Lights flying past on 285
After a late arrival Friday night, the weekend started out with a trip to the Stone Mountain area. I was under the impression that the laser show started this weekend, but apparently I don't know how to read a calendar. It starts next weekend.
Monday was spent visiting people in the Suches area. Most people know my attachment to the small mountain community, but it is hard to convey exactly what pulls me there. Life in the rugged hills of North Georgia is different somehow. Eighty-three-year-old men work as hard and as long as men half their age. A seventy-eight-year-old woman has never had a physical examination, but yet doctors marvel and claim she is as fit as a teenager. There is nothing mystical about this place; the land has simply shaped the character and strength of inhabitants. The people are as tough as nails, but some of the kindest souls you could ever hope to encounter. They, perhaps more than any of us in metro-Atlanta, know the meaning of hard work, and they also know the meaning of true hospitality. Sometimes it is hard to believe that such places and people exist in a world that has gone mad in its' hurry.
Unfortunately, I felt that I needed to snap these pictures before "progress" wipes it all away. The hill on the right in the last photo is being cleared to make way for sixty new houses. It makes me sick to think of the rolling open land being ruined. The people who move into those houses will never know what it was like to stand in the valley and gaze up at green rolling hills on either side of the pass. They can never appreciate what they are taking away from the people who have lived in and loved that valley.
Anyway. One of the best aspects of this weekend has been time to sit and reflect. I have re-discovered sitting in the darkness and dreaming. I'm excited about what life holds. I see the potential to make things happen. I am happy.
Tomorrow...Callaway...
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