Today was a particularly lovely one. The temperature was in the high 60s or maybe 70 at most and there was a good breeze all day. I decided to do a couple hour hike at Biltmore with Abner and on our way back to the lagoon we encountered this man and his Blue Macaw named Abou. She is three years old and very well trained. She and Abner got along famously.
Abner was really smitten with this bird. All he did was sniff her very gently and carefully. She seemed pretty comfortable with the whole encounter and Abner was just delighted. He had never been this close to any bird before, let alone one this big or exotic. The owner told us that she will probably live to be around 85 years old. I trust he has made arrangements for her in his will. 

There are still some amazingly beautiful flowers left although fewer and fewer each time we go out. The planted areas at Biltmore still have splendid displays but the wildflowers really do seem to be harbingers of the coming cold weather. I can't believe it took me 57 years to notice this kind of stuff.


Spider webs are really starting to appear all over the place. This is one photo you really need to click on and look at full size. The perfection of these webs is really uncanny. 

This was another of the kind of table shaped ones with really thick pulpy tops. Probably would be wonderful in a salad if it didn't kill you.
This one was so absurdly huge I had to photograph it with my foor to give you a sense of scale. My shoe is 12" long.
This one struck me as a dead ringer for the photos I have seen of hydrogen bomb tests.
And this poor thing looked like it needed a dose of Retin-A. My god what an awful complexion. 

Some look more like coral than mushrooms.

This one really blew me away. Not only was it this amazing color but it looked like it had been polished. I didn't touch it but I suspect that the shiny surface is some kind of secretion. . .seemed like there were things stuck to it.
And these looked like they were turned upward to collect water. 

Some are delicately growing out of the sides of living or dead trees.
Some come in pretty strange textures and colors. Scuttlebut is that the red ones are poisonous but I don't eat any of them just to be on the safe side. I like my mushrooms to come from a bin in the supermarket.
I like the ones that have the delicate flutes on the underside, although I have also been warned that that is another sign of their being poisonous. I think if they are growing in the ground, they are either poisonous or endangered and in either case, I probably should leave them alone.
If red ones are posionous, what about the rust colored? 

Some don't even look like mushrooms.


And some appear to be the absolute classics. 

This first group of pictures represents some of the variety of mushrooms I encountered while walking in the woods over about a two week period. I guess I should have paid closer attention in Botany class.


 

Yeah yeah. I know. I haven't posted anything in a month. Not that things haven't been going on, but even people who have given up full-time work sometimes get busy.

Going back to Mid-August, when I last posted here, much has happened. When I planned this move, I figured it would take me about two years to be able to figure out whether or not I would fit in here. . .whether or not I would like it enough to stay for awhile. Unlike when I moved to Sacramento, I have had the luxury here of paying attention to my thoughts, feelings and most important, instincts. My comfort level seems to be pretty consistent and I am getting the message that Asheville and I might last for awhile. People who started out as acquaintances of whom I was fond are starting to feel like friends. All this takes time, but since I am now at the 20-month point in my stay here, it is starting to take on a level of intimacy that makes me think I will probably stay for a while.

I have been enjoying the summer mornings, seemingly commonplace now, when I get up, get my coffee and retrieve the NY Times from the drive or the front walk (depending upon who is delivering this week) and am greeted by an ephemeral mist that shrouds the neighborhood in a warmly enveloping mystery. The sun doesn't have to rise very high for the mist to clear but it is quite comforting first thing in the mornings. I have, however, found myself wanting to find a house that is more suitable. The house I bought to move here is a comfortable 1927 vintage Tudor and it certainly has served the purpose for which I bought it. I needed a place I could land here but that would be easy to sell in the even that I decided that Asheville wasn't going to work for me. I also needed to be in a neighborhood where I could walk Abner and meet people, where I wouldn't be far from the center of town, and where, fundamentally and in a literal and figurative sense, I could get my bearings.

