy embedded her illustrations in her text, the files exceed the maximum size for attachment to my email. I can’t simply attach and hit “send.” I first have to “ungroup” all her illustrations from all her text, and resave it as a text document; then I hope to be able to send it on its way. I still have to figure out how to dump her cover art into the template without messing up all her hard work, but I should probably not think too much about that until I get her text to our editor.

Richard has another favorite saying, “There are no easy jobs.” I guess that’s why they’re called “jobs.” Nancy’s book, Am I Grown Up Yet? -- A Wonder Journal will, hopefully, be available before Memorial Day.

Oh, and another, technology-free gift that my trip to Nancy’s got me was a couple of plants for our “sanctuary.” All these peaceful people have lovely plants that they swear are easy to grow. We’ll see. At least they don’t require an internet connection.

Cruising and Cumulus Clouds

Woke up with a wild hair;
We were going to get out of here.
Spring was calling our names;
It was time for us to hear.
At first I thought that a hike
Would be the perfect way
To see what we could see
And enjoy a sense of play.
After driving down to Tellico,
It was almost time for lunch.
Would we have Sunday dinner,
Or a nice Sunday brunch?
We took a leisurely Sunday
Drive, to Maryville and back.
We lunched at Giovanni’s,
Then we were back on track
For cumulus cloud watching
Over the mountains of Tennessee,
Another dimension to the vistas
Of Appalachian hill country.

Gardening, Garlic, and Great Guests

Thanks to a gift from my niece Ginette, I finally got around to some outdoor work in my own yard. I’ve been so sedentary with all this driving around and writing that I hadn’t even thrown out the dead potted plants from last fall. Ginette’s gift of phlox and grape hyacinth from her garden got me moving in that direction; I needed the dirt from the potted plants for my new deck décor.

While I was outside potting, I did a little more digging in the dirt to clear some of the “wildflowers” – otherwise known as “weeds” from our flower beds. The dandelions are everywhere this year, including growing with great abandon between the granite chips that make up our front walkway. With a “yard” of over four acres, I rally needed to pick my battles, so I decided that anything green growing in the lawn could stay, while any wild thing growing in granite or my garden has to go.

I was really moving along, happily harvesting the weeds when I came upon a conundrum. I greatly admire thistles, and have photographed many a beautiful butterfly on their blooms. Directly in front of my azaleas, right next to our front steps, is a big thistle in all its prickly perfection. There was no way I could bring myself to uproot such a gift. So much for that well-groomed cottage look; you just can’t control Mother Nature.

The evening hours brought hailstorms and bluegrass. The crowd was small at Charlie and Deborah’s Coker Creek Saloon, probably because of the severe weather warnings. The weather didn’t deter Richard’s preparation of dining delights, however. Everyone enjoyed his sirloin tip tacos, even though I was a bit worried about how they’d be received; I had never before seen a recipe that called for a cup of fresh garlic.

His mandarin orange cake was so good and beautiful that Trailrider Nancy declared that she felt like we were back at the Whitestone Inn where we celebrated Charlie’s birthday. A friend of Charlie’s visiting from Alaska ate three pieces. I guess it was better than good!

One of the great things about the bluegrass pickin’ is that Charlie and Deborah host so many people from so many places. I could have spent about a week with these folks from Alaska; they were so interesting. In the brief time we were with them, we learned that he was a home builder to the rich and famous in this life, and that he had a very story-worthy, if not story-book past life.

He lost his parents in an automobile accident when he was two-years-old. After a series of foster homes he “struck out on his own” at the age of eleven without ever having attended school. By the time he was fourteen, he had acquired his first golden glove award. At seventeen, he retired from prize fighting after a concussion so serious that it caused him to stutter. By this time he had also had his nose broken ten times.

Like this wasn’t enough hard luck, within a couple of months, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. While there, he was stabbed once and shot twice, once in the back. He was released from duty with the prediction that he’d never again walk. He says that a violent sneeze led to the return of feeling and mobility in his legs. Must have been some sneeze!

The up side of his infirmity is that a corpsman taught him to read. He’s been married to the same woman, a professional photographer, for forty seven years. She showed me stunning photographs of their area of Alaska.

Mr. Bluegrass, Charlie Harper, was also in attendance with the demo copy of his latest upcoming CD. It couldn’t have been a better crowd.