A now sane individual who escaped the world of selling technology, now living in the rolling hills of the North Carolina Piedmont. I have been at one time or another, a farmer, a director for Apple, and a vice president at Wideopen Networks. I continue to pursue my love of photography and writing. I have great memories of boating, fishing, kayaking, swimming, and hiking the beaches along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where we lived for fifteen years.
At her peak, Maverick was named Field Commander for the Tabby Cat Alliance
On Monday, July 21, 2025, Maverick, one of the most unique felines to ever be a member of our family passed over the rainbow bridge. It has been a little over five years and three months since she joined our family with her three siblings. Maverick came into our world hissing and spitting. She was not amused at being caught in our Have-a-heart trap. She avoided it for a week longer than her siblings who were all caught within a space of hours.
Eventually she warmed up to me and showed a fierce loyalty to me and antipathy to anyone else who wanted her friendship. Our eldest daughter, Erin, AKA cat woman, gave it a valiant effort but Maverick resisted her charms and promises of treats.
Maverick did become a bed cat. For six months or so before she got sick, she would jump on our bed just as I got in bed. She would then head butt me until she got the petting that she wanted. Once in a while she would slip up and actually cuddle by my side. She often spent the whole night cuddled by my wifeās feet on the bed.
Maverick on our bed
Maverick was always the first to go on our porch during cold weather. Her thick luxurious fur seemed to be more suited to cold weather than the fur of the other cats. At her prime she probably weighed more than ten pounds. She was the only one of our three female cats who could throttle Goose, our big male Tabby. Goose never pushed his battles with Maverick far because even though she was considerably smaller, she could defeat him. As the most athletic of our cats, Maverick was great at games involving chasing or jumping. She got into our garage a couple of times but unlike the others she showed no interest in exploring the world beyond our house.
Maverick was happy with her twice daily trips to the screened porch. She could be demanding sometimes asking to be fed far away from the others. She lived by her own rules and expected us to adapt to her quirks. She was never much for variety in her food. Turkey shreds remained her favorite food. She especially good at hiding. When our cleaning ladies would come, she would burrow down into the pillows on our bed until she was invisible. Sometimes in the winter she would come up and sleep on my desk or in one of the office chairs.
Perhaps the funniest thing Maverick did was while we were moving to this house four years ago. We spent a couple of nights in a hotel while we were unpacking things. We would let the cats out of their carriers while we were gone to the house during the day so they could have access to a litter box. The morning we were packing to leave the hotel for the house. We got Goose, Jester, and Merlin loaded but could not find Maverick. We were about to give up when we figured out that she had crawled up inside a box spring mattress.
Maverick might be gone, but we will long remember her green eyes and fiesty personality.
Maverick will always be our green-eyed girl
She will be missed. Maverick and I spent some time together on her beloved screen porch before she passed. It was a good way to say goodbye and refresh memories. The full story of our four tabbies is in the post, The Company of Cats.
I have been asked serveral times how I got from shoveling manure on a farm to selling shiny Macs for Apple? There are several pieces to the puzzle. The first factor was the sky high interest rate we had to pay on our $100,000 operating loan in the early eighties. Once interest got over 20% and the Canadian government decided that our beef cattle operation was too profitable for the subsized 2% loans that our diary famer neighbors were getting, we made the decision that we had to get out. Putting together a successful cattle dispersal sale takes time. In our case it took ten months to turn one of our barns into an auction arena and get the cattle looking their best.
