It was always going to be busy chez Hall this week. Next week, there are not one but two photo shoots of the house, inside and out. One is for Designer Dream Homes, for the final article of three on “Reality Building”. And then our architect is coming along to get shots for his own publicity materials. And it does not stop at the interior, we need to get outside looking good too. So sll the front flower beds have had a thick mulch of shredded bark, lots of deadheading and tidying up. Inside, Lisa has been hard at work deciding how to “stage” things. It’s as bad as if we were dressing up the house to sell it! I haven’t been idle – putting up pictures, hanging a series of decorative plates, tidying up my library and the wine cellar and so on.
We had another surprise visitor this week, on Thursday morning. I was in the main room and saw a movement outside at the back. Wandering down the side of the house by the Great Wall of Dahlonega planting bed was a black bear. No Paddington or Winnie the Pooh, he (I assume male) was about 150lb of slightly scrawny bear. I suspect he was looking for a new home, having been kicked out by his mother when he got old enough to present a risk of incest. We stayed inside (sensible!), and he shambled steadily on his way up the hillside. At least he didn’t do any damage, unlike a herd of deer who carefully nibbled all the flowers of one of our rosebushes.
We planned on getting most of the house preparations done by Friday, as the weekend was spoken for. We went off for another family wedding, near Athens. The daughter of one of Lisa’s cousins (on her father’s side) was getting married (second time round for both bride and groom). The actual event was on their farm, out in the country, in the open air. Storms had been threatening all week, but instead we got a very sunny day – but HOT. When we were in Athens checking into the hotel we stayed at overnight, the temperature in the car park was over 100F. Out in the country it dropped to only 93F (33C). The bride came down the hillside from the house to the wedding ceremony in classic white dress, jiving with her father all the way down the aisle. The reception afterwards was in tented shade (thank goodness) – southern barbeque. A great time was had by all, even though the weather was enervating. And it gave us an opportunity to have a catch-up chat with Lisa’s realtives who had come from Cherleston for the event.
We stayed ten miles away, in Athens. Driving down the streets, one might have wondered about the name of the city – rows of huge mansions with letters from the Greek alphabet on the portico. No, we were not in Greece. Athens in Georgia is a very big university city, and these were fraternity houses (or sororities for girls). A combination of social clubs and accommodation for students. And since these places are all for students, they often have a reputation for less than sober behavior. The sheer size of these buildings, usually very well maintained, suggests to me that there has been a lot of money put into these organisations. No wonder US universities put a considerable amount of effort in keeping in touch with ex-students.
Robin’s Thoughts on America
Prompted by our stay in Athens, Georgia, and continuing my very intermittent Thoughts, Likes and Dislikes section, here is my personally opinionated thought for this week on life in USA.
Name That Town
I suppose that the huge numbers of immigrants from Europe into North America from 1491 onwards brought with it a degree of homesickness and an inclination to look for similarities here with what they had left behind. And one aspect of this is naming where you live after the place you left behind. It’s a totally understandable thing with a long tradition. In England there are often instances of new villages being named after the place where some of the founders came from, with a suitable modifying adjective – East Grinstead and West Grinstead, Ashby Parva and Ashby Magna (Small and Large Ashby). The obvious thing to do for new settlements in North America would be to name them as New Somewhere (such as New York, previously New Amsterdam)
However, the use of New seems to have been largely abandoned around here. Just reusing the original name seems to be sufficient. This was brought home to me on our weekend trip to Athens, Georgia. I was prompted to look a little deeper into the re-use of city names, and rapidly found 39 borrowed names – 8% of the total stretching between Abbeville and Zebulon by way of Santa Claus and Ty Ty. And not a single New Anything. I suppose that this says a lot about the difficulty of finding a new name!
| Abbeville Aragon Ashburn Athens Berlin Bethlehem Bremen Brunswick Cairo Canton Chester Clermont Cleveland | Culloden Damascus Dublin Ephesus Eton Geneva Hampton Hull Jersey Kingston Lyons Macon Manchester | Mansfield Milan Monticello Montrose Oxford Pembroke Richmond Hill Rome Scotland Stockbridge Turin Vienna Warwick |