Category: Modern worries

Life Sneaks Up On You

The Royal Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

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.

The Five Shirt Day

My Work Shirt

An overlooked challenge of the pandemic is that it has been very hard on clothing, specifically shirts. I have never been easy on clothing. I have a long history of getting dirty.  When we lived on the farm, my wife, Glenda, was known to sometimes hose me down and make me take my dirty clothes off in the woodshed before I could come into the house. Back in my lawn mowing days on the North Carolina coast, not only did I come in encrusted in dirt from a yard that was more dust than grass at times but I also ended up fishing, walking on the beach, gardening and working at my desk. It all required a lot of different clothes, but I am not sure that I ever had a five shirt day.

The pandemic has made it more challenging to do almost everything except work from home. The statement that clothes make the man or woman has changed to shirts make the man or woman.  With Zoom and Team conference calls, how you look on video is what matters these days and our video cameras only show us from us from the face down to our desks.  So we pay attention to the shirts that we wear.

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Infinite Parental Wisdom

Mother's Trout at Meadows of Dan, Virginia
Mother’s Trout at Meadows of Dan, Virginia

My mother pictured above with our good friend, Mr. Cruz, never knew a lot about fishing, but she was smart enough to trust the experts.

Apparently, today’s parents have grown so smart  that children no longer need schooling by teachers.  Perhaps that is an exaggeration and not completely correct.  The most vocal parents are okay with teachers as long as they teach their students to think exactly like their parents.  The teachers should also do this while not wearing masks and certainly without asking students to be vaccinated or wear masks.

Considering how much time most parents spend on their smartphones where I am pretty sure they are not reading books,  there must be another miraculous way of absorbing knowledge.  I am sure it is not Facebook or Fox News. Based on the precipitous fall in newspaper subscriptions, it is certainly not from reading the daily paper. Read More

Writing Our Own History

A Cathedral of Trees at Rich Park in Mocksville, NC

When I started writing for the web almost seventeen years ago, I had no idea how much I would appreciate my own writing. It turns out that few of us have memories as good as we think they are. Time after time, I will start writing about a subject and remember to look and see what I have already said about the subject. When you combine years of writing with extensive photographs from the same time period, you come up with local history that is often invaluable.

Local history is valuable in running local governments and even HOAs. In fact the governments, especially HOAs, that ignore their own history and precedents often get into the most trouble especially when they try to rewrite history.

Just because something is written down on the web does not mean it is automatically true. However, if it is written by someone with a long history of truthful writing, then you should likely give whatever they are saying consideration. I pay special attention to getting the facts right. I take some measure of pleasure in being right especially when I have been challenged by some who would rewrite history.

If you want to make sure your own story is correct, make sure you take being an author seriously. It takes a lot to build a reputation, but very little to ruin it.

Read more at my article, The Disappearing Narrative of Our Lives.

Our Pandemic Move – Life Lessons – Part 1

Early spring blooms in our neighborhood near Mocksville, North Carolina

Moving is never easy, but moving during a pandemic is a real challenge. However, we did and learned a lot – even some minor things like it makes sense to take paper towels and paper plates with you when you are huddled in the safe zone of your hotel room. Most of all, this move reaffirmed the value of working with a great real estate agent. While technology made the move possible. Our great realtors actually made it happen. Read more at this link.

A Safe Warm Spot for a Challenging Fall

The view from our small deck

We have spent fourteen years here along Raymond’s Gut just off the White Oak River north of Swansboro. I managed to learn enough about the White Oak River from my kayaking and boating to know Ed was right. Many times, I fished a cove just off the river when the main River had whitecaps on it. Then there were times you could be in the middle of the river with hardly a ripple. Sometimes it is blowing on the river but quiet on the backside of Bear Island.

Ed, a good friend of mine who died a few years ago, used to say that if you were willing to look a little, most of the time you could find a place on the water in Carteret County where the wind wasn’t blowing. Ed grew up here and knew the area’s waters better than anyone I have ever known.

It turns out Ed’s wisdom also applies to our house. If you look a little, you can almost always find a cozy spot out of the wind. It is one of the reasons we love our home. The side of our house with the most windows faces the South. That and the protection provided by pines just across the water from us makes our home a delightful place as the air turns cooler in the fall. It also creates a great microclimate for gardening. Living on Raymond’s  Gut just off the White Oak River turned out to be a lucky decision for us. Read the full article

A Loss of Innocence

Raymond’s Gut behind our NC home just off the White Oak River near Swansboro

It seems that I have finally lost even those places that I could retreat to in my imagination. The COVID19 crisis and the mass shooting in Nova Scotia have stripped away those places that have anchored my psyche for most of my adult life. Now there is no place to run. Read more here.

Whatever happened to graciousness?

wheredidgraciousnessgowm

Has spitefulness become the rule of the day? 

I will admit to not remembering much from long ago Sunday school lessons, but I do remember that being gracious to strangers was an important part of life.  It was also important in my upbringing.  My mother used to tell me stories about getting stuck on the muddy roads to Yadkin County when she visited from the big city of Mount Airy.  Often she had to knock on the door of a stranger to see if they could pull her car out of a mud hole.

The door on our farmhouse in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, got many knocks during the worst snowstorms. Many late nights someone would wade through the snowdrifts to ask if I would come pull them out of a ditch full of snow.  I never turned anyone down even though I knew it would mean crawling around in sub-zero weather in the snow to get a logging chain hooked to something sturdy before I put one of our 15,000 pound tractors in gear to pull the vehicle out.  I never took a dime for helping these strangers.

I have lived near some crazy people in my life, but I have tried to be gracious even to the most challenging of them.

Graciousness goes farther than just helping strangers, it used to define how winners and losers treated each other.  Today, it seems that many believe than spitefulness is the way to handle any interaction.   If I am winning, let me rub my opponent’s face in the dirt for good measure.  Is it any wonder that we have a hard time coming together after an election.

Being a gracious winner or loser is part of the process of coming back together so things can get done.  Taking your ball and going home is unlikely to be a way to help heal wounds that a game or an election caused.  Finding something good in your opponent instead of classifying them as the devil makes life better whether you win or lose.

Even the idea that I have to lose for you to win deserves to be challenged.

If you have forced someone to the point of unilateral surrender, it is unlikely that they will be thrilled to help you.

Graciousness in winning can make losing a lot easier and life more rewarding.