A Three Birthday Month

Birthdays

Timothy, Grandma and Elijah took another trip around the sun in April.  Each of their birthdays were celebrated with a special dinner and dessert.  Tim chose Huli Sue's and having brownies at home. Huli Sue's is a Hawaiin restaurant and our meal was delicious. Grandma chose dinner at home with homemade fried rice and Angel Food cake. Elijah picked Pack's Tavern, which is an old favorite restaurant and then having a donut tree in lieu of a cake. I absolutely failed to take many photos in April, including pics of two of the birthday people. 

Tim with his tiny coffee.

Grandma's presents 

Elijah's birthday donut tower.

Rebekah's Performances

We attended another fabulous show that Rebekah performed in. This show was "Slepping Beauty and Friends". It had excerpts from several Disney shows. Rebekah was the broom in The Sorcerer's Apprentice and an evil stepsister in Cinderella. 

Rebekah as a flying broom.

Her balance amazes me.

I can barely recognize her with the red hair wig!

College

Both Elijah and Rebekah had great semesters in college. They each did well in their classes. Finals ended yesterday and now we wait for final grades. We can already see that, once again, Rebekah  got straight A's. Elijah's teachers are a little bit farther behind in posting results. We know he is getting either A's or high B's in all his classes. Rebekah is taking the summer off from college but Elijah is taking two classes this summer.  

Elijah made this keychain in class.

Pets

I discovered this cat window bed at the Bins (a store filled with
Amazon returns at incredible deals). It is very popular with our kitties.

Recovery After Helene

Recovery continues in WNC despite the federal government pulling funds. Our state's request for continued help from FEMA was denied. DOGE withdrew the CDC, which had set up appointments in our area in order to do a risk assessment and advise our local government on ridding the toxins in our water and soil, determining the 200 plus families still at the highest risk of contracting disease from their flooded living conditions, and performing suicide risk assessment and prevention (suicide commonly plagues natural disaster areas after about six months ... I have already heard of one). We really needed these services, but the CDC workers had to turn around and go back.

The pictures below were taken on Easter Sunday. They are of a local park that, because of closed roads and piles of debris, I hadn't been able to access before. Before Helene, it used to be a beautiful tree-lined park where my kiddos learned to ride their bikes.  Now it is a desolate piece of land that is littered with shattered glass from the breweries upstream. Most of the trees were washed away. Two more bridges have been repaired and opened.  The Lowes store reopened on the seventh month anniversary of Helene. 

There are still mangled cars to remind us of that tragic day scattered throughout our region.

This path used to be a dozen feet away from the river. Now parts of it have been washed away and the river has spread out, altering the landscape. 

Bales of paper from a recycling center upstream still rest in a ditch.

Our city is changed. So many people have moved away. On our street alone, which has about 20 houses...two now stand empty.  I drove through another community recently with more than ten homes up for sale. Houses used to be in extreme demand and now they stand empty. We keep moving forward and hope that we will rise as a stronger, more resilient community.  It is going to take a long time.

Blessings,  Dawn 

Time Speeds On

Moments of Fun ~ February was a month filled with performances in Greenville, South Carolina.  Rebekah performed several times, and we also got to attend a performance by Alvin Ailey dance. We also got to attend Hamilton. It was fantastic! We even had the opportunity to see a community theater play here in Asheville called The Play that Goes Wrong. It was hysterical! We needed a good laugh so bad, and it was wonderful to see our community thriving, despite all of the hardship it is still experiencing.  As February turned to March, we attended our city's Mardi Gras parade. As usual, it was funny and quirky. We also went on an overnight trip to Louisville, Kentucky to see two bands, Disturbed and Three Days Grace, in concert. Tim and Rebekah loved it! I loved being with them and seeing their joy (and having earplugs)! We also walked across the bridge from Louisville to Jeffersonville, Indiana! Elijah thought it was too far to go for an overnight and decided to stay home and take care of the cats. We enjoyed our 24 hours away. 

What a delicious breakfast we had in Louisville.

Elijah is really learning a lot from his college courses. He has made a clock and a ball peen hammer so far. I am so happy that we found him a good fit on the first try.

This week, Rebekah and I tried a tea shop in a neighboring town. We had a cream tea (tea and scones). It was delicious, and we plan to go back with my Mom around Mother's Day. Everything was book themed. I loved the Little Women tea.

We continued our annual pass to the Biltmore Estate this year.  I bought Dear Husband one for Valentine's Day. We visited the one-week-old goats and gardens last weekend. 

