View from the Mountain

Lost in Vera Land

I once described Vera Bradly bags and accessories as a virus.  That did not go over very well with the ladies in the family.  Actually I think that I am still being punished for that statement.

I seem to end up waiting on the fringes of Vera land anytime we have visitors to the coast.  Family visitors seem to spend even longer in there since they often give each Vera bags for presents.

I should not complain.  The bags are colorful, durable, and apparently addictive.  There are plenty of worse things to be addicted to besides Vera Bradley bags.  Watching John and Kate on television comes to mind.

Our oldest daughter just finished a visit with us at the coast.  She is a very organized person and came to visit with a list of things she hoped to accomplish on her trip.  I just finished a post on her visit, What Makes a Vacation Memorable?

Our Vera trip came after a very tasty breakfast at Yana Mama's in downtown Swansboro.  We wandered the streets after breakfast only to find the store with the Vera still closed.  In accordance with business hours on the beach, the sales clerk showed up at five minutes before the opening of the shop.

However, when she two Vera dazed consumers on her steps, she kindly offered to open the store early for them.  With friends like her i need no enemies.

Still I really do not mind, the ladies each came away with a new piece to add to their collections.  Me, I came away knowing that this will not be my last trip to Vera land.

Fortunately living on the Crystal Coast usually gives me other options.

Finding perspective often saves the day

I have never been shy about what I believe.  However as I have aged, I have tried to make certain that my opinions are well reasoned and at least take into account my own bias. I read a number of opinions just to get some perspective. Once in a while one of those opinion pieces gets under my skin, and often it is when the author lacks perspective.

The Forbes piece, Fear And Loathing Of The 'Burb, by Elisabeth Eaves managed to do get my thoughts going.  Based on her one time experience of living in a suburb in Seattle, Elisabeth has this to say.

The suburban scale is such that everything is driving distance away. There are no elevators, hallways or foyers. There is nowhere to walk to, and so no one to run into on foot. Suburbs promote sedentary, misanthropic lives. I doubt it could ever be proved, but the tidy, knowable, under-stimulating suburb is probably to blame for most modern teenage rebellion; certainly it was for my own.

For those who rarely see the word "misanthropic," it means being someone who is a misanthrope or "a hater of humankind."  My guess is that Elisabeth was to blame for own rebellion.

After that Elisabeth complains that "engaging two tons of metal when I need to fetch a dozen eggs" but goes on to say she loves small towns and wilderness.  Ah lets live in the city and romanticize the country but hate suburia.

I hardly know where to start. First off, I have spent the last three years working as a real estate agent in an area where small towns are abundant along with a number of subdivisions.  However, it is not my career that prompted me to write a response to "Could it be that the detached single-family home is a historical aberration?"

It is my experience of living in a variety of places.

I am privileged to grow up in a small town, Lewisville, NC.  It had some early "suburban" developments. I have also lived in wilderness, cities, planned communities, and what Elisabeth might call suburbs.  I spent a fair amount of time in her favorite city, New York, and I also went to school in Boston.

I have had good experiences in most of the places that I have lived, and I have a hard time believing someone even wrote " the detached single-family home is a historical aberration."

My experience with apartment buildings is that you get to know your neighbors less than in a subdivision or a place with townhouses.

I guess her experience in Seattle was pretty bad considering this is the opinion she renders.

The single-family home, though, sitting on its little unfarmed plot of land, strikes me as a pale parody of wilderness. It allows the homeowner to mimic a feudal lord, to the point of bitterly defending his territory.

A more reasoned opinion than Elisabeth's might not have promoted the idea of suburbs as being places where "everything is driving distance away."  In our subdivision of Bluewater Cove, there is plenty of walking.  It would be a rare day for several people to not be out walking in the subdivision.  Actually we talk to each other on those walks since we live in the same community.  That would be a little different than the average city where you walk by a person barely glancing at them.

We can walk to the dock along water, to the swimming pool, the pond, or just down the street to enjoy the tall pines along the water.  No only can we walk, but we also are able to slide our kayaks into the water for a paddle out onto the river.  Then there is my bicycle in the garage.  Getting a couple of miles on it just involves a few a laps on the road out to the new section of subdivision.  My favorite activity aside from kayaking is swimming a few laps in the pool, but it is a little early for that.

