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Showing posts from July, 2020

The Unfortunate Fate of the Beeches on Beech Mountain

Overlook Trail, a climb at elevation with child in arms. Dense forest over boulder bones. The dirt, where present, dark and spongy. Lake Coffey to Lower Pond Creek Trail. Hiking up to the same park from the morn. Around the lake and over boardwalks. The beeches looked strange, kind of gnarled. I came to know that they were the garden variety beech, but that a disease was wiping them out. It explained the dead, and felled beech at our cabin that so interested Adella, and the dying beech still upright beside it.

To Boone or Bust

 A tiny sliver of moon hangs in the west. As it slips down, it rings round. This is the phase I love best. After the photographer came for staging photos, and I could finally let my breath out, I closed my office door and laid on the floor, unable to concentrate on work, and I listened to my thoughts running over each other. I tried to calm my mind and clear my head, but I was too tired. It’s taken days to recover a sense of peace, and it’s even some low stress state and not true calm. But such is my life now. We went due East, turned off of I-40, and headed to the hill country. When we stopped in Boone for groceries, Susan took the family to a small garden behind the store, and I met them there. It was cool, and lush, and is probably the closest I’ve come to the Ohio clime. In fact, I later found that both Beech Mountain and the Lake Erie Basin have the same climate type (called the humid continental climate). We twisted up from Banner Elk to Beech Mountain, and found our cabin clingi