My Mother’s Small World

This morning my mom and I got up at the lovely Lodge at Buckberry Creek, probably the nicest thing in Gatlinburg. No, not probably, definitely! We had felt like fish out of water yesterday when we walked through town because we had all our own teeth, no tattoos, no undergarments proudly displayed, could carry our own weight with our own two feet, had no obscenities written on our clothes, actually had no writing on our clothes at all, were not drunk at four in the afternoon and kept all our saliva in our own mouths.

How the rest of the people all honed in on Gatlinburg at the same time I do not know, but there is some kind of tacky magnet there. What we really could not get over is how every store we walked by sold anything at all because it was so full of crap. The only good thing is that we got a really good fast walk in as we tried to dodge the families who were swearing at their small children or hitting their adolescent son with the 9-inch Mohawk.

The whole reason we were there was for my mother to see her old summer spot and to try and find the mountain she and her sister’s inherited, which is now for sale if you are interested. I must say that outside the town the mountains are beautiful with the streams and rivers babbling down the hills full of rhododendron.

Thankfully I was able to find the one nice place to stay and we had a beautiful suite with a porch over looking the Great Smokey Mountains Park. We went to have breakfast in the main lodge this morning and one of the owners overheard my Mother talking about a childhood friend and asked where we were from. One bit of Knoxville led to another and it turns out he had gone to high school with my Aunt Edie and knew all the same people my mother did.

This just cemented my mother’s theory that everyone nice in Tennessee knows each other. I was just glad that he was such a nice man and did not have any tattoos, had all his own teeth, clothes with no writing on them and was clearly sober at nine in the morning. I am forever thankful that he was the one person my mother knew in Gatlinburg.