Yankees

October 17, 2022

Last week millions of Ukrainians once again endured the firestorms of Putin’s cruise missiles. Thousands of Floridians and Puerto Ricans still struggle with the cruel cost of the hurricane. Meanwhile millions of Americans, including more than 100 candidates in upcoming elections, support a delusional political movement now attempting to trample the Constitution.

So I can handle another slide into that electronic donut in the hospital radiology department to hold my breath a few times in 30 minutes.

“This is a headscratcher,” Dr. B told us last week. He said my MRI, just a day earlier, didn’t tell him any more than the PET scan a month ago or my mid-August CT scan about new spots on my liver and lung. “They’re suspicious, but haven’t changed since the last CT. They’re not definitized enough for a biopsy. Sticking a needle through a lung is risky. So let’s watch. I’ll order another CT for next month.”

I wondered about “definitized,” but nodded OK. “Thanks, Doc,” I said. We shook hands and I headed for the scheduler’s desk. Four years, 21 CTs.

We decided then to drive to Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee.

We have a funny history with Jonesborough. About 30 years ago we took the kids for a week at a state park in southern Virginia, near Marion. One day we drove to Pikeville, Tenn., to visit Sandy’s aunt and uncle, who had sold their farm and moved into town.

This was before cell phones and GPS—it was a much longer trip than I thought. On the drive back to the park we turned off the interstate and made a quick visit to Jonesborough.

Three years ago I wanted to see the place again. It turned out my memory was a little weak on exactly which town we drove through in 1991. So we went to Greeneville instead (this blog, Oct. 28, 2018), missing Jonesborough by about 25 miles.

Jonesborough was founded in 1779. It served as the seat of Washington County, then part of North Carolina. In 1784 North Carolina tried to cede its five westernmost counties to the brand-new federal government, which wasn’t interested. But in one of the true eccentricities of American history, settlers in the five counties established what they called the State of Franklin. They set up a government, which caused conflict with North Carolina, which had reassumed control of the area.

In 1790 North Carolina again gave up the five counties to what then was called the Southwest Territory. When Tennessee joined the Union in 1796 the five counties joined the new state. Ten years earlier, in 1786 American folk and real-life hero Davy Crockett had been born in Washington County in the tiny hamlet of Limestone. As we know from history and a half-dozen movies, he died at the Alamo when it was overrun by the Mexican army in 1836.

Among the many legends that grew around Crockett is one diamond-hard fact: while a member of Congress, he was the only member of the Tennessee delegation to vote against President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. He promptly lost his seat in the 1831 election. The Act, an indelible stain on American history, forced the relocation of some 100,000 Native Americans from rich southeastern farmland to scrub-desert Indian Territory between 1831 and 1841.

Back to Jonesborough. The state’s oldest town is a cute, cozy place, but not an escape from political conflict. East Tennessee was an economic orphan in the pre-Civil War South. Settlers grew subsistence crops in rocky soil and had no need for the slave system that served the wealthy cotton growers in Middle and West Tennessee and in the Deep South Delta low country. East Tennessee gave the Volunteer State its name: its men went both Union and Confederate. The gorgeous Nolichucky River Valley, between Jonesborough and Erwin, was an island of rebel loyalty surrounded by Yankees. Both launched savage guerrilla attacks.

Tenn. Rte. 81, which crosses I-26 a half-dozen miles past the North Carolina state line takes you to Jonesborough. In the 15 miles we saw not one Stars ‘n Bars. Confederate colors, seen all over the rural South, don’t fly there. These folks probably aren’t Democrats, but they’re not traitors.

The early East Tennesseans had backbone. In 1797, after Tennessee became a state, residents of Washington and Greene countries began forming anti-slavery groups. By 1815 East Tennessee abolitionist societies had formed the Manumission Society of Tennessee. It was on Main Street in Jonesborough in 1819 that Elihu Embree published The Manumission Intelligencer and The Emancipator, the first journals in the United States devoted to the abolitionist cause.

Jonesborough knows how to draw tourists. The town calls itself the “storytelling capital of the world.” Famous storytellers perform at the Mary B. Martin Storytelling Hall on Main Street, across from the Jackson Theatre. Folks were buying tickets for the theatre group’s performances of Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”

We looked at the gift shops, the Lollipop Shop, and a place that advertised Amish foods. You can get a “Jonesborough, Oldest Town in Tennessee” tee-shirt for twenty bucks. As we walked about a long freight train roared through the center of town.

