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Life on the ridge is like living inside a never-ending episode of Extreme Makeover: Appalachian Edition. We’ve chopped so many logs I’m starting to wonder if Hurricane Helene blew in a whole second forest we didn’t know about. I swear those trees are procreating in the night!
On occasion, I venture from the cottage, past the part of the acreage we have designated as “yard” to find that just beyond the barn, Willie has cleared another area and built something. A couple weeks ago, it was what is known as a log crib. It’s a three-sided, roofed structure about 4 feet deep, 8 feet long, and 8 feet tall. Willie says he needed a place to keep smaller logs dry. He told me he built it further away from the yard, since it’s not the prettiest of buildings. He’s right about the looks of the thing. When you come around the barn, you can only see one rough-edge short side of the structure. So now, thanks to Willie’s ‘log crib,’ our property has a scenic view of what looks like a very ambitious outhouse. I expect confused hikers to start lining up any day now.
This past week, he surprised me by clearing another area, just past the outhouse log crib. This will be a new house for Karrll and Corinna. Have I mentioned them before? Karrll is Willie’s prized possession – a small tractor. The name has two “r’s” and two “l’s” because it is to be pronounced with a kind of “man’s man” growl. LOL. Corinna is Karrll’s long-suffering girlfriend, the riding lawnmower. Their relationship is mostly functional, though she suspects he’s been eyeing the chainsaw.
This morning, I walked out of the cottage back door to find a giant pile of dirt and a new berm separating the designated yard from the area where we run the sawmill. Helene kind of scalped the very top of the ridge, resulting in quite a bit of water runoff, so we had actually planned this project to correct the problem. I simply did not realize it was going to be started so quickly. We hadn’t officially chosen the landscaping, but I’m about to get on that, right now!
For those that don’t know, North Carolina is full of red clay dirt. It was the bane of my existence our first year here because it gets tracked everywhere. It also stains clothing and absolutely will not come out, no matter what you use in the laundry. You can bet we will very quickly be covering our new red clay berm with so much landscaping it’ll look like Martha Stewart and a forestry service ranger had a love child.