If you are a lover of straight lines and tidy endings, be forewarned. This is not a straightforward drive from point A to point B. It will meander and ramble in an untidy way.
I flew the terrain in my mind’s eye as a hawk might, swooping in to assuage my sharp hunger with live and tender bits, soaring from the flatland piney woods of northwest Florida to the dusky mountain peaks of Western North Carolina. But in the end, the crude map I drew with the pen moving and my eyes closed, was of my own heart. It is bisected with a fault line down the middle: one chamber is Rice Cove, near Canton, North Carolina; the other is Cantonment, near Pensacola, Florida.
Watauga County Farmers’ Market will be having the first holiday market of the season this Saturday, November 22 from 10 to 2. We are expecting more vendors this year and you will have a wide selection to choose from.
Cold weather has slowed many of the local vegetables, but Shiloh Avery and Jason Roehrig of Tumbling Shoals Farm will be harvesting a nice variety of fresh treats including kale, collards, mustard, carrots, chard, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, beets, salad mix, spinach, arugula, mesclin and salad turnips. Charles Church will have four kinds of potatoes: Yukon Gold, Rose Finn, Apple Fingerling and Red Norland. Charles will also have garlic, butternut squash, Swiss chard, parsley, carrots, onions, apples and sweet sorghum molasses. Eugene McGuire and James Wagner will have fresh eggs from free range chickens.
For almost three decades, John Francis has been a planetwalker, traveling the globe by foot and sail with a message of environmental respect and responsibility (for 10 of those years without speaking). A funny, thoughtful talk with occasional banjo.
No pizza on top of Beech. No bar-b-q and bluegrass in Linville. No outdoor grilling on the deck above Clark Creek.
No morning coffee as the sun comes over the mountain and the valley fog rises to meet it. No evening glass of wine waiting for the stars and the fireflies to come out to play.
I missed the blue ridges fading into the dusk and I missed them when they faded back to blue again the next morning.
As I stare off into the distance here at home, my mind tries to make the tree line across the pasture become the ridges of the mountains from my memory…The layers of branches take on the look of the layers of ridges when my eyes let my memory take over…
In the years that I miss making the trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, I feel the call stronger with each passing month…Next year…
Next year I’ll get there…Next year we’ll make the move…Next year we’ll make it permanent…Next year…
It has been a season of extremes for Grandfather Mountain.
Earlier in the month, the tourist attraction experienced record highs for two days in a row, but unseasonably cold weather tied the record for the daily low temperature in Wednesday.
The reading was taken at the official US Weather Service reporting station located next to the Mile High Swinging Bridge on Grandfather Mountain.
The temperature dipped to 18 degrees early in the morning tying the previous daily low record for the day set in 1968.
The all time lowest temperature ever recorded in October at Grandfather Mountain is 12 degrees on October 26th, back in 1962.
The storm also brought high winds and snow to the area.
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