It had been many years since our drive-through, my memory was hazy. Now political undertones linger. On the road to Jonesborough we passed a sign advertising the Andrew Johnson National Historical Site in Greeneville. Johnson, the first president to be impeached by the House of Representatives, although he survived the Senate, betrayed Lincoln’s legacy and tried to return former slaveowners to political posts.

Greeneville is the site of the Andrew Johnson Visitor Center, Andrew Johnson Homestead, and Andrew Johnson Cemetery. Luckily for the country, he didn’t get a second term.

The Trump Cult, despite all those arrests at the Capitol insurrection and all those dismissed lawsuits, still is assaulting the electoral system. But I looked at the house where Elihu Embree edited his magazines, and thought of the stiff-necked East Tennessee Yankees who stepped up for the Union. Jonesborough gave us heart.

Woodlands

October 10, 2022

On a nice day, Conastee Nature Preserve is a pretty place. It consists of 640 acres of parkland in Mauldin, S.C., honeycombed with trails, including a murky 130-acre lake. Who has heard of it outside the county? Not many, most likely. Who has heard of Mauldin? People who live there or once lived there.

The Preserve is run by a non-profit foundation. Admission is free but donations are welcomed. The park’s website notes that Conastee Lake has been rescued, more or less, from years of dumping of toxic chemicals by industries in nearby Greenville. The Reedy River, which is more of a sandy, shallow stream, carried the pollutants to the Conastee area, hence the name “Co-Nasty.” The website reports that “the pollution rests inert beneath the scenic woods and waters.” But no swimming or wading in the lake or the river.

Hundreds of miles north, the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge lies along the Potomac River in Woodbridge, Va., at the end of Dawson Beach Road, which runs through the industrial end of town from the commuter rail station. It’s part of a larger system, the Potomac River National Wildlife Refuge Complex, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Like Conastee, the Occoquan park offers trails, mostly unpaved roads through low-lying wetlands. The trails wind for a couple of miles to the river shore.

The site once was the home of Native Americans who in the 17th century were driven away by white farmers. The farmers transformed the forest into fields and pastures. In 1950 the Army set up a radio transmitting station at the site, which then shifted to electromagnetic pulse testing, requiring cutting down more trees. In 1994 the Army shut the facility down. Local people then pushed for creation of a wildlife refuge.

The Potomac is close to a half-mile wide where it touches the Refuge. The narrow beach is cluttered with logs, tires, discarded lumber, broken bottles, and other trash half-sunk in thick mud. Like the Reedy, the Potomac carries the stigma of past pollution.

Neither Conastee nor Occoquan Bay offer eye-catching scenery, no majestic, snow-capped peaks, breathtaking canyons, or thundering waterfalls. Yellowstone or Yosemite they’re not. Mainly they’re patches of woods left untouched by the onslaught of suburbia in communities near large cities. You don’t see much wildlife in either, a few squirrels, a few birds. On one visit to the Refuge I thought I saw—someone pointed out—what looked like an eagle’s nest in a far-off tree. But no eagles.

Apart from its tainted past, Conastee is a pleasant spot to wander on an autumn afternoon. Couples, moms with strollers, dogwalkers, and joggers frequent the place. The woodsy trails are tame and level, manicured for the casual walker, not the mountain hiker. On certain stretches the whine of traffic rises from nearby busy streets. Still, you can look over the bridge or across the marsh near the lake and see turtles perched on logs sunning themselves.

The Occoquan Refuge doesn’t have the woodland trails nor the human traffic. Whenever I went it was nearly deserted. In the years we lived nearby I always had the impression the Fish and Wildlife Service added the patch of shore in 1998 because it had not been exploited by the auto repair garages, machine shops, recycling sites, and other industrial businesses that stretch from U.S. 1 along Dawson Beach Road. And yes, people have spotted birds in the area.

As a kid I spent many hours exploring a long stretch of woods behind the Bergen County, N. J., subdivision where my family lived. New Jersey is another place better known, although unfairly, for pollution, than natural beauty. Anyway, those woods were much the same as Conastee and Occoquan, a patch of untouched land, nothing special or unique. At some point local officials decreed those woods off-limits to building, protecting them from the stampede by developers to throw up giant new homes and subdivisions.

