RANDALL’S HOUSE
Randall Lanier is a fellow octogenarian, a former social worker, who lives in the hills above Hot Springs at the edge of the Pisgah National Forest and the Appalachian Trail on enough land that his two sons and their children are building houses close by, either to live in permanently or as a mountain cottage where they can escape the big city.
We wanted to see the new house being built for his son Randall Jr. who works in Chapel Hill by Todd and Randall’s other son, Laird, who is an engineer who works remotely designing ships in his home on Randall’s land. Laird also makes beautiful floating sculptures of whales and other large sea creatures.
Randall invited us for a light soup and sandwich lunch and showed us around his house, a 150 year old traditional house to which he has added a glassed in porch for plants and a large living room and front porch. But the setting is the traditional Madison County rural setting with a barn and sheds and fruit trees. The house is full of Randall’s treasures including paintings Randall made that could have been included in the folk art exhibit I photographed last week.
Randall is making Japanese kimonos for both Todd and Susie from some Indonesian fabric my mother stored in a cedar chest and never looked at. He wanted Susie to try hers on to see if it fit.
I photographed the house and Susie in her new kimono and then we went into the yard where there is an old barn that once was probably used to dry tobacco as were most of the barns of Madison County where tobacco now no longer is a cash crop and has been abandoned along with the barns that, unless they are painted bright red and used to house equipment and animals, are turning silver grey and slowly falling down like the barn at Todd and Susie’s place.
In the yard we picked paw-paws, a fruit that has a thin bitter skin which you peel off and a mushy interior with large smooth dark seeds and the flavor of a cross between a banana and a mango. I’d sung the song with the line, “way down yonder in the paw-paw patch,” as a boy, but had never tasted one. Delicious. After the paw-paws some of us picked beans for Susie and Todd to take home.
Then we saw the new house and drove back to Shelton Laurel to Todd and Susie’s house where I stayed for three nights.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 