Pining again for the little house on the river

There's a lot of me in a little white house on a pristine river in east Tennessee. It's as clear to me now as that cold river water — I should have held on to that house.

Built in 1926 for factory workers, it needed workers of a different kind when I found it. But its 900 square feet of hardwood floors, high ceilings and wide molding told me it had strong bones.

That little house was my first-time buy, and I got it for a song and $20,000. I put at least another $10,000 toward renovations, which left me a certified do-it-yourself carpenter, sheetrock finisher, plumber, painter, electrician and roofer.

My certification was earned through the benevolence of skilled friends and brothers-in-law, whose highest pay from me was a barbecue sandwich.

Similar houses dot the landscape of Elizabethton, Tenn., and countless other small Southern towns. But mine was in a prime spot right in the middle of West Riverside Drive.

The front porch I built was separated from the river by about five acres of green space. The Watauga River comes down cold, drawn from the deepest bottom of Watauga Lake since TVA finished the dam in 1948.

In the heat of summer, the cold water creates a blanket of fog mornings and evenings that hides everything below the heads and shoulders of fly fishermen.

Sipping coffee on the porch one morning, I noted that the fishermen keeping graceful rhythm on that quiet river cloud must feel as if they're fishing in heaven.

I knew right then I'd have no trouble selling that house. I didn't know for a long time how much I'd want it back.

My dad suffered the same strain of seller's remorse after we moved to Tennessee from Albemarle in 1968. For three years, he held on to a little 6-acre farm in the foothills of Morrow Mountain.

But he sold the little farm to help pay for a bigger house for his growing family. Five years after that, he moved the family into a smaller house on another little farm, and he never suffered from seller's remorse again.

I'll be staying at that farm again this weekend. And I'll be driving by my old house on the river again. I'll stop and look at the yard; the dogwoods I planted and the sugar maple that came from my parents' farm.

“See the tree, how big it's grown,” I'll sing, “but friend, it hasn't been too long it wasn't big.”

Maybe I'll have a little house on the river again some day. Maybe I won't. But I had one for a while, and maybe that's enough.

And Joni Mitchell sings, “Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till its gone?”

Mark Rutledge can be contacted at mrutledge@coxnc.com or (252) 329-9575.