Now Elisabeth's response might be that our subdivision is a little unique, and there is some truth to that, but there is more truth to life in a subdivision is what you make it.  We lived in a subdivision on a mountain overlooking downtown Roanoke, Va.  Our kids grew up there.  While they had their share of teenage rebellion, they also found some benefit from living there.  All of our kids loved the fort they built one summer in the woods of a vacant lot.  Sledding on our hills with neighborhood kids was something that I am sure they will never forget.  Then there was the lawn mowing business that my son ran even before he was old enough to drive.  It taught him the benefit of saving.  He graduated college with a five figure savings account because of that work ethic that he learned in a suburb.

For many years we lived on a farm where we grew almost all of our food.  We went to town perhaps once a week for things we did not grow.  I actually do not see how that made us better humans than the person up the street from us today who needs a car to go five or six miles to one of the several grocery stores in our area.

While Elisabeth is happy to walk to get her eggs, she might have found more challenge in bringing home the groceries for five people.  Even buying groceries at a reasonable price can be a challenge in a city.  In today's economy we save a fair amount of money by buying specials at different stores.   Many cities that I have seen do not have good places to buy groceries within walking distance.  I know that is one of the challenges facing the city of Roanoke.

While Elisabeth sees suburban neighbors bitterly defending their territory, I see my neighbor who mowed my yard as a joke a couple of weeks ago.  I also see my friend up the street who noticed a fire in an outside light fixture of one of his neighbors' homes. He knew she was an elderly lady and required help as quickly as possible.  His quick action probably saved her home.  I also see children of all ages playing with friends in our streets.

Where Elisabeth sees civilization haters, I see people who like some space and who often farm it, and certainly take good care of it.  I wonder if Elisabeth has every tasted a perfect homegrown tomato.

No place is perfect, but I wonder what kind of footprint Elisabeth's apartment building leaves.  We live in an area where for several months of the year, we need no heating or cooling.  We just open the windows.  Our strawberries come from the fields a mile away.  Our shrimp from the waters around our county.

We also live in an area where there is a wide variety of housing available to people at competitive prices.

Cities are not bad places to live, but they are also not the only good places to live. Having a detached home where the pride of ownership sometimes makes even the smallest place a little piece of paradise has had much to do with what has made our country great.  While it might come as a surprise to Elisabeth, but we do have parks also in suburbia.  And we have relatively clean water running in our rivers and sounds. 

Here on the Carolina coast we even have a grass, centipede, that is environmentally friendly. Not only does centipede not require nitrogen fertilizer, it does not like it.  It also requires very little mowing.  The water that runs off my driveway is filtered before it even enters the portion of the White Oak River behind my home.

While city dwellers often depend on others to take care of their needs, many people in the suburbs learn to take care of many things themselves.

The arguments that Elisabeth presents remind me of the strained logic of vegetarians who believe that we should plow up all our grasslands and grow grain.  They ignore the fact that much of the world's land is better off as grassland.  If you plant grains on grasslands, you will destroy the ecosystem.

Monoculture often is not good for the land, and my guess is that an America without suburbs would also not necessarily be a better place.

While not all subdivisions can lay claim to having improved the environment, ours in Bluewater Cove can.  Before the subdivision the waters around it were choked with weeds and mud from poorly farmed fields.  Now the waters here are a marine nursery teeming with shrimp and plenty of finned creatures.

There are places in the world that are not suitable for large cities.  I would argue that our area of huge marshes critical to marine life is just such a place. 

If Elisabeth would like to visit a part of suburbia that works, I would be glad to host her.  Perhaps she would like to attend our subdivision's Memorial Day pool party.

She might find that a little research beyond Seattle might change her perspective.

If she cannot visit, maybe reading about the Carolina coast would help.

Riding the technology waves

We dispersed our cattle herd in the fall of 1981. I grabbed my second technology wave that year when with my mother's help I bought an Apple II+ and started writing a newsletter for the Canadian Angus Association.