We had gone from a few cows to a much larger herd in under ten years. Turns out that selling a lot of cows in a short time, a dispersal, is a massive undertaking. We would have never pulled it off without help from the community. The weather turned so rainy and cold that it looked like we were not going to get the barns cleaned out in time. Most of the men of the community showed up one Monday and worked whatever hours they could over the next two weeks until everything was ready. I remain eternally grateful for their help. When all was said and done, we paid off all our loans except about $10,000. We did still have a lot of farm equipment which we sold off gradually, the last being our 4WD 60 HP John Deere diesel tractor with the snow blower and front end loader, but that did not happen until two years after the dispersal. My sale was so successful that Maritime Angus Association hired me as a part-time fieldman. One of the requirements of the job was to write and mail a newsletter to the sixty or so Angus breeders acrosss the Martimes. I sat down at my college-era Adler typewriter and after a week of very hard work and some real old-fashioned copying and pasting I had the first one done. Then it took me hours to photocopy and hand address the newsletters. I had spent my first winter of not tending cows hauling my oldest daughter, Erin, the twently miles to Fredericton to a preschool. It was too far to drive home on the potholed Royal Road and come back to get her so I found places in town to stay warm. One of them was a fledling computer store, I got to know the people pretty well. I even bought one of their TI 99/4A game consoles for the kids. While I was writing my first newsletter, my friends in the computer store were getting their first Apple II+ machines. I was telling my North Carolina-based mother about my new fieldman job, how long it took to write the newsletter, and my hope to speed up with the process when I could afford the $3,000 for an Apple computer, Epson MX-80 printer, and some word processing software. My always supportive mother who was looking for a way to make certain that I did not go back to farming offered to buy the computer. It was probably the best investment that she every made. I bought one the first computers that the Fredericton store sold. I took to software like a duck to water. In a matter of weeks, I knew more about the practical applications of a personal computer than everyone in the computer store combined. After three people I had talked to bought computers at the store, I became Salesman #1 in September 1982. I went on to design a course to teach smart college graduates how to sell computers. We opened four more stores across the Maritimes and within a year, I was salesmanager and had close to twenty people working for me. I spent at least a week a month visiting the stores and going on important sales calls. I still have the invoice for where I sold one Apple IIe, a 5 meg Corvus hard drive, and a couple of printers for over $20,000. I was writing simple database applications for customers that saved them time and money.. In the spring of 1984, the company sent me to the rollout of the Macintosh in Toronto. As soon as I saw Steve Jobs draw a circle on the screen with a mouse, I made a vow that I would one day work for Apple. As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for, you might get it. By November of 1984, I was working for Apple out of the Montreal office. Things moved quickly at the dealership to push me towards Apple. The company. was operating on a shoestring and always near bankruptcy. They went searching for other product lines since Apple would only deliver computers to them for cash. They picked up the Sperry and TI MS/DOS compatibles but what they really wanted an IBM authorization. They found a white knight computer company out of Toronto who could bring the IBM authorization with a merger. Like many mergers, the only way to make the company attractive was to cut costs. Upper level management asked me to rewrite the commission plan to massively reduce commissions and to sell the idea to the sales people. I looked at the plan, decided that I could not in good conscience support the new commission plan so I resigned. The company offered me another job, but I was already bleeding rainbow colors and knew their focus was going to be IBM. I stayed until the merger went through. That was September of 1984. That same month Apple started adversing for an Apple rep in the Maritimes. I immediately applied for the job and in early November I got an offer. I started work on November 26, 1984. The only condition was that we had to move to Halifax. On December 26, 1984, in a snowstorm we moved to our new house in Halifax. We got there before the furniture so that night we slept on the floor. The next almost twenty years were a wild ride.
Goose, our tabby cat with a permanet sense of wonder
One of the reasons that I love our big tabby cat, Goose, is that he always has a look of wonder.Ā We could learn a few things from Goose.Ā A few times over the years I have forgotten to be pleasantly surprised at whatever has happened, but not often.
After I went away to military high school in Tennessee in 1963, I figured out within the first three months that I could either be unhappy with what was happening in my life or I could be wonderously surprised at whatever happens next because it is often an unknown piece of the puzzle that turns out to be my life.
When I got in my car to go office to college in the fall of 1967, I left with a sense of adventure which included a promise to myself to try new things especially if they forced me to step out of my box. The Vietnam war was raging during my college years and for a while it looked like I might become a foot soldier in it.Ā Instead once I graduated and figured out that I wasnāt going to be drafted, I immigrated to Canada.
That as you might expect was a huge decision but like many decisions in the days before the Internet, not a lot of research went into it. I was in love with Nova Scotia.Ā The beauty and wonder of the place wrapped itself around my mind. Before I got married, I came to know loneliness even in a place as scenic as Nova Scotia. Marriage to a NC girl was another moment that surprised me and left me thinking that I was living under a special star that helped me find such a wonderful wife.