All of this has happened largely as I hoped it would in my more optimistic moments. I have had a few days when I was missing my friends in Sacramento and was thinking that if I had moved to Bellingham WA (runner up) rather than here, I would probably have seen more of them. I actually doubt that really would have happened but occasionally I wondered. Now, though, this feels like home. Consequently, this summer I started looking for land on which to build the house I really want. This turned out to be a very educational experience.

When I bought my house almost two and a half years ago, I could have bought a lot reasonably close to downtown with a reasonable view in a good neighborhood for around $75k or $80k. Those days are gone. I have looked at every lot that is available in any reasonable proximity to downtown and has a view and there is precious little for double those figures. I even looked at a disgusting tear-down in a good neighborhood that was going for $150,000. I was having trouble wrapping my mind around it when it sold the 4th day it was on the market. You snooze, you lose.

So then, I started looking at houses. There are actually several places for sale right now in neighborhoods I like and some have a sort of view but here's the deal. One I liked with a phenomenal view and a great location would have taken every penny I could gather just to buy it leaving me no way to remodel without going back to work. . .yuck. Others that weren't quite as pricey were so disgusting that I would have almost had to start over, thus making them unrealistic as well. And then, I found a deeply troubled house on top of the mountain. It is literally at the summit of the first major mountain that defines the East side of central Asheville. It has a moderate summer view but should have a spectacular view once the leaves fall from the trees. I think, if I get it, I will remove some trees to open it up a little more in the spring and summer as well.

In August I made an offer on this place and thought I was going to get it. The house had been on the market for more than a year. Strangely enough, at the point when it had been languishing for 10 months, the owners inexplicably raised their asking price by $30,000! Now I don't claim to be an expert in residential real estate, but generally I have observed, over the years, that the way to get rid of a house that isn't selling is to lower the price. And this place has problems. First and foremost is the fact that it is all wood. And by all wood, I mean ALL wood. Floors, walls and ceilings in virtually every room in the house are dark browns of various hues and textures. Even the walls of the Master Bath are paneled. I am not certain that this wasn't some previous owner's bad idea of making the house seem more mountainy but I cannot imagine that, even in 1968, the year of it's unfortunate birth, anyone would have done this. It is insufferably dark due to all this wood in spite of having extensive glass.

Making matters worse, the kitchen, dining room, and den all have ceilings that are 7'1" high. The two finished rooms in the above ground portion of the basement, while not quite that short, are still well below 8' high. There are multiple levels. Entry, kitchen and dining share one level. The living room and den are up a few steps. Then the master bedroom and bath are up another half level or so, and finally there is another bedroom and bath at the topmost level overlooking the living room. And by overlooking, I mean that there is a 30" parapet keeping children or drunken adults from falling over the edge into the living room. I don't think there is a building code in America that would allow this. Clearly this room wasn't originally a bedroom, and it isn't much of one now. The whole space on this level is about 14 by 16 feet out of which a large bathroom and a small closet have been carved. You might be able to squeeze a bunk bed or twin against a wall but that is all there is room for. The bathroom is huge and brown. Toilet, tub, sink, and tile. . .all brown.

Then, if you go down a level from the entry level there is another bedroom and bath and another room of undetermined function, along with a large pleasant (albeit low-ceilinged) basement with generous laundry and work/storage space.

With three bedrooms and three bathrooms, you would think that sometime in the last 38 years, it would have occurred to someone that a bath on the same level as living, dining, kitchen or entry would have been a good idea. Well, that hasn't happened.

The house has no garage and sits on .82 acre of land sloping to the south.

On the plus side, it has a self-contained 900 sq ft guesthouse that was built in 2002 and has wood only on the floors and cabinets. It has its own laundry, a large kitchen 1 bedroom and a second room that certainly could be one, a great room and a bath with whirlpool tub. All across the view side of the guesthouse is a lovely deck, also facing south.

After visiting this place a number of times, I figured that I was probably the only person in Western North Carolina who wouldn't run screaming from this house. Clearly the paneling has to be removed and replaced with drywall. Some light colors need to happen as well as the demolition of the hideous brown bath. It needs a garage and a powder room on the entry level and is in desperate need of some lighting, but all of that can be accomplished and I can live in the guesthouse while it is happening. When it is done I could be living in a very pleasant house with beautiful views and a guest house that I can rent until I pay for my remodel.

