Back on the Road

 After a wonderful holiday season, Trish and I are back on the road again on the storytelling trail.

This past weekend we were in Newnan, Georgia, for a wonderful event organized cooperatively by three Newnan churches. The Presbyterian, Eposcopal and Central Baptist church’s have for twenty-nine years come together one weekend each year for a shared community program.  They have a speaker in the Christian tradition for a Saturday night banquet and for shared services on Sunday Morning.  It was my privilege to be their guest this year.

Since we were already going to be there, I asked whether we could do something for children and families on Saturday morning.  We had quite a gathering of families with their school-age children in the old Carnegie Library, right beside the church, where I had fun telling family stories.

The Saturday night banquet was in the brand new Central Baptist Fellowship Hall that they informal call the COVID Building as it was constructed during these past two years.  This was their first community event in that new space.

This event was also used to raise money for the Samaritan’s health clinic serving uninsured and underserved people in Coweeta  County.  The weekend was a model of how churches can cooperate for community good as well as their own.

Winter Yard Work.

 This is the time of year to get things trimmed and cleaned up outside while nothing much is growing or going on outdoors.  Summertime heat here plus dry spells in the summer mean than we don’t have very much luck with summer grass in the yard. But, we have lots of green in the wintertime.  We sow winter rye in September and then we have a nice green lawn all around the house until it gives up about the middle of June.

There is a lot of trimming and general cleanup to be done. Our little truck works hard (along with Trish!) to haul away the results of lots of work.  

This year’s asparagus gets trimmed back, all the roses are pruned, the grapefruit tree is trimmed, and the garden area is generally cleaned up.  Once all this is done we can look out the windows and begin to imagine what things can look like when warm weather returns starting in March.  We love our seasons.

Ocracoke Variety Store

 We have one all-purpose general store on the island: The Ocracoke Variety Store.  The Variety Store includes a grocery store and a hardware store and they stock everything we need to live here.  Tommy Hutcherson, who with his mother, Miss Julia, own the store, works very hard to stock what we want and need and to get things here even when weather and seasons make that especially difficult. The store is also a good employer.

Local residents have charge accounts at the store.  We don’t pay when we shop…it just goes in our bill and then we pay once at the end of the month  This sure is convenient!

Hurricane Dorian flooded the store in 2019 but Tommy and his staff worked through night and day to reopen almost as soon as the storm had passed.  There was, however, long term water damage which is now showing up in a big way.  Therefore, this winter, the store is undergoing a major rebuild and expansion.

Right now the hardware side has been totally rebuilt from a new floor up to the ceiling and some expanded space.  Following that the grocery side is not under work.  You can see the big red box in the parking lot that is receiving all the damaged wood that is being torn out.

When we go inside special care is being taken to insure that we still have access to everything we need during the construction.  Almost daily stock is relocated from place to place so we can find what we need even as parts of the store are closed off while 24 hour a day work goes on.  Customer care is always the highest priority.

So try to support the Variety Store as much as we can because they always take care of us.

BANANA SURPRISE!

 When we came to thr New Year on the island, we got a big surprise at our house:  our biggest banana tree is starting to bloom!

This tree is a raja puri banana from India and it produces fruit that is very sweet and edible.  The stem that is in bloom is nineteen months old.  

Whether we get bananas will totally depend on the temperature over the coming couple of months.  If we can avoid a hard freeze, we should get bananas.  If it freezes we are back to th start over point.  Whatever happens this is a great experiment and lots of fun.

Happy New Year from the Island!

 We are happy to be restfully at home through the start of this New Year.  The weather has been in the low 70’s this week and even our biggest banana tree is blooming.  We are afraid that bad weather is coming in the next few days, but, for now, we will take this lovely weather.

Out at Springer’s Point little beach on New Years’s day we enjoyed a time with Kelly, Erin, and Frank who are here for a few days.

In the live oaks.

Even ghost crabs came out to celebrate the New Year!

Ghost crab.