Blue Ridge Country Jan/Feb 2025 - 24

A Small Bouquet to Helene Victims
Intimacy WITH THE
As the editors and staff of Blue Ridge
Country have looked for the impossible-a
way to express our sorrow and our hopes
for those most affected by Hurricane
Helene's mountain-region destruction-we
settle upon the writing of someone who
loved her tiny piece of Western North
Carolina perhaps as much as anyone has
ever loved a piece of land. Elizabeth Hunter,
who died in 2022 at age 75, lived for more
than half her life in her adopted home of
the Bandana community in Mitchell County,
for which she wrote a book celebrating the
county's 150th anniversary. She wrote for
us from our inaugural issue in 1988 until
2014 (and occasionally thereafter), and this
piece is emblematic of not only writing that
won her Gold Awards from the International
Regional Magazine Association's annual
competitions year after year, but also of her
Thoreau-like dedication to where she lived
and how she lived. This is her column from
the September/October 2001 issue. May we
all come to reach her level of appreciation
of where we live, whether climbing up from
the rubble or lucky enough to have escaped
that terrible challenge. She titled this
column, " Celebrating 25 Years: Nearly half
a life in one place enriches that life in ways
unforseen. "
BY ELIZABETH HUNTER
Land
T
his September, I celebrate
25 years of living in this
house, on this acre, in this
place. On evenings like
this, the third weekend in
May, when I'm putting in my garden and
we've had a half hour of rain in the driest
spring any of us can remember, I feel
greatly blessed. I've just taken a bath. I've
washed away the grime of gardening,
of mulching, of painstakingly transferring
water from barrels under my gutter
spouts to storage barrels in my front- and
backyard gardens.
Like the world I look out on, I am
moist now instead of parched. In my
side yard, the indigo buntings and house
finches are emptying a feeder I'll have to
refill in the morning. There is no wind.
In the last week, the trees have darkened
almost to the green of summer, like lights
being dimmed. " To everything there is
a season. " Yes. The season for trees ocTo
read more of Elizabeth Hunter's writing for the magazine, go
to blueridgecountry.com/elizabethhunter or scan the QR code.
To read entries from the journals that she kept for much of her
time in Bandana, go to elizabethhunter.substack.com.
cupying center stage is over now; they'll
be backdrop 'til fall, when they'll perform
a flaring encore. The blackberries
are in exuberant bloom, as are the
multiflora roses (plenty of them!), purple
rhododendron, yellow iris, Japanese iris,
peonies and early roses. The first fireflies
rise from the weeds. Five days ago, the
season's final frost whitened the grass in a
low spot of pasture I drove by on my way
to town. Blackberry Winter, too, a month
ago-snow and biting wind.
I have been anticipating my silver anniversary
of peaceful coexistence with a
place I love-a small ridgetop cabin set
in a clearing-for several years. That it
coincides with a period in which I have
contracted for more work-for-hire than
I've allowed myself to take on for perhaps
a decade is unfortunate, though I have
good reason: I'm buying a car. Whenever
I tell people I'm surfeited with work, their
invariable response is, " That's great! " I
beg to differ, even if it's wonderful work,
which all of it is. Because I'm painfully
aware of what I'm missing when I'm
away from home-or at home, with my
nose to the computer screen. Renting
my brain-the way I think of work-
cuts into my thinking time, my gardening
time, my caterpillar-raising time, my
24 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
http://www.blueridgecountry.com/elizabethhunter http://elizabethhunter.substack.com http://www.BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
Blue Ridge Country Jan/Feb 2025

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country Jan/Feb 2025
