FLYING HIGH OVER THE BLUE RIDGE

Larry had the vision for today's blog...literally!  Actually he gets to have many of the visions as we travail away up here on this mountain trying to market a lifestyle since his primary job descriptions would include walking beautiful land, enjoying vistas, capturing a sunset, sharing your dreams.  Hmmm.  I get to sit at the computer.  Wait, something may be a little unbalanced here.  

He finds really cool things on his grand explores.  Of course, he notices things that I would just probably trip over. Old fences are interesting.  The first thing that's notable about them is they are very often smack dab in the middle of the woods.  Healso finds many piles of stacked rocks out in the forest.  A lot of the land back here was once pasture.  When the farming population started to fall off the trees grew up.  Much of the fence remained.  Some farmers built meticulous fence, fence that has endured now probably two generations.  Larry would be that kind of fence builder.  Built to last, well thought out, painstakingly constructed.  Some fences were built what appears to be more randomly.  I call it artistic and creative.  Wrapping around trees and up and down hills.  The ADD and impulsive way to enclose your land.  Maybe the ground was too rocky to put post holes in, so you nailed your fencing to a poplar tree.  Maybe you didn't have the budget the meticulous guy had.  These fence builders probably had more fun in construction but they sure didn't have the staying power of the meticulous fence.  And they probably weren't too effective in corralling your cattle.  Guess which fence builder I would be?  Ahhh....it makes for an interesting relationship.

He also found a cool old rusty Chevrolet truck with a tree growing up through the middle of it.  It comes with the property.  No extra charge.  The truck probably isn't going anywhere soon.  That tree has a 16" diameter and probably stands 50' high.  I'm not sure it would run anyway. :)  A photo is on our website www.floydvirginialand.com on Tract 3N Remainder,  in case you're interested.

But, this story is about balloons.  On more than a few occasions he finds balloons.  Once he found a National Weather Service balloon high up in a tree.  With just the right stick he struck it down and found a prize.  It had been launched from the Blacksburg VA office and had electronic gear and a self-addressed stamped envelope for the return of said tracking gear and data collector.  Pretty cool, as I was saying.

Then just the other day he noticed a huge pile of really colorful balloons over in the Overlook.  The cluster held about 20 business cards thanking the balloon recipients for attending Piney Grove Baptist Church's Fish Fry and commissioning them to be fishers of men.  Well, we don't have a Piney Grove around these Blue Ridge Mountains.  A Sandy Level and a Rocky Bottom and a Flat Top but no Piney Grove.  So, of course, we googled it.  There was a phone number but no area code.  So I put the phone number in google search, along with the Piney Grove Baptist Part.  AHA!  A match!  Seems our balloons had traveled all the way from  Cottondale,  Florida, a tiny town on the border of Alabama and Georgia.  An 11 hour drive.  Almost 700 miles away.

I was able to reach Pastor Rich last Sunday morning before the men's prayer breakfast.   He said the fish fry was about 2 1/2 weeks ago, and they had an unbelievable turnout of 120 folks!  He remembered the balloons getting loose, not intentionally but they escaped from some kid's greasy fish hands.  So these colorful beauties must have gotten a fierce updraft (did we have some hurricane in there somewhere?) and cruised 700 miles or so in a little over two weeks.  I told Pastor Rich that his outreach was much greater than the deacons could ever have planned for.

So when you are out hiking through these gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains, keep an eye out for history.  Sometimes old and rusty, sometimes new and colorful.
l 

REPURPOSE, RECLAIM, SUSTAIN

I acquired my first antique when I was in the third grade, an old tea chest bought somewhere along the coast of Maine.  I still have it and Cameron uses it in his room as a bed-side table.  The kids in my family grew up poking around in antique stores up and down the east coast and later all over Europe when my family re-located to Germany and France.  I thought that all families antiqued together.

The first gift that Larry gave me (when he was 16 and I was 17) was a hundred year old Limoge locket bought on our first date at an antique store in Clinton, NJ.  Old stuff and the joy of the hunt is in our family's DNA.

When we started buying land sometimes the major selling point was an old barn, a historic fixer-upper house or a really cool old tobacco barn full of ancient walnut slabs, wormy chestnut planks, and tobacco drying slats.  Much of our home is decorated not in period antiques, but in repurposed stuff.  The bar in our family room is made of one of those walnut slabs and propped up by a super thick grape vine, repurposed as a walking stick and then repurposed again as a bar holder upper.

Sometimes things have to be torn down to begin a new life.  (I know, all sorts of spiritual connotations here.)
Realizing that a barn structure is dangerous and can't be saved doesn't by any means ready it for the burn pile.
Floyd Virginia Land recently bought a 100 acre piece of property known as Sugar Run Farm.   The property has a great picnic shelter and captured spring as well as pasture, woods, and horse trails.   We tried to save the wonderful old barn but realized that the structure was unsafe and the foundation was no good.  So we called in our good friend Mike Whiteside from Black Dog Salvage in Roanoke to carefully tear down the barn and reclaim the wood for bookcases or cabinets or flooring or some other cool architectural feature/creation.

Reclaiming may be a hip concept right about now.  We have all suffered through a generation of  waste and disposability.  I believe we are craving history and a connection to things that have a connection to another simpler time.  "Stuff" just isn't cutting it anymore.  We want objets d'art, not mountains of plastic.  So soapbox time. Reclaim something.  Find a way to share your unwanted items with others.  Create something out of something else, even if it doesn't make sense to your neighbors.   Get your art groove on; think outside the box.  Not because the concept is cool but because you are.