Cashiers on the Barrelhead

I love sally Janez Mom.Charming, warm, bright, kind, and curious and talented. Her house could pass for Samuel Pepys lumber room. Beautiful. Old stuff everywhere, and not just stuff, but beautiful and sophisticated objects of furniture and decorative arts almost casuallyheaped together. For instance a five-panel display of 1828 silkscreen wallpaper depicting the battle for  Heliopolis, stylized French Dragoons and exotic Mamelukes on horseback. Sally and I talked about the difference between a Fauteuil and a Bergere. You can google it and Wikipoedia will tell you all about it.

Her  Husby is nice stays in his basement with his hundreds of restorable twenties radios and his computer array and his glasses on a string around his neck. Cashiers is a rich people’s Resort town, such as was Simla in the Himalaya foothills for the Raj, and Cashiers is the cooling off place for the effete Raj of the American South.

Sally’s antique store she calls Dovetail is a serious place, far beyond what I expected, I’m kind of immune to the antiques business, or I was anyway, but she has things in there that deserve to be cherished and Sally cherishes each and loves them and it hurts her to sell these beautiful tender things. She does, just often enough, and it makes the world a richer place.

When she and I were out walking we saw a local curiosity, a White squirrel scampering among the pines and thickets of. Rhododendrons.Sally told me all about them, that I was lucky to have seen one, and I did feel lucky, in many ways.

I was fascinated by the convoluted granite you see revealed in the cutaway mountainside on the way up to Cashiers.. NC mountains, so they told me are very very old, late Cambrian, never inundated, so there is no sedimentary rock and thus no fossils.old.

I slept in the most comfortable bed in the world and I was damn sorry to have to leave it.

For lunch on the bus out of Asheville, to console me after a very much-too-brief visit, I had a Tupperware tub of leftover and delicious meatloaf from the dinner at the golf course brewpub the night before which had been served by ta distinctly surly bartender whom I actually grew to respect if not like. All those rich assholes. All summer long.

I think fondly of little Sally in her mountain redoubt, surrounded by a pack of the ugliest and sweetest dogs on the planet, cherishing her beautiful things amidst the summer dust and dog hair. I had a fine time in Cashiers