Getting back to the land

Would there be a twinge of regret?  That was the question hanging over our spring break trip down to Chapel Hill.  (That, and what to do with our 16-year-old son whose idea of fun did not include hours spent traipsing across a field.)

Nora had not seen the property in person since we first made the offer on it last July, and now it was April of the following year.  It rained on us as we left Virginia, where we had been visiting our daughter in college.  An omen, possibly.  Heading into the heart of the country, the wipers beat a steady tattoo across the swept-back windshield of our mid-sized SUV.  Outside, the miles rolled drearily by. I took a deep drag on my unfiltered Lucky Strike and turned to look at Nora through a haze of blue smoke and shattered dreams ….

Actually, nothing like that. We were excited, maybe a little nervous. Three hours later we made the turn onto Bethel Hickory Church Road.  Around the bend, down the dirt lane, and we were back on Eco Drive. Nora’s first reaction: a little uncertain.  “I didn’t know that house was so close,” she said about the place to the west of us.  (Editor’s note: the following day we were out with Rodney, the designer, my brother, and a tape measure.  The place was 200 yards – two football fields – away from our proposed house site.  Think Dustin Hoffman as the gunslinger in the bar scene in “Little Big Man” – “You’re crowding me ….”).

Anyway, even the white cliffs of Dover may be have seemed too close based on how we’d remembered things. That’s the problem with long distance planning – the imagined and the real start sidling down different paths. But we quickly came around. A little landscaping would restore a woodland view for both parties, east and west.

Around us, the leaves were starting to bud on the trees and the grass was turning green, but we could still make it back into the woods without too much trouble. Nora was able to walk the property line for the first time.  The truth is, for a couple of people living in suburban New Jersey, 10 acres is a lot of land.  There was water in the creek, some striking bits of quartz along an old stone wall, and the possibility of one day building a trail down here to look for frogs (and snakes) with grandchildren.

What about our son?  He spent most of time in Woollen Gym on the UNC campus, shooting hoops.  One morning as I was walking him in he said quietly to me, “That was Marcus Paige.”  The Carolina guard had just passed us going in the other direction.  We looked at each other, started out in pursuit.  Tucker caught up with him on the sidewalk just outside, and Marcus was just as gracious as you might imagine him to be while I fumbled with my phone, finally managing to snap a picture of the two of them together. 

So call it the Paige Principle for teenage basketball fans (with apologies to Dickens’s Mr. Macawber): four days meeting with a designer and walking around a field with no hoops, result: misery; four days playing hoops with the college kids capped by a photo with Marcus Paige (just two weeks away from starring in the national championship game, and making the most improbable shot ever), result: bliss.