Bain de famille

Well, we spent the last four days roaming around seeing several of the natural habitats of North Carolina, from the Piedmont (where we are) to the Coastal Plain (where Fayetteville is) and to the Mountains (where Mike's aunts, uncles and cousins are). As we say in French, we bathed ourselves in family (nous avons pris un bain de famille).

We spent Thanksgiving in a quiet way down in Fayetteville with Mike's parents, eating turkey leftovers from last Sunday, plus a couple extra casseroles. We walked it off going around the lake on which they live. The lake grows numerous bald cypress, huge trees that grow right in the water. Bald cypress grow big knobby "knees" that jut out of the water besides the main trunk of the tree and are presumed to assist the tree with its absorption. Bald cypress, which take forever to grow of course, have excellent rot-resisting wood which was used a lot in them olden days for the construction of greenhouses. I'll take a photo to show you next time I go, they're very soulful looking trees.

On Friday we hit the road for the mountains. It was a bright crisp day and we were happily cruising along, when just after stopping for gas, our car Emma just plain stopped running. Well, it was 4:00 on a Friday afternoon just after Thanksgiving, which was ominous, and we were , of course, halfway between home and destination (and a hundred miles from both) in a little town called Mocksville. I called our roadside assistance, but my cell phone died. I walked to a phone and called, and was told to wait. But as I walked back to the car a hunter came by and flagged me down. He was driving a big old pickup truck and had a pretty red hound with him, his name was Eddie. He tried to see if he could tow us himself, then went down to the nearest service station and talked to the mechanic there to tell him to wait for us. That's when a State Trooper stopped to see that we wouldn't get run into. Then Mike the wrecker came (a wrecker is a tow-truck here in these parts, took me a while to sort that out). He introduced us to Billy, the mechanic down the road, a true mechanic who within five minutes sorted out that it was the fuel pump, which probably couldn't get fixed until probably Monday. Bruce who owned the shop got us in touch with Mr Steele who could drive us to Statesville to rent a car. But then when we were halfway there I realized I had left the pie I had baked on a gas station pump! Once we got our rental, we drove back, and met Bruce's granddaughter who had set it aside for us. Whew! Well, in all this bad luck, it was our extreme good fortune to meet one nice person after another who would do anything to help us and try to cheer us up.

Well, we made it up to the Mountains just fine after that. We spent the weekend visiting will most of Mike's relatives, who live around Bakersville and Spruce Pine, very close to the famed Blue Ridge Parkway. The area home to the Penland School of Crafts, and its soil is rich with very fine clay and quartz, which has spawned a strong artist community rich with potters, glass blowers, bastketweavers, etc. Mike's Dad grew up in Loafers Glory (honest! to prove it, I took a photo of the road sign) and just driving around there seems every curve and hill has a story or a relative or friend tied to it. And so we wiled away two days visiting with relatives and going to arts and crafts studios and galleries, bringing home some apples, apple butter and pure sorghum molasses.

Since arriving in NC, I've repeatedly had the experience of having shopkeepers or even passersby just start talking to me. And the first couple of weeks, I kept expecting a hard sell somewhere (you can take someone out of California...) but it never came. I've since had to learn the art of "visiting", of simply being friendly and taking time for a chat. It's a graciousness that changes your mindset about what really needs to get done in a day, it really is helping me downshift, just as I said I was going to.