people

I love Christmas trees. When I was a kid, we’d go to the farm and cut down a scratchy cedar tree and erect it in the never-used living room at my parents’ house. I love cedars. They smell so heavenly, which kind of makes up for their deadly pricks that leave sore scratch marks on your arms days after you’ve had a run-in with one. I loved the lights and the handmade ornaments my mom made after she got married, when they had exactly $0.00 in their bank account and had to rely on ornaments made of toilet paper rolls and tin foil.

Yesterday we went to the tree lot tucked behind the Farmer’s Market. I’ve decided that I love the Farmer’s Market, despite its tendency to be more of a wholesaler market than a true farmer’s market. It’s my type of place, which is, essentially, one filled with old people and hoop cheese. What can I say? I’m from rural North Carolina, after all.

We pulled up, parked, and … bought the first tree we saw. Yep, for all the tree love I have coursing through my veins, it never fails that we pull up to a stall, walk about five feet and find the perfect Frasier fir. We bought it from a man with the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, who lives in Little Canada, a tiny community off the Tuckasegee River in Jackson County. Across North Carolina, there are an estimated 50 million of these trees on over 25,000 acres, and he and his wife have 14 acres of land filled with these trees. A couple of years ago the two put out 1,200 baby trees by hand. It took them three days. 

I imagine that they go to sleep and night and dream about trees. They have to watch for red spiders, which crawl in the little bitty buds at the tips of the limbs and make them explode. They have to use big, long machete-ish knives to sheer the trees into the perfect cones. They have to worry about drought and frosts. And that’s just until they get them to the market, where he’ll be until Christmas Eve, watching over the trees he’s selling there and trying, I imagine, to make a small profit. Years of work go into this season. The 12-foot trees (which we did not buy, by the way, because that would just be silly) take eight to nine years to grow. He said the drought we’ve had has slowed down their growth a bit, making them a little bit fatter rather than a little bit taller. Sometimes they think about going out and setting them all on fire, he laughed.

I understand this, the love-hate of the work you’ve chosen. It’s a fine, fine line, even for Christmas trees and even if, in the end, what you grow brings someone like me who stands talking in your forest of swinging trees, pulling at the leaves and smelling the piney scent on her hands and dreaming of lights.

There is a time when I travel, an unexpected moment, where I find myself soaked in the place where I’m standing. Most times, it’s a singular experience, I’ve found, the one hour or minute or even second where I feel connected to the place I’ve flown to, driven to or walked to. Sometimes it happens in familiar touristy spot, like walking across Prague’s Charles Bridge at night in the rain, huddled under an umbrella to find a stand to buy hot mulled wine. Other times, I don’t know it’s coming, like when we sat at the restaurant counter in Barcelona, talking to the owner and eating whatever he brings to us – tiny dishes of unnamable (to us) ingredients; when gondoliero (this isn’t him or his boat, but it’s a beautiful photograph) and his architect friend laughed and talked with us in a dark, subterranean restaurant in Venice, as I downed the best filet mignon ever and drank all the limoncellos they buy me; when the beautiful five-year-old girl at a restaurant in Curacao who, after dancing around the floor with her mother, climbed to our table to talk about SpongeBob SquarePants.

When I’m in these moments, I feel this soaring joy at being alive. I know it’s a sentimental thought, but I love it then.

When I was in Boston recently (which was, by the way, filled with these moments!), we wandered around the streets of Arlington on Halloween night. Little Tairou was dressed as a lion and my friends Melody and Josh pulled him along in the dark as he sat in the back of a red wagon and we tried to coax him to say “trick or treat” to perfect strangers. Early in the night, we turned a corner and saw a group of people gathered at one side of the street, so we all wandered over there, too.  A tall, muscled, red-haired, pony-tailed guy was bent over a set of tables erected on the side of his yard. A small desk lamp was propped on a music player, sending beams of light onto tubs of hot dogs and vats of chili. When he saw us, he sang out a big hello and he started dishing out bowls of chili for us, telling us he’d won awards for his slow-cook chili.

We stood around on the sidewalk, balancing bowls of warm, tomato-y chili in our hands, as he told us about growing up in this house, in this neighborhood. Every Halloween, he tries to cook something for people in the neighborhood. He and I started talking about barbecue — he’s getting a smoker built, he said — and when he told us he a musician, he ran inside to get us some CDs of his band, the Dave Sammarco Band. When I asked if I could take his picture, he said, “Hold on, let me get my glasses on.”

I could have stayed there all night talking with him about living in Arlington and his band and his burgeoning catering business. But we slid on down the sidewalk to gather more candy and head to a nearby Korean restaurant. It was the perfect night, the perfect Boston moment. Do you have these moments, too?

This morning, like most, I walked down the porch steps and headed up our street. Our dog, Sammy, comes with me, of course. Today, while he reacquainted himself plots of grass and the other neighborhood dogs, I thought about how it has been a year or so since we moved into our house in West Asheville, since we left the the Swannanoa mountainside and the one-lane gravel road.

When Pat started building this house, we didn’t think we would really move here. We loved our house in Swannanoa and we had dreams of selling this one and going around the world: Thailand and Vietnam, maybe a stop in Spain. But things changed. The housing market slowed down and as the months ticked by, we started counting our pennies. One weekend, we called up our friend Jack to ask if he wanted to buy our Swannanoa house. (What’s the saying I want to put here? A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush?) After the phone call, we started packing.

A year later — even though there are boxes I still haven’t unpacked cluttering the basement and I sometime wake up and think we’re in our other house — I realize that I love this neighborhood. It didn’t take long, this growing love, to settle on me. I even admitted as much in my contributor’s bio for the latest issue of WNC Magazine, wherein I am quoted saying that I live on the best street in West Asheville. And NO ONE called me out on it, so it must be true!

But what I’ve also been reminded of over these last 12 months is what it is to be a Good Neighbor. That’s where Ginger comes in. She’s a little shy.

Not really. Ginger has got to be one of the least shy people you’ll ever meet, which is why I find this photo hilarious.

Let me introduce you to her, because she was one of the first neighbors to introduce herself to us. That was just the beginning. She has helped friends buy and move into houses along our street. She organizes a monthly poker game and always sends me an invitation. She planted rows of tomatoes, peppers and squash, which becomes a community garden because she lets anyone come and pick them if they want. Her fenced-in backyard is frequently populated with groups of dogs, both her own and ones she’s taking care of. When someone moved away this year and left a starving, sick cat behind, she adopted it and named it Sweetie. She worries over some neighborhood kids and takes care of others when their parents need to take a sudden trip to the ER. She cuddles the babies. She also always stops to talk when she sees you outside and always, always has nice compliments to offer and helps out in crises and celebrations.

(Wow, I was impressed before, but just writing this makes me feel like a self centered, undependable shut-in.)

She is unfailingly, absolutely unique. I’m so thankful for her! She has, whether she knows it or not, helped make my feelings of homesickness — both for my old house and that old romantic idea of home and community — dissipate, even as dust still collects on those moving boxes I’ve yet to unpack.