There were plenty other moments of wonder. After dispersing our cattle herd, somehow I made the transitiion to working with Apple Computer. From shoveling manure to selling Macintoshes has to be an epic career switch. Twenty years later when Apple pushed me away from the company, several people encouraged me to think about my next career as finding something that would excite me for the next fifteen years. It took a while, but I ended up helping communitieis build fiber networks.Ā Along the way, I learned how to take a skiff out into the Atlantic and how to kayak a two-mile wide river. I spent a few years rescuing an HOA.Ā
I always welcomed the next challenge never doubting my ability to do a good job and always approaching a new challenge with a sense of wonder.Ā That doesnāt mean I did not have any worries. There were many sleepness nights during my HOA time.Ā I would always wake early when I was taking someone new in our skiff out into the Atlantic. It was a big responsibility.
I recently got a new heart valve by way of a TAVR procedure. While I was afraid, I never waivered. I am still facing some medical issues but I face them with a sense of wonder that something so complex can be done without cutting me open.
I have been surprised by people all my life from the British doctor and his wife who became great friends to some of the very interesting people that I met Harvard.
I continue to be amazed by people that I meet from the young farm family working on the same farm that has been in their family for over one hundred years to the New Brunswick farm couple in their sixties still haying and keeping work horses. I also amazed by the young adults finding their way through this increasingly complex world.Ā That they can keep moving forward when most of the cards are stacked against them renews my sense of wonder.Ā Then there is my adult son who rose up to start doing many of the things that I was doing before my heart valve problem. I am back to driving and hope to be gardening in a few weeks but I definitely have a feeling of wonder seeing my son plant flowers. If that can happen, I think we will be able to push back on the anti-democracy forces trying to destroy our country.Ā That of course would lead me to an immense feeling of relief.
Our backyard in early spring. I feel blessed to see it again
Goose and I have been quiet but it has been for a good reason. Last Friday after my annual physical at 10 AM, I was pretty happy. My blood sugar was at its best level since we moved here from the coast in February 2021. My blood pressure was 112/68 and I had lost a couple of pounds. I came back by the house and picked my wife, Glenda, for a trip to Winston-Salem. I neglected to have something to drink while home. Since I had been fasting that was a mistake. We decided on Culverās for our meal because I want some good french fries since it is something we rarely have. I got my smashburger, order of extra crispy fries, and a Coke Zero which is also something I rarely have. After an enjoyable lunch we went across the street to Lidl to pick up a chicken to grill and a few other things. I had paid for the groceries, got Glenda in the car and was taking the cart back to the cart corral when I started feeling not so good. I stopped for a moment and rested by sitting on one of the concrete posts. Then I went back to the car put Glendaās rolling walker in the back of the card and started sweating. It was a hot day, well into the eighties. I sat down in the driver seat and that is the last thing I remember until I woke up with Glenda pounding on me. I had passed out.
EMS was there shortly after I awoke. I was loaded into an ambulance and transported the short distance down Silas Creek Parkway to Novantās Forsyth County Hospital. The only discomfort during the ride was them trying to start an IV on the bumpy road. They finally gave up.
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We spent the next six on seven hours in the Emergency Area while they ran tests. I was finally told that I didnāt have a heart attack but the enzyemes that show up prior to a heart attack were elevated. They suspect dehydration played a significant role in the event.
Wednesday afternoon, I was finally discharged after a battery of tests including a heart catherization and a transesophageal electrocardiogram (TEE). My heart rhythm came back on its own. āHeart catherization is a procedure where a thin, flexible tube (a catheter) is inserted into a blood vessel and guided to the heart to diagnose and/or treat heart conditions. The TEE is a type of echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) where a probe with a transducer is inserted through the mouth and down the esophagus to get clearer images of the heart structures, especially those at the back of the heart.ā While both procedures sound scary, they are short and painless. They take probably 35 minutes for the two of the them if you ignore the 4:30 AM bath in some sort of special prep the night before each one. The nurse was careful to use warm water the first night. The next night it cold water which was no fun. I was also on Heparin drip with IV pole for three days. Getting on the drip is also no fun since they have test your blood ever six hours until they get it right. My hands look like purple pin cushions They eventually decided I didnāt need the Heparin.
