DECEMBER 3, FRIDAY

HOME

I’ve been back two days and slowly I am shifting to sleeping till 4 and going to bed at 9. But jet lag means that your body is on one rhythm and is being forced into another and is disgruntled a good deal of the time. I am normal one minute, zonked the next, and chipper the next.

So here I am. But I come back with a new attitude toward home. Home is where the heart is. Home is where you are comfortable and know exactly what needs to be done and when to do it. Home is fitting back into domestic conventions which is what it turns out that part of me doesn’t want to do. Maybe Wolfe is right, you can’t go home again.

But this shift comes after shifting to Naousa and then to Winsen. I have gotten used to shifting. I am back for seven weeks before (unless Omicron stops me) I am off to Morocco. Yesterday after our men’s group met at 10, Dusty Benedict invited me to his house to see photographs of the apartment just about the white crashing waves in Agadir, Morocco where he and his son went to surf the high waves a few years ago. It was beautiful and lures me on. I don’t have to settle down.

It made me feel that I was a bird, just landing here for a little while, and then flying off again to Morocco, then landing here again for a month and then flying off to Paris in April and then hopping back again before taking off again.

Am I coming home or not? Home is living in one spot for 30 years with Kathe, living within the secure and familiar conventions of domestic life. This hopping in and hopping out makes me a visitor in my own house. To make my stay in my house as stimulating as possible, as stimulating as living in Winsen or living in Paros, maybe I need to experience my house and Asheville and places within driving distance as a visitor from another country or culture would experience them and to report what I see to others who might want to visit here as if I am still writing a travel blog.

Slowly as I have been traveling I realize that while Paros is beautiful with its white houses with blue trim that it is simply home to the people who live there, a place where they are comfortable to the point of becoming so used to it that they don’t ride around the island or explore new places or even think that Paros is very special. The young people escape Paros to Athens and escape Athens for the greater opportunities in cities across Europe. They only come back to Paros for a visit. The same is true of Winsen. Elke and Heinrich have lived in this village all of their lives. Heinrich likes traveling to Norway, Elke would like to explore the world, but home keeps them home. Their children don’t stay and their grandchildren have explored the USA, Ecuador, Uruguay and are ready for more.

Part of what makes Paros and Winsen so beautiful and interesting and gave me something to write about every day was that everything was so new to me. Everything was dislocating and stimulating.

But coming back to Swannanoa I am about to sink into the old conventional ways of doing things. If I would see Asheville as an outsider, as I once did, could Asheville be just as stimulating and interesting? The question is how to stay stimulated and interested in Swannanoa and not to sink back into the torpor of comfortable conventions.

So one of the ways to do this could be to see Asheville as someone from Winsen or Naousa or Ahmedabad or Agadir might see it. To do this I need to let go of my normal way of fitting into Asheville and experience from their perspective.

So the first step is to invite them into my house, a typical American house, a very ordinary house from my perspective, a house that looks like every other house on the street with the same low pitched, shingled roof and wooden siding and picture windows facing out across the valley. My kitchen has the same appliances as every other kitchen, the bathrooms the same hot water heater and showers. There is nothing remarkable about my house unless you come from Paros or Winsen or, most certainly, from Varanasi.

Not only will I invite any readers from other lands into my house, but I will also invite them to stay here. While they are spending a month or two weeks here, I will stay in their house in Paris or Winsen or Naousa. They will be delighted by my house, by the view of the pasture below and the Black Mountains in front of me with the Blue Ridge Parkway visible far above, a view which I have become so used to that I never notice it, and I will be delighting in their house with the view of the Aegean or the Ganges or the cobblestones of Winsen. We will just exchange houses, leaving everything as it is, without judgment and saving lots of money at both ends.

My kitchen has a refrigerator that is large by Paros standards where people shop every day, but just like every other American refrigerator. I don’t have a dishwasher but an easy to use sink and plenty of dishes.

I have two bathrooms and two bedrooms, each of which will sleep two people but with the possibility of adding cots if a family comes. One bedroom is stacked with stuff that I am trying to sort out to make more room so I won’t show it. It has a view toward the street and Jones mountain, a hill just across the street on Warren Wilson College land where there are a number of marked trails for walks through the woods. The other bedroom, shown here has views of the mountain and a small recently remodeled bathroom with a sink, toilet and shower. The other bathroom is off the hallway for visitors or for those in the second bedroom. I will probably leave my wife Kathe’s knitting room as it is because I don’t know how to dispose of her things, or want to, with the offer that knitters can use any stored yarn for knitting projects.

The living room has a TV set and fireplace with plenty of wood stacked outside for making fires in the evening. It has large windows looking out over the valley. Outside the living room is a conventional American deck, every house on the stree has one, which is shaded in the afternoon by the house and is comfortable from April through October and at times in the winter, like yesterday, when the temperature was 21C/72F. As with most American houses there is a large lawn which the neighbors want trimmed every week or two. There is a riding mower that you can use. In addition there is a large storage room that used to be a garage where I will store things to get them out of your way and a washer and dryer in a room just off the deck which you are welcome to use. There is Wifi and television as well. And beside the house there are two twenty and fifteen years old cars which you are welcome to drive since you need a car in American since everything is spread out. If one breaks down you can drive the other.

I taught at Warren Wilson College for 40 years and our house is on Warren Wilson College’s 1000 acres of forest and farmland. So you will feel you are living out in the country even though surrounding the college, and out of sight, are housing developments everywhere. Our house is about ten miles from Asheville, a beatiful tourist town with restaurants of every kind and great shopping. The Blue Ridge Parkway, a national park that extends 500 miles along the ridge of the Appalachian mountains all the way to Washington, DC, can provide rides up to 7000 feet and great views, west to nearby Mount Pisgah and a mountain top restaurant and east to Mount Mitchell, also nearby, the highest point in the Eastern United States. The biggest locals tourist attraction is the 250 room Vanderbilt House and grounds with beautiful gardens and a winery with wine tasting. Fifty miles away is the most visited national park in the United States, the Smoky Mountain National Park, with good camping and great views. At the edge of the park is a Native American restored village where you can learn about the Cherokee Heritage.

I sound like a travel guide (and I will have to do a little fact checking to make sure I’ve got my facts straight), but I wanted to demonstrate that there are all kinds of interesting things to do nearby, although I only do most of them when visitors come to visit, but would be glad to guide you around. In fact, in my new project of seeing what Asheville looks like from the perspective of Winsen or Paros or Varanasi I will reexplore some of these areas and report on them as I try to see Asheville in a new and stimulating way during the next seven weeks of my visit here.

So this is my first attempt to to get out of my home bubble and to see from the outside. I’ll keep trying.