Both Conastee and Occoquan are more of the same, accidental parks. My last visit to the Occoquan Refuge was just before we moved away. I trudged the dirt roads, feeling the after-effects of radiation and chemotherapy. The sun shone, the road wound past the woods and marshland, back from the cluttered beach and out through the humming industry of the suburbs. I thought: The Fish and Wildlife people did well to save this spot from more metalworking, more car repair, more retail. But yet it seemed to be a stark, unbeautiful, not quite successful stab at nature at its purest.

Conastee, with its big “Lake Conastee” marquee, the detailed trail directions, the kids’ playground, shows the local, single-minded focus on turning a polluted lake into a park. The trail network is a maze of interlocking paths around and the lake and across the sandbar-clogged Reedy. The underbrush is swampy and lush, hinting at nearness to the Carolina Low Country.

The forest, even with no mountains or waterfalls, may—just may—summon great thoughts, as they have for special people whose lives resonate from different worlds. St. Francis of Assisi lived the life of a penitent and beggar and found God in the natural world. Henry David Thoreau, in his two years at Walden Pond, worked out his idiosyncratic philosophy of a simple life, distrust of government, and respect for nature. Thoreau, both admired and dismissed as a cranky eccentric, stood fast in his abolitionist convictions, which would not go well in 1861 in South Carolina.

Walking these woods and others like them doesn’t immediately lift the spirit. But when we do we may find ourselves starting a search for something higher, for the object of our faith if we have faith, or maybe just a moment of precious calm. An hour or two out on these humble trails puts distance, physical and even spiritual, between our lives and whatever darkness afflicts us. Nearness to the natural world, which is God’s domain, draws us to closer to goodness. The forest may not transform your soul or make your heart sing. But then, it may.

Quiet Places

October 3, 2022

It was nearly freezing at Wintergreen, Va., mid-30s, when we arrived mid-week. As we chugged up the three-mile-long mountain road to our rented place at nearly 3,600 feet of elevation, an adult black bear, probably 300 pounds, raced across the road in front of the van and disappeared into the woods. I jammed on the brake and drew a deep breath. We pushed on.

We settled in, got dinner at the nearly empty restaurant, the only one open of the three on the premises. We then shivered in our sweaters.

The next morning the sun rose gloriously above the mountains, the air was autumn-crisp and clear, we could see through the legendary, delicate blue mist for 100 miles. Then we watched the hurricane reports as Floridians waited for Ian, far from home or sheltering in darkness.

The mountain resort colony of Wintergreen was nearly deserted, the serious foliage rush had not yet started. The silent majesty of the place and its wild surroundings offers a brief touch of serenity, but the hurricane news 850 miles south assaulted the abiding peace of the Shenandoah. Last Wednesday the National Weather Service radar map showed the storm whirling across central Florida then aiming north.

The sun shone on this eccentric spot on a mountain, a mid-grade ski resort—Vail or Killington it’s not. Wintergreen is a refuge for the affluent and semi-affluent who like some distance from their neighbors and love mountains, forests, and cold. Some of the homes are palatial three-level monsters perched on hillsides and concealed in dense treelines; others are modest, A-frames, Capes, ranches, just off the narrow roads.

We’ve been to the place a few times, the most recent more than two years ago (this blog, Feb. 3, 2020) to find a family vacation rental. We drove the 130 miles down from our Woodbridge place in the morning, then through the maze of Wintergreen roads most of the day. We thought we found a nice place, then trekked home and made the reservation. The pandemic showed up. Covid raged through the spring, we canceled, rescheduled, then canceled again.

The two years since then reacquainted us with sickness, tests, and surgeries. So now, back again to Wintergreen, this time from 400 miles to the south. We came in from the west, 30 exhilarating miles through pretty Fairfield and Vesuvius, then 25 more on the quietly gorgeous Blue Ridge Parkway.

We stepped outside the apartment that morning and gawked at the distant peaks and the wide valley, still splendid in summer green, then got coffee at the main lodge. We sat, just the two of us, in the cavernous, silent lobby. We looked at the rich paneling and stonework. A single clerk manned the front desk, no guests in sight. None of the fashionable shops were open.

We recalled the last visit: the crispness of winter air, the snow-crested mountains, the exotic, colorful outfits of the ski crowd, the happy cacophony of a dozen languages. We leaned over the railing at the lift and watched the skiers race down the slopes, then drove across the mountainside looking for that special spot.