What I do need is a new aortic heart valve since mine is calcified. They are proposing a āTranscatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) which is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a narrowed aortic valve with an artificial valve.ā It’s an alternative to open-heart surgery. We have several doctorās appointments in the next few weeks and the hope is that sometime late this month a TAVR procedure will happen. I will go in on a Tuesday morning (TAVR Tuesdays I am told) have the hour long procedure then spend a day being observed before being discharged.
I have been told that within a month, I will regain much of the energy and strenght that seems to have faded from my aging (76 year-old) body. In the spring of 2018, my total mileage for the previous 12 months 1,530 miles. The next three years, I averaged 1,100 miles. The last three years, I have only average 600 miles. On July 3, 2017, I walked 10.5 miles in one day. I managed only a few quarter miles of swimming last summer, compared to several the year before.
There are more than enough excuses, more deskwork and less time but also a problem with a sciatic nerve. I have a goal to lose thirty pounds this summer. I already have lost six pounds which I credit to hospital food.
All this makes you look at life a little differently. I was able to finish up an office project with my 10,000 cell spreadsheet and the nice GIS maps that I do this afternoon. By Sunday night I hope to finish my taxes or as I say tie up an important loose end.
I have walked well over five times what I did any day in the hospital. I cooked my own breakfast and cooked the salmon cakes for dinner – I did not partake of the gravy. Strangely the high blood sugar that I have been battling seems to relatively stable right now. I havenāt had Metaformin in a week so that is also a good sign. I think being in a hospital long term can really suck the life out of you. I feel blessed to be home with my wife and tabby cats.
I am very grateful for my wife who cared enough to pound on me and for a lady named Judy Hill, a stranger, who was there to give her support when no one else would. I am impressed with Novantās heart team and have no concerns about letting them try to fix me. The good news is that my arteries had no plaque so with a new valve, I might get back to some serious walking. My son, Michael, and been a champ in stepping up to do whatever needed doing including retrieving our car after an Uber ride and bringing me clean clothes at the hospital.
My primary care physician and I had agreed on having my life long heart murmur examined this summer. I think that might be one thing that I can take off the summerās list. A few residents at the hospital even got to hear it. I can consider myself lucky to have been where care was not far away.
I did meet a trump supporter technician in the hospital. My conclusion is that evenyone who works in the hospital works such long hours (12 hour shifts) that they have no time to dive deep into the news. It took me two days to find someone who had watched the NCAA basketball final.
My last thought is what if we took all the people doing billing and collections and retrained them to work in hospitals? What a wonderful start that would be on better healthcare with universal covervage. I was once told there are more billing people at Dukeās Medical Center than there are doctors. That seems wrong and from how stretched the nurses were during my hospital stay, I know they could use some help.
A final word, I have a high dedcutible Blue Cross Health supplement. It has worked well because I havenāt been sick. Any paid subscriptions that I get will be going right into a saving account to cover what I think will be a substantial deductible. It is no fun getting sick and living on a fixed income.
I can assure everyone that I will continue writing and perhaps providing some real insight into what it is like being a heart patient. With some luck, I can convince my younger daughter to plant three or four tomatoes for me. It would be a wonderful gift to be able to look after them this summer.
Fun fact, I have had two overnight stays in a hospital, this most recent one of five days and another one night stay for a liver biopsy. It was the same hospital fifty-six years apart. I still remember waking up from my liver biopsy and a cute candy-striper told me that I had mail. It was a letter from the draft board ordering me to report for pre-induction physical. The hospital was in the middle of a field then.
Goose by the way says that I should nap through it all.
I once posted a picture of this Swiss Army knife and someone made some disparaging remarks about Swiss Army knives in general. I responded back that if you have never needed a Swiss Army knife, your life was likely confined to more civilized areas than I have frequented. Even a cursory examination will reveal that this knife has been well used. I am pretty sure it went to Newfoundland with me on our little trip to the barrens. I know it went in my pocket every day that I farmed. It did things it was never designed to do and some parts are broken as a result. It never failed me. I like to think the theme of my life is lot like that beaten up Swiss Army knife.
