“Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.” – Garrison Keillor

Friday was one of those days with a lot of details. Not much actually on the calendar but a lot of busy nonetheless; no time to write, or work in the garden, or settle in with a cup of tea and a book.

Rebekah and I had business in Wake Forest, grabbed one of the best hamburgers I have had in a long time at the Gatehouse Tavern, then drove down to Smithfield to check out the Garden Center we’d been told to scope out at DeWayne’s.

Good grief. We were expecting, you know, a garden center. But instead the place made me think every travel stop on I-95 had decided to move into the same building. DeWayne’s is the Buc-ees meets the Cracker Barrel Country Store of roadside retail.

Yes there is a garden center, but you have to walk through a gauntlet of why are so many people here? to find it!

Every square foot was packed with people! We are in a curious place as a nation when tens of millions of people legitimately need food assistance – while at the same time money is being shoveled into the stuff nobody really needs end of the economy by the truckload!

So I shielded my eyes from the “refined accessories” in the “Men’s Shoppe,” and the life-sized Santas, and the “elegantly curated sophisticated home accents,” and “North Carolina’s premier Christmas destination” until we found the garden center.

Project Urn:

Our mission – our assignment – was to research medium-sized concrete urns to anchor part of our garden design. We have only just started the process, but we had heard about DeWayne’s wide selection (along with Saint Francis statues of all sizes and yoga-cats and bunnies and Celtic crosses and gargoyles and lions and obelisks and ornate fountains with fat cherubs sitting on them).

We did not purchase anything but we do have a good idea now of scale. Ideally we would like to find a couple of antique urns or something from salvage.

Then it was home to Tarboro and my “First Friday” tasting at the Tarboro Brewing Company. Franklin always offers an interesting talk about process and history and the chemistry of it all – as well as brewing up some of the best beer in the region.

Later, as Rebekah and I were walking home we stopped and chatted with a friend for a few minutes and I commented that, “This is exactly what I had in mind when we moved here. Walking home together, running into friends along the way, enjoying the beauty of the fall colors and the cool evening air, being met at the door of our restored home by the world’s best Golden Retriever, grateful and blessed….”

Do good, be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for yourselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that you may take hold of the life that really is life. – 1 Timothy 6:18-19

Life is, of course, what we make of it. We’re just glad to be making it here – DEREK