A lot of people at the time said the best thing to do was to wait for computers to go down in price.  Well except for the ones from Apple, computers are still going down in price twenty eight years later.

I am glad that I did not wait.  I managed to sandwich a nearly twenty year career with Apple in there.  I have often thought that there are only three outcomes with waves.  You can ride them, jump and get a little lift as they come by, or get smashed by them.

Standing still and get smashed by a wave has never appealed to me.  If you have ever been out in the ocean jumping the waves and got smashed by wave, it is something like going for a ride in a washing machine.

I have been riding the technology waves of social networking and blogging for five years now.  There are still lots of people in denial about the importance of social networking to business.  There are now as many paid blogger as lawyers.  I am one of those paid blogger.

I am also a Realtor®, and I no longer believe in typical print advertising.  There are a number of real estate agents in our firm which has four offices.  No one can remember the last time that they got a call from someone responding to an ad in a real estate magazine or a newspaper.

The world has moved on and if you want to connect with potential clients and especially buyers, you need an online presence.

I actually think Twitter has huge potential, but I know of a number of agents who do not want to take the time to figure it out.  They want things to stay the same.  It is not going to happen.

Life is about change.  We either adapt and move on, or we get left behind.  I plan to keep moving forward.  I am Ocracokewaves on Twitter.  Join me in the adventure.

This article, 10 Ways To Be Useful on Twitter, is a good start and David Pogue's article, All You Need to Know about Twitter, fills in the rest of the story.

By the way, my first technology wave happened to be round balers.  I was one of the first farmers in eastern Canada to use them in 1973.  The provincial agriculture departments said they would never work.  I was right, they were wrong.

A generation passes

As we were leaving Yadkin County, we drove down Union Cross Church Road that passes less than a mile from the long dry mill pond where my mother had been born. 

We had just come from the funeral of my Aunt Sallie, she was the last of my mother's sisters and brothers.  She had died just a week from turning ninety-seven.

I wrote about, my mother and her sisters in The Three Sisters, a 2006 post that also had a picture of my Aunt Sallie the last time I saw her outside of her home which was also less than a mile from the original mill pond.

My Aunt Sallie's family was the part of my mother's family that stayed on the land and even farmed much of my grandfather's original lands.  Farming was their way of life.  I can still remember when they got rid of their last cows and chickens.

As a young boy I can remember fishing a few times in the creek that flowed at the back of their pastures.  It was the creek that once provided the water for the mill pond where Walter Styers, my grandfather, ground grain.  After the original house on the mill pond burned down, Walter had a dairy farm and eventually collected milk from other farmers.  Milling had been a tradition in the family that was hard to give up.

I was probably the only one of Walter's grandchildren who actually made their living from a farm.  My wife and I built and ran a cattle farm in Canada for eleven years.  We grew most of our own food.  We learned to preserve much of it from my mother and her other sister, Aunt Mollie.

I miss my mother and her sisters, I miss tales of their early life on the mill pond.  On our farm, we got a taste of their life.

But life on the farm changed in the twentieth century, they had mules, we had diesel tractors.  They all left the farm early in their lives.  My mother went to the big city of Mount Airy.  My Aunt Mollie ended up working in a textile factory in Winston-Salem, NC.  Their lives still had room for gardens and cans of home preserved green beans, but it was a far cry from living on the mill pond where their only cooling was an ice box or a covered spot in a spring and cooking was done on a wood stove.

Now that the last of my mother's generation is gone, the mill pond will fade farther into the shadows.  The pond had been drained before I was born.  I can remember hiking down to the old pond site once as a young boy.  There was not much to see as very large trees were already growing where water had once been.

I had a far different childhood than my mother.  They spent much of their summers picking berries and working in gardens. My generation got to play in the woods and fields. 

I am glad that my own children got that same opportunity to play in the woods and fields.  They might have been the last to do that since video games seem to be the preferred way to play in this century.

Now that the last of my mother's generation is gone, I guess my cousins and I have to figure out how to be the family elders.  There are some big shoes left to fill.