So armed with my ambitious plans and having gone to enormous lengths to get through the morass of documents describing what can or cannot be done in this location, I made an offer that was very reasonable but based upon the old asking price since the new one was clearly ridiculous. After some back and forth we agreed upon my price but they insisted on a 30-day escrow. Since 30 days would have put me pretty much at the week I was scheduled to return from my Fort Bragg/Sacramento trip, that wasn't realistic. Furthermore, I had guests scheduled for the whole month of October and after the last of them leaves, I will have less than three weeks at home before Abner and I leave for Ocracoke Island for Thanksgiving in the Outer Banks.

With this as our only point of disagreement, these people, whose house has been empty for 13 months (actually now 14), who have long since moved back to Charleston, and who have very little hope of finding another person willing to take on this project, decided to die on the hill of the escrow date. Personally, I don't understand it. They could continue to market the house and in the unlikely event that they got another acceptable offer that was cleaner than mine, all they would have to do is give me 72 hours to either release all contingencies and schedule a closing, or give up and let the new buyers have it.

Subsequently, I found out that they thought that perhaps they would hear from me again when my house sold, but I took it off the market the day it went on since I don't want to sell this house until I have one to move to.

This saga will continue.

Abner continues to be a major attraction. Total strangers address him by name on a routine basis. On Sunday, after giving him water and a treat at the stable courtyard where we frequently stop as a halfway point in our walks, we strolled into the bookstore to say hello to Elaine, the woman who runs the store most of the time and had apparently been asking about us. I had been gone for a little more than a week visiting old friends in Fort Bragg and Sacramento, as most of you know, and in spite of what some people think, he doesn't drive over to the estate on his own so several of the people we see regularly had been wondering what had become of us. So I took him in to see Elaine and was stopped by a visitor to the house who asked what kind of dog Abner was. This is hardly a new occurrence. Anyone who has walked with us knows that I get asked about 30-50 times per visit to Biltmore. I am getting quite good at the answering and am always ready for the predictable subsequent inquiries but this guy threw me. After I told him that Abner is a Great Pyrenees his response was "Is this Abner?"

Well that really got me because I was pretty certain I had never seen or talked to this guy before. He explained that he works for Wachovia Bank and had heard about Abner through other people at the bank. This kind of thing is happening more and more. People are now discussing him in their workplaces so we are starting to encounter total strangers who already know who he is. It really is a little strange. Sometimes I think I am walking Brangelina.

I am not going to go into a long description of the California trip since many if not most of the people who read this blog saw me or talked to me. What I can tell you is that I will certainly do this differently the next time. I don't know what I was thinking but trying to see 33 years worth of friends in a week, only 4 days of which were in Sacramento, was overly optimistic. I am hoping to come for a month next year. I have a wedding to attend in early August and would still like to go to Winesong the weekend after Labor Day, so if I can rent a car for the whole month and drive out with Abner, I can have a more leisurely visit and see more people more easily. I really do appreciate Anne Jackson and Sue Boeger throwing parties for me so I could see more people in one spot than I could possibly have seen one at a time. Being gone for 8 days was interesting though because the season seems to have changed while I was gone. Suddenly the days are cooler and the nights considerably so. I am hoping we will get good fall colors this year if we can start getting cold nights. The vegetation we see on our walks is starting to diminish and it is starting to look like fall. I have been obsessed with the myriad of types of mushrooms that have been around for the last few weeks. When I finish this post I am going to post a bunch of pictures I have been taking. I never realized how many different kinds of mushrooms could exist in one place. I am certain there are scads of them that I haven't even noticed as well.

I am trying to take things a little easy since I will have visitors again starting October 5th and would like to be rested and ready when they start arriving. It will be a busy month. I have made another offer on the house on top of the mountain so there may be some action in that department too.

And so it goes (as Linda Ellerbee used to say). 20 months have elapsed since I left Sacramento and more and more this feels like home. I will be seeing many of you here this fall, a few this winter, and a bunch in the spring. Can't wait.