Mountain Spring

Winter in the mountains hangs on like a canker sore.  I have no problem in the dead of winter, when it is cold everywhere and we just have it a little worse than my people back home.  But this in-between time as I wait for spring to rise to our elevation makes me crazy. I see my girlfriends’ pictures on Facebook of sunny patios and shirtless children.  Our friends in Mississippi have reported that the hummingbirds have returned.  Meanwhile, our feeders sit filled with sugar water hanging in silence like they’ve been stood up for the prom.  I have a friend in Alabama who once interviewed for a job at Virginia Tech.  One of the interview questions was “what will you do when you wake up one morning and there’s 36 inches of snow on the ground?”  My friend’s reply “I’ll turn around, go back in the house and go back to bed.”  He did not get the job.  This sentiment towards cold weather rings pretty consistent throughout the Deep South and I am not exempt.  However, we are mountain people now and that requires that we toughen up. 

One winter Sunday a few months ago my husband and I were readying for the day.  I had to go do some work at our local community center and he was tasked with bundling up each kid, putting them in the stroller and walking them to a late afternoon birthday party just up the road. I could see the reluctance on his face, the sky outside was overcast and the grey on the mountains indicated there would be no sunbeams at the party.  Half way through my afternoon I looked out the window to see large clumps of snow falling.  I jumped in the car to drive to meet my family; convinced they would be stuck at home in this weather. Instead, I found them at the party.  Oliver’s bright red coat darting through a pack of bundled kids in the yard.  Isabel was on the porch in her daddy’s arms dressed in her baby snowsuit.  The stroller was parked under the awning covered with piles of blankets.  He had strolled the kids through the snow; we were in fact mountain people.  I watched the swarm of children screaming,  “Snow! Snow!” only to hear my son chanting, “Cotton! Cotton!”

We are mountain people but there’s more to the story.  My son jumped in a hopper full of cotton with his cousins long before he ran through his first snow. My story is not his story, but he has enough of me to recognize cotton before snow and I have enough of home to feel no shame in griping about the weather.  

My Red Couch

My red couch was the first “grown up” furniture purchase I ever made. I was browsing a flea market in Wetumpka, Alabama and saw it sitting there with a price tag of $400. "Layaway" my friend Ashley said when I began to buckle at the price. We haggled the lady down to $350, and three payments later, in the dead of winter, my dad and I were headed to North Georgia with the couch loaded on the back of his pick up truck. It fit perfectly in my first non-roommate inhabited rental house, which came with my job at North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega. The couch was my centerpiece for entertaining in my sparse beginnings as a single adult with a paycheck. I had parties, flirted with through-hikers and cried with girlfriends on that couch. I was sitting on that couch one Saturday afternoon when it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was falling in love with a bass player from Buford, Georgia.

When my job took me to Atlanta the couch got loaded with everything else and it followed me to every overpriced apartment that I occupied ­­– including the house in Decatur I eventually moved into with that bass player. When we got married we rented a house with a fireplace and hardwood floors, the perfect setting for my couch. But on the way into the front door the back foot was broken off, so we had to prop it up with my new husband’s old web design books. When the economy tanked he pulled those books out and used something else to prop up the foot while I worked and he went back to school to study graphic design. A few years later we had our first baby, Oliver, and as soon as he could walk he started pulling the stuffing out of the loose velvet upholstery. “You should just get rid of that thing,” my husband growled as we chased our son around the house to pry dusty cotton strands from his tiny grip. I wouldn’t hear of it. We moved again, had another baby, Isabel. For the past few months the couch has been parked in the garage of the house we finally bought, back up in those mountains where we first fell in love.

That bass player made good and became a creative director for a web company, while I stayed at home with the kids (he’s not a bad photographer either, he took the picture). The couch is now a home to our cats and lord knows what other creatures that venture into our garage in the dark Georgia night. Once, I found a raccoon poised on its two hind legs as if it were arriving for tea. But I am keeping this couch. It’s my flagship heirloom, not passed down from my grandmother’s grandmother but a symbol of my debut into responsibility. I plan on getting it stuffed, recovered, and the broken leg fixed. I plan to have many important talks with my kids on this couch about hard work, holding on and the importance of sitting still while you let the beauty of life wash over you. I hope it also stands as a reminder that it’s OK to take a chance and buy something on layaway every once in a while.