It all seemed frozen in time. The rental unit, the stunning mountain views, the layout and décor of the visitor’s center, and the restaurant menu remained as we remembered them. We looked for a little while for the vacation house we rented twice. We didn’t save the address, but the image of the site lingered in our memories. Memory wasn’t enough.

We drove down into the valley to get lunch, managing the hairpin turns of Wintergreen mountain, taking in the vernal richness of rolling farmland, acres upon acres of corn that backed up to the surrounding Shenandoah. U.S. 151 winds north through the hamlets of Nellysford, Greenfield, and Avon, past vineyards, breweries, and churches to I-64 and Skyline Drive. Closer to sea level, the sun grew warm.

I hiked the Appalachian Trail near our rental. The Wintergreen stretch is narrow and heavily rocky and wound gracefully northwest away from the settlement. I spotted bear scat and paused, listened, and looked around, then leaned against a tree, taking in the magic and mystery of the woods. A through-hiker passed and smiled, we chatted. She moved on, I headed back. The storm was coming.

We drove the 90 miles up the interstate to Bayse under gathering clouds. The Virginia governor had declared a state of emergency as the dregs of the storm approached, but the sun returned, the sky cleared. We tacked northwest to Mount Jackson then straightaway west on U.S. 263 toward West Virginia. The cornfields fell away, mountain forest closed in again.

We passed through tiny Mount Clifton and cruised through Bayse, an unincorporated place of a few businesses, truck-garden spreads, and hidden residential streets. We paused at Orkney Springs, site of Shrine Mount, a pretty complex of colonial homes converted to a retreat center by the Episcopal Church. The noon sun gleamed off the whitewashed houses, a few Episcopalians strolled about.

Back at Bayse, we walked a rugged mile, panting up steep slopes in that hidden spot just short miles from the West Virginia line and hundreds of miles from our South Carolina neighborhood. The quiet path prompted the questions that oldsters keep asking themselves about the past and the future, how we got here, what’s next, that kind of thing.

Dark clouds appeared, bringing a cold rain. We slogged back, fortified in a small way by closing on the boundaries of wild places. The forest will turn brown and gray and frigid winds will rush in. Winter is coming. We pressed on.

Big Road

September 26, 2022

Bayse, Va., is west of the Massanutten Range just south of Front Royal and Strasburg. For us, that means I-81 from Johnson City, Tenn., for roughly 350 miles of mountains, farmland, and small country churches.

Five interstate highways, 10, 40, 70, 80, and 90 cross the country. I-81 really is just a spur, at 850 miles, from just east of Knoxville to the Canadian border. It’s long enough.

In 2011 we drove south on I-81 late at night. Near Wytheville, Va., the wind howled, the rain pounded the windshield. Eighteen wheelers were pulling to the shoulder, the highway was dark, no headlights in front of or behind us. We saw the marquee of a La Quinta Inn and got off. The desk clerk’s face was pale. We got lucky, they had a room. Thunder crashed, rivers and lakes formed in the parking lot. Then it was quiet.

Back on the interstate the next morning, we saw shattered and twisted trees, barns, sheds, homes. The news reported a tornado, then several, up and down the I-81 corridor. It was the same on the way back a few days later along that stretch. Destruction for miles.

2011 is a lifetime ago, the images remain. Earlier, every year starting in 2006 and through 2017 we drove from northern Virginia to Nashville in April to visit family and friends. We passed and or stopped at familiar places, around the Shenandoahs, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Natural Bridge north of Roanoke, and Blacksburg, Marion, Abingdon, Bristol. Then Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Crossville, Cookeville, Lebanon. We both were working and healthy.

In those years we didn’t look forward more than a few days. Everything is different now. Our Nashville friends moved away. Others, Sandy’s family, face health problems, work transitions and challenges. The city is not the same city we moved from years ago, not the same city we visited for years afterward.

Now forward is all that matters. Grandkids have something to do with that. In ten years the older boy will graduate from high school. I’d like to attend the ceremony. The U.S. Navy is building a new class of submarines that will stay in service until 2080. We know where we’ll be then.

For now, I-81 still draws us. Heading north from Greenville, S.C., it’s U.S. 25 to I-26 to Asheville, then through the empty country and dark peaks of western North Carolina and East Tennessee, through Erwin and Unicoi to 81 just past Johnson City. The Virginia state line is another 20 miles, opposite the fabulous Tennessee Welcome Center, which offers eloquent lessons in the state’s tumultuous history and rough-hewn culture. On the southbound side is an enormous neon-lit cross fronting a modest Baptist church. You would know you’re in Tennessee.

