Car wheels on a gravel road

I grew up on a dirt road in Durham in the 1960s.  In the summer the city trucks would come and spray oil to keep the dust down.  Whatever they had left they dumped in the nearby creek to kill the mosquitoes, leaving a rainbow-hued slick. Nobody thought too much about this at the time. We ran barefoot on the road and played in the muddy water, building red clay dams, looking for crayfish, and keeping an eye out for snakes.

Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  There’s an amusing scene at the opening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:  Paul Newman walks into a small town bank somewhere in the southwest, looking around. The security is the best the nineteenth century has to offer. Newman looks puzzled.  He walks over to a guard standing by the door, “What happened to the old bank?” he asks.  “It was beautiful.”

“People kept robbing it,” replies the guard.

“That’s a small price to pay for a little beauty,” says Newman.

For our part, Nora and I are happy to be back on a dirt road, and the dust is a small price to pay to hear car wheels on gravel again. We’re looking forward to the sounds of the country – rain on the metal roof, maybe an owl hooting in the middle of the night.  At least one of those is getting closer: work started on the lower (metal) roof this past week, and should be done in a few days.

Everything’s getting down to the details, but of course we all know who lurks there.  (Favorite recently heard old blues lyric: “If you give the devil a ride, he’s gonna want to drive. Don’t give the devil a ride.”)  Finish date has now moved to mid-June.

The other big news:  water.  The well pump is up and running, the counter tops are in, and the plumbing fixtures are being installed.  It’s starting to look and feel like a functioning house, a place you could go live in tomorrow if you had to.

The summer heat is picking up, too – 80 degrees in the shade, dark clouds sweeping over the trees in the late afternoon, thunderstorms.  The field has gone green.  The last time we truly upended ourselves was nearly 30 years ago when we left the city for the suburbs.  We had one child then, and kept on adding more. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

A move is kind of like having a kid. There’s a long run-up, a lot of expectation when you’re busy but nothing much really happens.  In the event: one moment you don’t have a child, the next you do, and life is changed forever. Same thing with this.  On July 15th we’ll go to bed in Summit.  On July 16th, we’ll be in Chapel Hill.