Somehow, I seemed to be prepared for whatever challenges that I faced. Perhaps it started when I grew up the child of single mother in the fifties. I tried not ever let having only one parent drag me down. Mother always told me that if I worked hard, I could be anything that I wanted to be. She pulled herself out of red clay soils of Yadkin County, NC and got her license to be a beautician. She supported us from the beauty shop attached to the back of the house.
In a sense being an only child of a mother who worked extremely long hours gave me a push into learning how to do things I might have avoided in a more standard family. I learned the basics of cooking because if we got food on the table at any reasonable hour, I needed to be involved. It started with just sticking food in the oven, but well before I got to Boy Scouts, I was grilling half chickens on an old charcoal grill. Tinkering with things started at an early age. By the third grade it was my job to balance the check book and make sure the deposits were recorded properly. At some point I became the navigator and developed a love of maps that still bedevils me today.
Being a Boy Scout accelerated many of these interests and enhanced my love of the out of doors. By the time I left college, I was in need of an escape from the cities. Regular visits to Maine had only made my desire to get back to the land worse. The old Nova Scotia farmhouse that I bought in 1971 only pushed me harder. I had to learn plumbing and how to wire a house at the same time my carpentry skills had to get better if we were going to have a place to survive the winter.
By the time we got to our New Brunswick farm, I was ready for almost anything. With a welder and an acetylene torch, there wasnāt much on the farm that could slow me down. I always had a John Deere tractor and a Chevy 350 3/4 ton 4WD that I could lean on and some great neighbors who were always willing to help. With some local help I even built a couple of barns that are still standing 50 years later.
After the farm, I went on to sell Apple computers, learned how to manage a sales force, and how to survive a teetering small business. When I actually went to work for Apple, the second day I was on board, they gave me a tray of real 35 mm slides and said youāre presenting to 100 people tomorrow, put together a presentation. If was the first of many presentations that would define my almost 20 year career at Apple. My last days at Apple in 2004, I was director of federal sales and sat with Avie Tevanian at a federal hearing on cyber security. Had Apple stuck more with open source and the direction our team was headed, there would be a lot more Macs in the federal government and our government would have a more resilient infrastructure.
After a consulting gig with the National Lambda Rail (some called it Internet 3), I went to work at an email company and learned the ins and outs of online marketing. It was a steep learning curve with Google analytics, buying search terms, and managing an inside sales force when I had spent most of my life in outside sales.
By the time the email company was sold, we were well on our way to establishing a life on the North Carolina coast, I worked a writer and I dabbled enough in real estate to know how to mine data from tax databases which turned out to be very useful when I became a vp at a company that was building fiber and convincing people to sign up for it. My love of maps led me to extensive use of Garminās mapping tools both on land and in my skiff and kayak. A knowledge of GPS helped me jump feet first into ArcGIS Pro and the technical reports and maps that have defined my last dozen years.
Not long ago, my barber asked me, āHow in the world did you get from shoveling manure to selling computers and then helping to build fiber networks?
I told him the answer was simple, I always believed in what I was doing and I never sold anyone something that I wouldnāt be proud of using whether it was a bull, a bailer, a computer, or a report on the state of the Internet in their county. I could have said that I had a Swiss Army kind of life, always ready for the next challenge even as I was taking a lot hits along the way.
