Blooming Again

I’ve been absent from this space for a while now. The last time I checked in was in August and I was just preparing to weave a new batch of towels. I was just finishing them up when Hurricane Helene hit WNC at the end of September, and we have been in recovery mode ever since.

Thank you to everyone who checked in on us to make sure we were ok. We fared better than many people in town, and our town as a whole fared better than much of WNC around us. We are located near the start of Spring Creek (I can look out my window and see the mountaintop where the creek begins) and I think that spared us from a lot of the more damaging flooding that happened in Hot Springs, Marshall, Asheville, Swannanoa, and surrounding areas where creeks had already converged with larger rivers. There was a lot of damage to roads and bridges in our area, both due to flooding and to mudslides, but our home is ok and everyone has been working amazingly fast to make roads safe and passable.

These are before and after photos of Spring Creek at our house. At its height, it had risen enough to flood our pavilion to the point where the swinging bench hanging there was being jostled around by the current. All of our beautiful native plants (and several bushes and small trees) are completely gone, along with three of the four picnic table benches we had under the pavilion.

Ironically, along this part of the creek right behind our house we had gotten funding to plant $3000 worth of native flowers, grasses and rushes for erosion control due to their deep root structures. I hope wherever they ended up, their seeds will still be viable and they’ll grow to secure a riverbed somewhere else now. We only lost one tree, a beautiful willow tree that provided the most gorgeous shade – a hidden respite by the creek that was Kyle’s favorite place to lounge on a warm summer day. It was uprooted by the current and for a while was hanging onto the powerlines. Luckily when it eventually came down, it didn’t take the lines with it.

Our back porch is built right at the edge of the retaining wall you can see on the right side of the photos above. The water was high enough that it was about a foot up the retaining wall, and we could stand on the back porch and look straight down to see the creek. Thankfully the wall was there (and now we know why), because if it wasn’t, we likely would have lost our porch.

All night long, the only sound we could hear was deep booming, like thunder that you felt in your body more than actually heard. It was the sound of boulders slamming into each other under water as the creek created a new landscape.

On Thursday morning, the rain had just started and I was happily splashing around in the creek taking photos of my finished towels, unaware of the transformation that was about to take place.

I didn’t realize at the time that these were the last photos I would take of the lush, green, moss-covered rocks and flower-lined creek.

I’ve been sitting on these towels for a few weeks, partly because it felt impossible to list them for sale and talk about them as if nothing had happened to the world around me, and also because there was simply no way for me to be able to ship them out. Recovery is now far enough along that I should be able to get to a functional post office, but shipping will likely be a little bit delayed because, well, because I have to get to a functional post office in order to send them out. My local post office is currently operating out of a FEMA truck and as far as I know, they are not handling packages at the moment.

I had named this design “Field of Flowers” and for a while I felt like it was mocking me as I looked outside to see that everything along the creek had been stripped down to rock, but I am now taking it as a sign of resilience. Everything looks gray and brown and lifeless right now, but the flowers will eventually return.

I will take a note from this zinnia that voluntarily grew out of our sidewalk, and chose to bloom for the first time the day after Helene passed through. Storms don’t last forever, and even rocks give way to new life.

For those interested, my towels are now available in my Etsy shop. Thank you for your patience and understanding with shipping, and thank you to everyone for keeping WNC in your thoughts. Recovery will take a very long time, but it is starting to feel like we can breathe again.