Welcome to Asheville

          “Where are you from?” comes up daily in conversations since we moved to Asheville.  It’s the question I remember being asked most frequently when we lived in Dubai, a city with over 85 percent foreigners from every country in the world and a handful of native Emiratis.  Asheville is not Dubai and yet it is a unique small city in the Western North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains that has been discovered by transplanted people from all over the U.S…like us.  The conversation usually continues like this:

            “We moved from Vermont,” I say.

            “Oh…where in Vermont?”

            “In central Vermont near Middlebury and Rutland… in the small town of Rochester,” I reply.

            “You sure got out in time, didn’t you?” the person answers referring to Hurricane Irene this summer. 

            “How long have you been here?” I’ll ask back.  And then I learn they have moved here from southern California or Maine, Chicago, Michigan or Texas. We have even met Vermonters from Putney/Brattleboro area in a casual conversation and have become real friends.

Often the conversation will continue covering mutual interests, why you moved, and where you live in the Asheville area.  There is a friendliness towards the many newcomers that continually surprises me. Here, the dialogue goes beyond the ”where are you from?”  And, if you happen to meet a native North Carolinian they will immediately rattle off a long list of places you absolutely must see.  Our realtor Hope, who happens to be one of the few native Ashevillians I have yet to meet, drove us all over Asheville for an entire day and a half pointing out sights and highlights before we ever set foot in a house for sale. She wanted us to love Asheville as she does.

            Meeting new people in Asheville usually ends with, “Oh, you are going to love it here!” or “We came for the weather and it’s wonderful.” Or “You won’t believe how much there is to do here.” 

            It’s only been five weeks since we arrived here and I look around my house and marvel that the packing boxes are gone and things put away in places where hopefully I’ll remember where they are.  A new sofa is in place in the living room with its high cathedral ceiling, and a large Mission style table and chairs (very Asheville “arts & crafts”) graces our dining area. Two new beds are in the guest room waiting to be slept in for the first time. The last of our paintings collected on our world travels are now hung on the walls, and our Dubai rugs look like they were made for the dark hardwood floors in this house. The pantry is beginning to be well stocked, and fresh yellow mums from the Farmer’s Market on front porch are a sign that 50 Black Horse Run is lived in.

            We are members of the Center for Creative Retirement at the University of North Carolina Asheville, the North Carolina Arboretum and the YMCA all in a month.  I now go to Yoga and Zumba classes and Nathalie, my favorite instructor who handles up to 30 and more to a class greets me with a cheery smile and a “Hello, Kristina!”  I can drive places without clutching my dog-eared Asheville map or plugging in the GPS and am rewarded occasionally with discovering a shortcut to get somewhere. I can get to Tyson’s Furniture in the charming town of Black Mountain outside Asheville and I’ve been lucky to find bargains at the huge Restore run by Habitat for Humanity volunteers and the Resale Shop supporting Hospice. Volunteer opportunities are endless as I learned when I met with a volunteer coordinator, a young woman from Toronto, who is helping me look for a way to use my Spanish.  I now know where and what Greenlife is - a huge whole foods and organic market similar to my familiar Coop up north but much larger. I stocked up and “Kristina’s Granola” is back in production again.

            We’ve gone with the Biltmore Lake Hiking Club to Graveyard Fields (at 5,000 ft.) off the Blue Ridge Parkway and next Saturday will hike to the summit of Mt. Mitchell, over 6,000 ft, the highest peak in Western North Carolina. The Duplicate Bridge Group plays once a month and of course, everyone is from somewhere else and loves it here.  My wallet is filling up with new membership cards including a library card at the Asheville Buncombe County Public Library, a mile from home. I walked there on a warm sunny afternoon the other day.  We’ve biked on the Biltmore Estate with our new Vermont friends who invited us on their passes and even tasted local wines at the Biltmore Estate Winery.

 

            Perhaps it’s the openness of people in Asheville that has made me want to dive right in faster than it has taken to settle in other places. I think about my new friend Sarah, a tall slim girl with a wide smile in her mid twenties who greeted me at my very first Yoga class at the YMCA just two weeks ago.  After the usual “where are you from” conversation she went out of her way to catch me afterwards and formally introduce to me Nathalie the Yoga teacher who had just lead the class.  Then we walked out of class together and she told me she had grown up in Asheville and gone away to college. She confessed that after college she came home to visit and just couldn’t leave because “after all, what better place could there be than Asheville?" I see her from time to time at the Y and she always has a smile for me. I am old enough to be her mother but I like that she wants me to like Asheville as much as she does.

            Moving to Asheville from Vermont has taught me that that there is much more to “where are you from” than I had experienced.  In Dubai, where different nationalities kept to themselves it often didn’t go much beyond this first question even if you would have liked it to.  While as a newcomer it is easy to embrace the friendly atmosphere here, I remind myself occasionally that as a transplanted Ashevillian, I should do the same for the newcomers who just keep coming.