My mother who grew up as Susie Blanche Styers was part of family that had lived in and around the hills north and west of Winston-Salem since the Revolutionary War. Our first ancestor in the area is recorded on the 1790 census and is buried with his wife forty-five minutes away from our current home. Motherās grandfather Abe Styers ran Styers ferry which crossed the Yadkin River from Yadkin County to Forsyth County. Forsyth County, the home of Winston-Salem, was destined to be a county that pulled itself into the manufacturing boom of the second half of the twentieth century. Yadkin County would remain solidly agricultural. Mother was born on a mill pond in the heart of Yadkin County in 1910. It was a time before electricity and when horse drawn buggies were more likely to be found on the dirt roads than those new Model T Fords. Her mother, Sallie Shore Styers, died in the 1919 flu epidemic. By the time my mother was nine years old she was cooking for the family of eight. That presented some challenges since she was too small to lift the heavy cast iron pan used to bake biscuits each morning from the flour mixed up weekly by one her older female relatives. Fortunately, her older brother Henry would help her with the pan after he had taken care of bringing the wood inside and starting a fire in the stove. While life around a millpond in the early part of the twentieth century might sound idyllic, it was actually a lot of hard work, and a life that didnāt leave a lot of time for play. While Walter, motherās father, was a miller, most of the rest of the food for the large family with six children had to be grown and preserved on the spot. There was no yard to mow, just some bare ground to sweep around the house with homemade brooms made from the readily available broom straw. Preserving food for winter was a skill mother and her sisters never lost. The stories of watching men cut blocks of ice from the pond during the winter and haul the loads of ice with teams of horses to their sawdust insulated ice house in the ground seem hard to believe in our warming world. Yet life was very different then. They kept their milk and butter cooled in a spring house which was little more that a small building with a roof set on top of a spring flowing out of the ground. Mother had places to go and things to do in her life so it didnāt take much time with her new stepmother before she left home as a teenager for the big city of Mount Airy, NC. Eventually she got a license as a beautician and had her own shop on Main Street. She even claimed to have spanked Andy Griffith when he was misbehaving in her shop while she did his motherās hair. When she was in her nineties, she used to joke that she had walked by Snappy Lunch for most of her long life and never tasted one of their pork chop sandwiches. We bought her one, and she declared that she had not missed much. While mother made it out of Yadkin County, her sisters never did. With the determination that only a true southern matriarch demonstrates, she was determined that her nieces and nephews would have a taste of life beyond the red dirt fields of Yadkin County. She was the only one of the sisters to learn how to drive as a teenager. Iāve been told many times by cousins that they never would have enjoyed much of a Christmas without my mother. She was famous for braving the muddy roads to get back to her sister Mollieās house. I remember her stories of getting stuck and having to knock on the door of a farmerās house to be pulled out.
Goose and I just sent out a new newsletter, Goose Speaks: Memories of Love, Black Friday 2024. It has more about my mother. You don’t have to subscribe to read it, and there is a free subscription that will get most of the posts.
Goose, the biggest of our tabby cats from the marshes
Goose has enjoyed some popularity on social media sites, including Facebook but also on Bluesky where one of his pictures got over 5,000 likes. Goose’s no nonsense attitude kept him from being quiet during the summer. His most famous quote has driven some of his popularity.
I have little tolerance for fools.
Goose follows a rigorous schedule that includes breakfast, bird watching, patrolling for squirrels, naps, dinner, and more naps. Then he gets his before bed treats. Goose isn’t so full of himself that having some fun dialogues is out of the question. He can get very passionate to the point of being hilarious when discussing the amount cat food in his bowl.
The following is an excerpt from Goose’s Newsletter this Sunday, November 24, 2024. Goose is talking about his first memories as a kitten.
Goose, āI remember how dark, cold and wet it was under the shed where we were born. What I remember best was how I would play with my sisters, Merlin, Jester, and Maverick in the sunlight at the back of the shed.Ā Our mother, Elsie, told us to be careful and not to get far from the safety of the shed.Ā She told us that there were all sorts of things that would eat us from hawks to alligators.Ā Still when the sun was bright, we had lots of fun. We never saw any alligators but the marsh grass was so tall that even I couldnāt see over it.
We were sort of in a routine, nursing mom, playing, and then piling up together for naps. We were growing and it seemed that we were always hungry. After we were a few weeks old, mom carried us one by one up up over the bulkhead to the back of another building. It was a garage. There were bowls near it and they were full of what we were to learn is cat food. It was tough crunching for a while, but we learned it was a good way to not feel hungry. Sometimes we would hide until the people filled the bowls.
Then came the night mother left us in the garage. What happened next changed our lives.
The rest of the story is behind a paywall.
