Curmudgeon walked into the General Store and said to nobody in particular, “It’s started again.”
“What?” asked Storekeep, Mrs. Storekeep, and brother of Cityfella.
“That ubiquitous fog, you know the all-consuming early-morning mist that ruins golf shots and shopping, especially up here on our mountain top.”
The store windows that once looked out on a mountain view with trees and clouds galore now looked out on that pearly mist and shrouded the view of that little piece of heaven that was part of the newly restored salute to elegant mountain living called Grandiose Manor. The mini-estates were carved from the Asheville holdings of Grover Clampert, who made his money in the first Florida real-estate wars of 1892.
“You know,” said Cityfella, who presently hailed from Atlanta, “you all promised my brother that he would adjust to the climate here. After all, we’re all only in Asheville three months a year—then it’s on to Greece, Madrid, London, Peru, and our own beloved LA.”
“Thank heavens for that,” said Curmudgeon to himself as he stirred his freshly-brewed coffee that warmed his chilly hand.
“We are,” Cityfella’s Brother added, “fortunate to be at home here in Grandiose Manor, not only because of our wonderful condo but for the fly-casting pond and the Labyrinth, all those meandering footpaths, the waterfalls, the woods, and our beloved Koi pond.”
He paused to stir his coffee and spooned more twice-filtered fresh cane sugar into the mix, “but I do wonder about that monster who works daily in the center of the maze and preaches that drivel about redemption and Mother Crete.”
“We all must work,” said Mrs. Storekeep, “at whatever job we do best, and you must admit our local minotaur is smashing in that outfit made from imported wool collected in the Ecuadorian Mountains and loomed in that charming little shop in Biltmore Village.”
Mr. Storekeep stopped stacking shelves and began to butter his toast made from just-delivered bread, baked to perfection in Johnson City and trucked over to WNC so folks never got hungry as they talked and talked about saving the environment.
“You know,” said the Postman as he opened the front door of the store, “it’s really damp out there!”
Suddenly, Curmudgeon was consumed with a desperate love for their small little corner of the world, and setting his cup on their newly installed kitchen table made from one piece of hemlock left over from the Big Bang that blew up age-old hemlocks up at the Joyce Kilmer Park he reached for Storekeep’s hand and shook it for all he was worth.
“In fact,” he continued, “I think it’s time we resurrected the Big Balloon that we had planned on flying to Raleigh and give them a piece of our minds. The world is just beginning to cry out for justice, not only for teachers, but for miss-tried convicts, and small businesses that are continually losing out to big businesses, and not to forget saving small parks and big parks and building needed roads and bridges, in fact getting this great country patched back up and once again, leading the world in our continued fight for democracy–”
And you could almost hear the mightiest Big Band in the world, revving up the buglers, and bringing tempo to the drums–not to mention the sound of the pumps filling that old hot-air balloon with the gasses of the atmosphere so it could once again fly over the mountains, over the Continental Divide, down infamous I-40 and on to the capitol of the great state of North Carolina, and take government back from the Unjust and give it back to the people!
Peter Loewer has written and illustrated more than twenty-five books on natural history over the past thirty years.