We finally found a licensed and insured tree company that had the time to come out and bring down our two dying elm trees. They also cleaned the back of our land of all of the overgrowth to reduce our risk of wildfires.  Everyone needs to do what they can to clean up from Helene.  There have already been a dozen small (less than a 100 acres) wildfires in WNC. There is so much debris that the risk of wildfires is much higher for us right now.

Next week marks six months since Helene hit our region.  Our area has worked very hard, but there is so much more to do. We still have no trains or Greyhound buses. Driving on I40 to Tennessee is still challenging.  The eastbound lanes of I40 are damaged or completely gone for about 5 miles. Changes in the last month are listed below. 

• The Nature Center opened back up this week.
• Goodwill opened back up this month.
• Several more buildings have been razed and the land cleared.
• A few more traffic lights are on permanent power instead of generators (a few are still on generators in the city limits).
• Another bridge was reopened. 
• Walmart reopened this month. 
• The Botanical Gardens reopened,  but they still have lots of trees down.
• They have completely cleared cars and trucks out of another few miles of the Swannanoa River.

The pictures below are from this past week.

Tim standing next to the root ball of a tree at the Botanical Gardens 

A pile of cars and trucks removed from the river.

Lastly,  the weather is warming up and our bears are waking up. This bear was a bit tipsy while waking up in our backyard.  He had hibernated this winter under our back shed. He is really big and offered us an hour of entertainment the other day.

Blessings,  Dawn

Searching for Beauty

Smashed car on top of trailer...left behind by the river.

All of the photos in this post were taken in the past week. We are still living in a disaster zone. There are still people in tents.  Thousands of people are displaced and hundreds of businesses are still closed. There is still a desperate need for help in our area. However, we keep taking small steps forward. There were 900+ vehicles in the rivers after Helene and now there are 89 vehicles that still need to be removed from the rivers. That is progress. Two bridges and half of a main road have reopened in our city. There are still major issues with travel to Tennessee because the highway is so damaged and unstable. There is still no train service (commercial or passenger), but it is getting closer as they make repairs to the hundreds of miles of tracks. It is about 1.5 hours away now. 

Below are two photos of an apartment complex destroyed by the river that is still the same as when the water first receded. 

Smashed tractor trailers still remain along the road.

Our regional food bank was destroyed.

Manna, our regional food bank

They rebuilt the road on one side of the river, but the entire other side is still in ruins. 

No change on this bridge, but the river is looking cleaner and healthier in this section. 

Our city's award-winning golf course is in ruins.

Anyone need a fridge?

This road reopening means my husband's commute is back to normal, although the traffic lights are run on a generator because there is still no power on that section of road.

Many patches of woods look like this photo below.  So many trees are down. We are at great risk for forest fires and there has already been three fires in the neighboring county. 

Rebekah and I spent one day at Biltmore. It was nice to rest our eyes on beauty. The orchid greenhouse was beautiful. Spending some time on the Biltmore Estate was a wonderful reminder of the beauty that our area is so known for.  Beauty is always a bit hard for me to see during "stick season" ... what we affectionately call winter here because of the lack of snow.  It is all that much harder right now with so many trees down all over the area. Biltmore Estate has worked very hard on their grounds and the progress is impressive. 

Looking out from the back of Biltmore house

The river was frozen and every adult was embracing their inner child and trying to break the ice with a rock or two...LOL.

We traveled to Washington, D.C. and Richmond, VA so that Rebekah could audition for Summer Ballet Intensives. She got into both of them and will be spending part of this coming summer with relatives while dancing her heart out. We visited the National Cathedral while we were in Washington, D.C. It was really lovely inside and out. We didn't walk through the gardens because the weather was so cold, but they were impressive from our car even in the dead of winter. I love stained glass windows. 

We are so busy on the home front. Rebekah is finding her college workload to be very demanding this semester. Elijah is adjusting to college, too. He is taking four classes in Integrated Computer Machining. He likes it, for the most part, and is getting used to the routine and demand of so much homework. This year feels like a year in which we will be staying close to home. I am planning to open a day care out of our home in a few months for only a couple children. We are planning a small trip this year within a state or two from our home. So much hinges on what happens to my husband's federal government job. With this administration trying to dismantle the government, his job along with 2+ million federal government employees' jobs are very much at risk right now. It is a very shocking and alarming time. Even those who work with veterans, such as my husband, are not safe.  Apparently,  making America great again means stomping on the least of us. We would be wise to remember and care for the least of us. Mathew 25:40.

Our cats are so silly. A game of chase resulted in one cat getting stuck in the fruit bowl. 

Elijah's hair is getting so long. He is enjoying the cascading curls.

Blessings, Dawn