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There is a free subscription that will get you the occasional post, the paid subscriptions will get you everything. A $5 monthly subscription is only 16 cents a day. An annual $50 subscription is just 14 cents a day. If you subscribe you will be supporting not only an independent journalist but also helping to feed four growing tabby cats that have lots of love to spread around. Goose often share’s David’s recipes and cooking tips. Today provided directions for cooking perfect bacon. It you do a paid subscription, you will get some regular emails from Goose. He has his own website and his own email address.
I wrote this back in the fall of 2016. It was one of the nicest falls that we enjoyed in our fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. I wrote more than one post arguing that fall was even nicer on the coast than in the mountains.
Here is a brief description of the memorable month of November 2016, as seen from the water and the beaches of Carteret County.
The good fishing and nearly perfect weather, continues but I can already feel the best of fall sliding away.
On Saturday, November 5, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful as you can see from the marsh grass picture. I also managed to catch and release another sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.
On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks in my kayak and I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In the last ten days, I have landed ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I have only kept one red drum but I have kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.
Last year, 2015, we did not have a fishing season like this one. I blamed it all on the early October rain we got. It is hard to miss a fishing season when fall fishing on the coast is such a tradition. This year we have been lucky. Since Mathew dropped three inches of rain on us October 8, we have only had two-tenths of an inch on October 22, and another two-tenths of an inch on November 4.
Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory.
Just after I graduated college in the summer of 1971, instead of going to Law School, I headed off to Nova Scotia. I was part of the generation that felt strongly about getting back to the land and understanding a lot of things that modern society was hiding from us.
A decision like that is possible when you are young, I believe that as age and life will sneak up on you, it gets much harder to go off on your own in a wild adventure as you age. How older people have done it, remains a mystery to me.
Eventually, I got married and my wife and I moved to what I considered a real farm or at least one that I believed that I could make into a modern farm. We never really gave up all modern conveniences like many back-to-the-landers. One of the first things that I installed in our Nova Scotia farmhouse was a dishwasher. I also put one in our home in New Brunswick. I plowed my garden with a John Deere tractor not a horse.
The road in the picture ran 20 miles back to Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick. We were lucky to have schools, churches, a couple of general stores and medical services in our little community of Tay Creek. Forty years after we left, the churches and general stores are gone. If you want to buy gasoline or a nail, you have to go to Fredericton.
Taking on building a home for your family in an isolated spot which at the time was subject to amazing snow storms is something you only do when you are young and your body can take on almost any challenge. In my twenties and thirties, I never doubted that I could do everything for my family aside from medical care and schooling. Plumbing, electrical wiring, installing appliances, those were expected of the folks who lived beyond the city. There was no one to hire to mow a yard or even change faucet. While we had an oil furnace, most of our heat came from a wood stove. The furnace would come on during the early morning hours as the house cooled. Our water came from a spring. Our food came from our garden, our milk cow, chickens and cattle herd.
As nice as the life on your own in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick was, it was non-stop work. It was ten years before we went on a real vacation. After we left the farm, we mostly lived in suburbs. Seven years after leaving the farm we were in subdivision on the side of a mountain in SW Virginia. For many years I kept the steep slope behind the house clear of brush and small trees. It meant working with a chainsaw on a hill where I could barely stand. Fortunately, I never got injured. It was another activity reserved for youth.
By the time we got to our next house twenty-four years after leaving the farm, the strenuous work was down to mowing the yard, keeping our skiff running, and hurricane preparation. Good preparation for a hurricane often meant the cleanup afterwards was relatively easy. A storm like Hurricane Florence meant extra cleanup for everyone in the area no matter how much you prepared. The older you get, the harder all that is. Polywood outdoor furniture is nice until you have to haul it all into the garage.
When we moved from the coast in 2021, my wife and I were both over seventy. We were far from our children and family. Our house had too many steps and we were both tired of the hurricane routine in spite of never having any real damage to our house.
My wife had almost five acres of raw farmland which was a hayfield in Surry County. We briefly considered building a home there, but quickly decided that we were too old for all the work needed to build a home so we found a great subdivision with public sewer, water, and fiber Internet. Moving to North Carolina Piedmont close to where I grew up has turned out to be a wise decision.
