Family photo
Sarah's room
Looking into the woods in Cullowhee, N.C.
Growing up, I lived in a house nestled in the woods. Only in the winter, with all the leaves off the trees, could we see our neighbor’s porch lights. Privacy afforded the imagination great luxury, which I—even as an only child—greatly enjoyed.
I swung on grape vines, counted trilliums and bloodroot flowers, stalked bunnies, and played in the small stream that ran from an old springhouse down to Mr. Eleazer’s pond. I could wander as far as I could still hear my mother’s whistle (the sharp kind performed by placing one’s finger just so in one’s mouth). No one ever just dropped by save for the occasional meat purveyor dealing vacuum-packed cuts from a cooler in the back of his pick-up truck whom we always turned away. There was no trash service or pizza delivery. There weren’t even trick-or-treaters come Halloween.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to miss the privacy that house provided. Today, I see ten houses from my front porch in town and six or seven times as many from the second story sun porch windows out back. When a neighbor decided to cut his towering pine trees, our view suddenly included the town’s paper mill, and when the renters next door have an argument, I always know—and sometimes also hear what it’s about.
Friends of ours, Laura and Travis, moved from the mountains to the piedmont years ago, and just recently from a house in a subdivision to a house in the country on five acres of land. There’s an outbuilding and a tractor, a tremendous garden spot and wild blackberries. The dogs gallop about freely, chasing grasshoppers and tracking whatever wildlife recently has ventured through.
To say that my husband and I are jealous would be an understatement. He grew up in central Georgia on 13 acres of flat, piney land, riding his bike on a barely traveled dirt road. Now he yells at drivers who barrel by with blatant disregard for the 25 mph speed limit. One early morning a teen ran off the road, tagged the fire hydrant on the sidewalk, obliterated our mailbox and young redbud tree, bounced off our driveway over the hedge of burning bushes and slammed into our elderly neighbor’s bedroom wall. Another late night a drunk driver took out a power pole (she was fine and even attempted to drive away before a neighbor in nothing but his boxer shorts stopped her). A woman who walks her Golden Retriever thinks that our trashcan, left out for pick up on Mondays, is a wonderful receptacle for her dog’s waste products. Life in town is at least interesting.
Land in the mountains comes at a premium price, so our increasing desire for less human interaction increasingly seems as though it will be solved only with a tall and solid fence. I used to think that people who erected such things were anti-social. Now I know they are—and that I am one of them.
These hassles, however, are what I accept in order to live in the mountains. A summer trip Tybee Island, Ga., reminded me that what we here consider humidity is nothing compared to a steam heat index and a planned camping trip to Edisto Island, S.C., has led me to buy the first box fan I’ve owned since college. The cascading waves of blue mountains that rise far beyond the 10 houses I see from my front porch appear like giant sleeping dinosaurs. The doves, cardinals, and wrens that dine at my bird feeder sing their songs in the surrounding oak and locust trees that light up with hundreds of lightning bugs’ green strobes each night.
Life in town means that I hear the ice cream truck’s relentlessly happy tune as it makes its way through the neighborhood, my husband can make a quick run to the grocery store if I’m cooking and forgot to buy eggs or milk, the roads always are plowed when it snows, and a recent pizza delivery came via a young woman whose godmother once owned our home.
This edition of Smoky Mountain Living is dedicated to our mountain landscape. Perhaps I am selfish for wanting to own more of it, but it is my pleasure to share it and its stories with you.