The House Pictured

Remember last Labor Day Weekend when I went to see Greta and then to see my guy?  Of course you don't.  I do remember that, because I so rarely leave the farm to go visit anyone now.  I used to think nothing of hopping in my car and zipping here or there.  Over the last five years, traveling has become problematic.  By "traveling", I mean anything more than a trip to town and back, a whole 25 mile round trip which leaves me exhausted.

Greta had been asking me all summer to come visit her, three hours away in the Shiloh (Tennessee) area.  I had been feeling particularly off last summer, fighting a well-entrenched infection in my lungs in the heat and humidity of Mississippi when breathing is already a chore was very draining.  I drove up and stayed with her for several days, just prior to the labor day weekend.

As we drove into Savannah (uhm, Tennessee) from her home, I saw a pinkish house and did a double-take.  The house actually was not pink.  The roof was.  It wasn't that rusty clay brickish manly shade that some roof tiles can be.  No, it was pink.  It gave the entire house a rosy glow that was quite the eye-catching spectacle.  Or it was for me, for Greta, it was not eye-catching at all.

But she indulged me and let me drive by several days later while gassing up so I would be ready to go to see my guy the next day.  Once I pointed out the house, she gasped in glee.  It was empty.  In fact, it was not just vacated, but sort of trashed inside.  I know this because we parked and I went up to the house, the front door was opened and so I entered with caution (it turns out that the back door was hanging open and some of the windows were missing).

I may have written about this last fall (I think I may have, but am too damn lazy to go find it at the moment).  So I won't tell you what all we found and our enthusiastic oooooooooohs and ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhs.  But I will tell that if you look at the pic in the previous entry, you will note that I am holding up a mailbox.

Savannah had a few years back opened a new highway which branches off from the main street precisely at the point where the house sits.  The old part of the road that continues past the house dead-ends at Cherry Hall, a historic landmark where the ferry used to be.  So the house had been reassigned an address.  Because so much of the mail, and many organizations and individuals no doubt, continued to use the old address; the mailbox has both the old and new address numbers.

My guy lives just outside of Oxford, MS and I live just outside of Starkville, MS (closer to Pheba really, but if you don't live in Pheba, you have no idea it even exists.  except you, you know Pheba exists, and since you know it exists, I ought to let you know the correct pronunciation, which is:  FEEE-BEEE as in the girl's name Phoebe).  Our homes are about an hour and a half apart (or about 110 miles).  My guy comes to see me most every weekend.  This is just another example of the awesomeness of my guy.  He loves me.

Plus he likes the peacefulness of the farm.