We are glad that we moved when we did. We have friends our age that would like to move from the coast but have decided that they are too old to try. I can relate to their feelings. Getting our coastal home ready to sell and moving with our four kittens was not the easiest thing that I have ever done. I am pretty sure that three years later, I would be reluctant to move again unless I just had to move.
You don’t think about these things when you are young and can handle anything. Life can sneak up on you. It is good to plan a little for the time when you can no longer take on the world with one arm tied behind your back.
Long ago I remember hearing my mother say, āOld age is not for sissies.āĀ She was 84 and I was 45.Ā When you are forty-five,Ā you think you handle just about anything.Ā In the twenty-four years after college, I moved to Canada where we farmed for ten years, and we moved back to the US. By the time we got to Roanoke, Virginia had already been selling Apples for nearly a decade. While I was a very successful sales person at Apple, my mother who knew nothing about computers knew a lot more about life than me.Ā
She understood that families can get complicated, hard work does not always result in success, and most importantly she knew the value of continuing to work even when it was not easy.Ā She could accomplish amazing things, but she did it not through a flurry of activity but through methodically getting things done as she was able.Ā When she was in her nineties, she was proud of still being able to dress herself even though it took her over an hour. Her mother died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic.Ā At the age of nine she became the lady of the house.Ā She had to cook for her five siblings. Many times she told me the story of making biscuits in the morning for the family but having one of the boys put the heavy cast iron pan in the wood stove because she could not lift it. She left home in her teens because the new stepmother and my mother did not see eye to eye.Ā
If I remember the story correctly, as mother was leaving leaving home, she told the stepmother that if it ever got to her that the stepmother had laid a finger on one of her sisters, she and her favorite cast iron frying pan would be back to deal with it. Mother had grown into being very proficient with a cast iron pan. Blanche, after putting herself through cosmetology school, became a successful beautician running her own shop on Main Street in Mount Airy and later after I was born, she had one in the back of our house in Lewisville, North Carolina.Ā It was the way she supported us. As a single mom in the fifties, she managed to raise me and become a very popular Boy Scout mom who was considered a better driver than most of the men.Ā
I never lacked for love. I also learned the value of education and hard work. Like all of us, mother had things in her life that challenged her, but she always rose to the challenge even if it involved a lot of false starts.Ā She was someone you could count on when help was needed.Ā We had a cattle field day at our farm in the late seventies.Ā My mother who was in her late sixties got on an airplane and flew from North Carolina to New Brunswick which included switching terminals by herself in Boston to help feed the 300 people who showed up. Mother was in her mid-eighties before she gave up her driverās license. When she did it, she told me not to worry, if there was an emergency, she could still drive.Ā A few years after giving up driving, she had to give up working in her flowers.Ā It was the stairs in and out of her house that put an end to the flowers.Ā It was then that we realized the house was holding her prisoner.
When our good friend RJ who was living upstairs in the house died suddenly, mother had to move.Ā RJ had been her legs, getting groceries and things that they needed. She had continued to cook for them as he continued to work for the local newspaper. Mother moved in with us and we offered her our main floor bedroom.Ā She wouldnāt hear of it. Every night, she would go up the stairs on her rear, one step at a time to one of our other bedrooms.Ā It is appropriate to mention at this time that one of our daughters likes to say she comes from a long line of stubborn. It is pretty easy to see the source. Eventually we built mother her own room and bathroom but it was only a matter of time, before mother reluctantly had to move into an assisted living facility.Ā In spite of declaring she could never make new friends, she made some of the best friends of her life in those last three years.Ā It was only in the last few days of her life that she had to have help getting dressed.Ā Only after all her new friends passed away was she was ready to let go.Ā Her mind was still clear but her body had worn out long ago. She was ninety-three years and six months old.Ā She is still missed every day by those of us she touched and nurtured.Ā I have cousins who say that they would have never had Christmas if it wasnāt for their Aunt Blanche, my mother.Ā Another who is now ninety himself claims that he would have gone down a bad road and likely be dead if my mother hadnāt forced him to go to military school.Ā She was a force of nature.
While I still miss her, I am proud of the values that she instilled in me, and the help that she provided our family when our children were growing up. I hope she is pleases at the kind of family we have become.
Our technological infirmity 