Finding Autumn in Appalachia

I spent last week in Appalachia, where the Smoky Mountains, the Blue Ridge mountains, and the Appalachian Mountains merge. Did you know they do that? It’s kind of like a family, genus, species thing. Or a Jonah, whale, ocean thing. The Smoky Mountains are a small set of mountain ridges within the larger Blue Ridge Mountains and they’re all within the quite large (Alabama to Maine kind of large) Appalachian Mountains. Facts like that fascinating me.

So does sharing them. Which, if I share weird facts in person, I most often feel like I’m Super Boring as my listener’s eyes glaze over. This is not the case with a few odd children of mine, who like random facts as much as I do. And it is not the case when I write, because I imagine you’re on the edge of your seat as I tell you things.

We’re moving soon.

Did you know? We’re leaving the coast where we met, and where our babies were born and raised. We’re heading to the mountains. In fact, we’re heading to those Smoky Blue Appalachia mountains, to homestead, to hike, to protect trees and bears and all-the-native-things, to metal detect around the old moonshining camp, and to overshare with you.

In fact, I bought SmokyBlueAppalachia.com and will one day in the Spring launch a website for my oversharing.

We will always feel at home on this coast, and will visit it often. Nowhere else are there such emerald waters and such pure white fine sand. I will miss much about it. Most of all my backyard lemon tree and the lazy river beyond it. I get all slurpy just thinking about leaving such things.

But along the way at some point, as I was holding onto the coast, I realized I was missing other things. I was missing hikes on land above 20′ in elevation, firewood weather, my parents and most of my nieces and nephews being within an afternoon’s drive, and I was missing autumn.

I will be busy with our last holidays together in this sweet home, packing up our earthly things, and prepping the house for sale, but I hope to write about it here. Something about being super busy makes me want to write. It’s on the easy days that I find sitting down to write most difficult. I don’t know how to psychoanalyze that. I think it has something to do with procrastination.

p.s. I do read comments but don’t publish them on the site anymore.