Northbound is a slog for a while. Beyond Bristol the road descends into the remoteness of the rugged, depressed stretch to Abingdon. The coal mines have closed, factories shut down, young people have left. Grayson Highlands State Park outside Wilson is spectacular. Years ago when the kids were small we spent a week at Hungry Mother State Park near Marion, a quiet spot next to a pretty lake.

Interstate 81 at times resurrects memories, long dormant, of both happy and grieving trips in both directions. The broken white lines and mile markers blur and disappear over miles and more miles. One exit stays in my mind, “Rural Retreat,” which we’ve never explored. A sense of our Virginia world turns up around Radford and Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech. The highway drags towards Salem and Roanoke.

Along this lonely stretch are connections to the Blue Ridge Parkway, which soars through the Shenandoahs for maybe 100 miles to a place called Rockfish Gap, west of Charlottesville, where it becomes Skyline Drive, showing off some of Virginia’s breathtaking vistas, rolling, deep valleys and soaring Appalachian peaks.

North and west of Roanoke is hot-springs country, where pricey spas nestle near isolated coal towns. Years ago I took U.S. 220 from I-81 through tiny, cut-off hollows to Hot Springs. Suddenly the forest opened up at The Homestead, a spa and golf resort planted in the middle of almost nowhere—except that The Greenbrier, another mecca for affluent steambathers and massage-seekers, is only 40 miles away in Warm Sulphur Springs, West Va.

I can’t remember when, exactly, but I went to business meetings at both. The contrast, ramshackle shacks and soaring white columns, boarded-up stores and sweeping green fairways rattles the nerves.

We take turns at the wheel, plodding through the mountains to the piedmont’s rolling green hills, deeper into the Old Dominion. The change is from hardscrabble southwest, really still the Deep South, to the tragedy-racked heart of the state, where Yankees and rebels fought at New Market and Winchester then, further east, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Petersburg, Richmond, where the war’s end was decided and the course of American history recharted.

Coming north to our old Virginia place over three decades, we’d leave 81 where it meets I-64-East at Staunton, then turn north at Charlottesville. Another two hours on state roads would land us in Prince William County. We still have the route memorized. Now, though, it’s 81 only. The pitch of the landscape smooths a bit before the Massanuttens rise gradually to the east. The 100-mile-long ridge looms past New Market and three pretty towns, Edinburg, Woodstock, and Toms Brook.

The suburbs begin to show up with the fast-food joints and the ubiquitous Sheetz multi-pump gas and grocery outlets. Suddenly majestic Signal Knob mountain appears, a beacon to Strasburg, then Front Royal, then I-66 to Washington. The American South ends at Front Royal. But I-66 crosses the Appalachian Trail at Markham. Still deep-forest, rocky country.

Just past Strasburg the D.C. rush hour reaches out 50 miles, the left-lane traffic blasts past us. The mountains, becoming hills, are in the rear-view mirror. Woodbridge, where we ended our long Virginia tour when dreams expired, is an easy run. It rates a drive-by, a short one. We look south now. I-81 is our escape route, all those miles to a complicated future in a still-complicated place, to respite, the final act, salvation.

The Project

September 19, 2022

The floor sander weighed more than 100 pounds, easily. The Home Depot Rental Center staff, a young woman and an older guy, lifting together, loaded it in the van. I bought four strips of coarse sandpaper. At home I took a deep breath and eased the machine down to the driveway and pushed it through the backyard. As I heaved it up the two steps onto the deck I felt an ugly twinge in my back. I knew then this is a two-man job. I was short one man.

The deck is about 10 feet by 10 feet, accessible from the house through a sliding glass door to the kitchen. Sunlight streams through the door into the kitchen. The deck is old and rickety, the paint chipping, the nails popping. It cried out for top-to-bottom refinishing, or the junkyard. A short few months ago we thought it could become a sunroom, providing more living space, brightness, and warmth.

Sunrooms are popular. Who doesn’t love sprawling in an easy chair or on a soft sofa, feeling the bright rays bathe the body in nature’s gentle warmth, even through the summer’s choking humidity or winter’s icy winds? Everyone loves sunrooms, the cheery, wide-windowed spaces on the bright side of the house. That is, on some houses. Ours doesn’t have one.

