View from the Mountain

Learning one of life's lessons

It is hard to remember where or how some of life's lessons are learned. Mostly they don't come as an "aha moment."

Or if you do have the "aha moment," it is long after you have internalized the behavior which you finally realize is the right way to do things.

Not remembering when or how I figured out this valuable lesson for life hasn't kept it from being an important one for me.

A first step is learning that what we do in a situation means more than any title attached to your name, but the real lesson is that whatever you do or say should focus on making things better not worse for others. Passing on a problem, hidden or visible, is not a good way to live your life.

Making your problem someone else's problem is just not a good way to live your life. Creating something better out of what life puts in your lap is a lot more worthwhile.

The first time I can remember consciously working towards this was when we bought our second Tay Creek, New Brunswick farm in the eighties.  We bought it from a man who I later learned had a reputation for buying farms and destroying them.

He would buy the farm, have the timber clear-cut, use the fields until they would hardly grow crops, and then walk away from the mortgage if he couldn't sell the place.

We bought the farm from him and immediately started working to bring the farm back into production.  One field had been taken over by alder bushes, and the whole farm needed lime.  Over the course of a few years, the farm became a place were we could count on great crops. All the hard work was worth it, and when we sold the place, the fields were in very good condition.

Not surprisingly the same concepts work when dealing with people, but because people are more unpredictable, sometimes you can treat people really well and still have few positive results to show for your efforts.

However there are times when the results with people are even more impressive.  We have always tried to be good neighbors, and when we lived on the farm, mostly we were surrounded by people who believed in lending a helping hand whenever possible.

During the Canadian winters, it seemed like I was always pulling someone out of a snowbank or clearing a driveway with my tractor mounted snowblower.  We didn't have a lot of spare money, but I don't think that I ever turned down a request for help.

When we decided to disperse our cattle herd in 1982, it was a huge undertaking and took the better part of a year to prepare for the dispersal sale.  A lot of the work was in converting one of our barns into an auction ring with seats for bidders.  It meant cleaning out the barn and moving tons of manure.  Selling over two hundred head of cattle in a few hours requires the right kind of facility.

Our sale was scheduled in October and the weather turned bad in late August.  There were non-stop rains, and it looked like the three people I had hired were not going to be enough to get the job done.  We did not have more money to hire additional people.

Monday morning two weeks before our sale date, many of the men from the community showed up unannounced on our doorstep willing to work with no pay until our barn was ready.  One neighbor even took vacation to help.

Our sale went on to be a great success, and I will never forget the people who worked in such miserable, cold, rainy conditions to help make it possible.

Over the years, we have even made it a household policy to sell things in the best possible condition.  When we ended up with my mom's home in Mount Airy, NC, we used all our spare time for three years to get the home back in good shape so we could feel comfortable selling it to someone.

When we put our Roanoke, VA on the market, we worked for several months to fix what we saw as things we would want done before we moved into a home. It wasn't a cheap way to go about marketing a home, but it is the way that fits with our philosophy.

I read somewhere recently that above a certain level, the amount of money that you have has very little correlation with your level of happiness.  There is plenty of evidence that being rich isn't the road to happiness.

If you focus on leaving things a little better wherever your presence has an impact, in the long run you won't have to worry about things coming back to haunt you, and you might even get some nice surpises along the way.

 

Sometimes the best memories are fuzzy ones

In the fall of 1989 we moved our family of five from Columbia, MD to Roanoke, VA.  Our time in Columbia was short by choice.  After moving there from Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1987, we quickly decided that it was not the place for us to raise our children.

In May of 1989 we put our Columbia home on the market and came to visit Roanoke.  We also managed to check out Blacksburg and the Mountain Lake Hotel of Dirty Dancing fame where the kids revolted because there was no swimming pool and no television.  We ended up in what was then the Marriott in Blacksburg.  At the end of the week, we received a full price offer on our home. Less than a month later, we signed a contract on our new home.

In digging through some old pictures, it struck me how much has changed since our first year in Roanoke.  This picture of the house was likely taken in the spring of 1990.  Around ten years later, the house and landscaping look a lot different.  The pin oak that was in the middle of the first picture has started growing, and the silver maple that was on the far side of the yard has become a good sized tree.  The cedar shake roof is gone, and there are two mailboxes which means we have neighbors.

In 1990 there were no houses around us. The snow plow even turned around before it got to us in the winter of 1989 because the driver thought no one lived at the top of the hill.  Today we are surrounded by other homes.

However, if you compare those 1990 and 2000 pictures to the one in the post which was taken in May 2011, the changes both visible and invisible are truly amazing.  First off the pin oak is now huge.  It is amazing how much a tree can grow in Virginia in 21 years. The silver maple girded itself and had to be removed.  Our original shrubbery except for the giant holly bushes is also gone as are all the cars in the second picture. Two of the cars in the picture, our old Subaru and the Previa both had analog cell phones mounted in them.  Analog mounted cell phones and the kids have also disappeared.

In the 2000 picture you can make out our black Labrador retriever, Chester.  He died in 2004 as did my mother who was living with us in the 2000 picture.  Both the the 1990 and 2000 pictures were taken with film cameras and scanned.  While I still have my film cameras it has been years since I took a picture with one.  I now take a few pictures with my cell phone.

We came to Roanoke with three young children, they all grew up and went away to college and are out living on their own.  Now we even have a granddaughter, but we also have a lot of wonderful fuzzy memories for those years on the mountain overlooking Roanoke.

As I was cleaning our deck today, it was hard to not think back on the many times I have stood on the edge of our deck and admired the mountains surrounding the Roanoke Valley.  There are countless pictures that I have taken of the valley and the sun as it was rising over the mountains.

The pictures are nothing compared to the memories.  There have been birthday parties, graduation celebrations, and neighborhood dinner parties on the deck. We have faced both wonderful and challenging times up on the hill. We celebrated many holidays by the big fireplace in our great room. In the winter of 2009, I shoveled snow until I thought I would drop.  Only the appearance of our son for the holidays saved me from seemly endless shoveling.

Our house on the mountain was also home to a variety of pets besides our Labrador retriever.  We had three cats over the years, and the last one just left us this January.  Chester, Glenda, and I walked miles and miles on trails that I maintained up on the mountain behind the house. Walking those trails in a forest undisturbed for the last seventy years was like being in another world.

The house saw blizzards, torrential downpours, the remnants of hurricanes, and many impressive lightning storms.  Through all of that our home was like a ship protecting us from dangerous waters.  As rain lashed against the house and winds twisted the red buds on the bank behind the home on May 3, 2011, I knew it was just another storm where we would be safe inside our fortress on the hill.

The kids are long gone, so it is time for my wife and I to move on with our lives. While we might leave the home, we will be taking the memories with us. My hope is that the next family gets as many wonderful memories from our home as we are carrying away with us.