Long Hard Summer, Nearly Over!

Here we are on Labor Day weekend and although we have several full house week-ends still to come, there is some light in the tunnel during the mid weeks when we are only half full or less. Phew! June, July and August were so crazy we worked and worked and then collapsed on the bed or sofa to get half an hour off our feet. Our guests have run the gamut from absolute horrors to really interesting and accomplished people who

one can’t help wonder where they find the time to have achieved so much.

There have been some wonderful high points during all the craziness of work. My brother David and sister-in-law Jo came to visit for three days on their way back to Britain from a week in the Outer Banks at a huge annual family reunion (my mother’s side). It was the first time we have seen them for nearly nine years, too long of course and I resolved not to let it happen again. Bears with their cubs and sightings of a pair of deer twins as they grow up in our immediate woods. The gracious musician Don Walters who arrived with his companions a mandolin, guitar and banjo. They wrote music together in Room 1 for three days and on the last night they gave us an impromptu concert under the stars, around the nightly campfire. The frogs and cicadas seemed to be singing louder that night in appreciation of their beautiful music.

The work of running a popular ten room B & B is endless. We rise at 6.30am and the phone is often still ringing with reservation demands or questions from people at 10.30pm at night. Incredibly, we have endured the phone ringing at 2 or 3am in the morning. They are lucky that we ignore them and turn over, because it is a severe temptation to be fabulously rude to that kind of imbecile.

One of the ways I have “escaped” this summer is through some good books and I highly recommend any of them.
“The Millennium Trilogy” by the late Stieg Larsson
(The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest)
“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” – Carson McCullers
“The White Tiger” – Aravind Adiga
“Fire Bed and Bone” – Henrietta Brandford
“The Help” – Kathryn Stockett