No, it’s true, we don’t have one. In the plodding melodrama of our lives, really, it’s a small thing. Meanwhile, we’re stunned every day, like everyone else, by the relentless history beyond our modest foothold in this place. Floods and fires ravage the nation, stock prices plummet, interest rates spiral upward. Covid is returning, the country is torn by political anger. The world is wracked by war, millions suffer.

Yet still—we all push on, trying our best to move our own worlds forward and make our dreams come true; to do something concrete and creative, to leave a mark, great or humble, that will remain beyond our time, something others can point to and even enjoy.

Some try to write a book, paint a landscape, plant a garden, something maybe only our families will remember. In the suburbs we have a natural avenue, both ambitious and mundane: fix up our little nests. Moving into a new home juices the feeling. You like it but it still could use something, a fresh coat of paint, new kitchen or bathroom fixtures, drapes, curtains. Or a sunroom. Our kids’ homes have sunrooms. So do our most of our friends’ homes. When we visit we sit in their lovely, sunny spaces and wonder, could this be ours?

It took us months to make up our minds to sell our Virginia house and move. Inertia paralyzed us, reinforced by years of doing the same things in the same place. It set in again here. We looked on as neighbors and family took on ambitious projects, and wondered.

Months sped by, eventually we stepped up. Three contractors gave us sunroom proposals ranging from $41,000 to $21,000. The high one was from a big homebuilding outfit that wouldn’t notice our business and probably didn’t want it. We didn’t respond, the firm didn’t bother calling back. The low-bid guy pitched a semi-back porch framed with uninsulated plastic windows that he called a “three-season” space. We guessed he knew he would be the low bidder.

We liked the third guy, his bid seemed reasonable. We would have tweaked it. The HOA would rule on the design. That could take a while. But he said that supply-chain problems meant long delays for materials, and anyway he was backed up with work for months. We didn’t commit. His bid simmered for a while, then went cold.

So did our excitement about our bold stroke. A sunroom would add square footage, but we would lose the outdoor space and the spray of sunlight into the kitchen. We wondered what else we could do with the thousands of dollars the sunroom would cost. Our daughter said we could travel the world. It wasn’t in the budget when we moved. Meanwhile health-care costs are rising 8 percent per year.

Ten years ago, in Virginia, I built a 30-foot-long patio with concrete bricks. It took four months, but was indestructible. I sat out there on many evenings, taking in nature. Over time the backyard hill eroded a bit and dirt leached onto the bricks, some of which buckled. But it was mine.

We looked again at the deck with kinder eyes. We could refinish and rebuild it, make it immortal. We could enjoy fresh air and sunlight outside.

Back to the sander: I fastened a sandpaper strip in place and pressed “Start.” The engine roared and tore into the deck surface. I shut it off and caught my breath, the sander vibrated to a stop and keeled over. I peered at the underside, the paper was torn by protruding nails I didn’t notice.

I righted the machine, grasped the handle and pushed “Start” again. It bucked forward and chewed at the rough floor, pulverizing the surface and the faded decades-old blue paint, dust shooting in all directions. I kept pushing, weaving slowly across the deck to the railing. I backed up and ploughed over the same boards a second time, leaving a whitened, smoothed path through the rough wood.

After navigating the sander in rows across the entire deck I hauled my leaf blower from the garage and blasted away the thick lines of dust, which blew back in my eyes and nose and coated me head to toe. I replaced the worn sanding strip and steered across the deck again. The sander whined, the paint turned to dust. Back and forth, back and forth, through the ear-splitting din. I hit another nail that tore the paper. I replaced it and kept going. In 90 minutes the worn deck floor looked whitened, beaten, smoothed.

I turned the machine off and leaned on the railing, sweating and covered with dust. The deck edges the sander couldn’t reach were untouched, awaiting long hours of hand finishing.

The sander was due back at the Depot in an hour. I stumbled inside. Sandy helped me lift it into the van. We headed back down the interstate. Outside the Rental Center a staff guy waved. “It’s in the van,” I said. Together we lifted the machine onto the parking lot. I thanked him, we drove away.

Later that afternoon I used the leaf blower to blow away the remaining dust, revealing most of the surface, now ground cleanly to bare wood. Months of work remains, but this much is done. The sunroom? Maybe next year. Maybe not.