Welcoming Spring in NC

OK, I’m a few weeks late regarding welcoming Spring — but life has intervened. This is a guest post, again from wordsmith Elizabeth Hudson, the editor of the superior Our State magazine. I’ve been to Omni Grove Park Inn (what she writes about), and it is indeed wonderful…

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People come to the Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville for the great fireplaces, those caverns of stacked stone that feel like they could heat the whole mountain. They come for the comfort of the building itself: the weight of its rock, the cool in its shadowed halls and subterranean pools. They come for the craftsman legacy of the historic Stickley furniture, and for the names of guests that linger here — Fitzgerald, Edison, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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People come to the mountains for the seasons we already know how to praise — fall, for the bright show of leaves; winter, for the snow in Boone and Banner Elk, for the spectacle of frozen waterfalls in Highlands and Cashiers.

But spring is the surprise.

On an early spring morning at the Grove Park Inn, I found a window seat in the Blue Ridge Dining Room for breakfast. The golf course below had begun to green, a brightness that hadn’t been there the day before. Beyond the Asheville skyline, the Blue Ridge rose, not fully leafed out yet, but awakening to the season.

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Within seconds, a kindhearted server set down a cup of hot coffee and motioned me toward the breakfast buffet, a spread so abundant it needed two rooms to contain it.

Two rooms.

Not one long table, not one orderly line, but two rooms: stations for the warm things and the brown things and the buttery things; stations for the bright things and the cold things and the crisp things. Fruit stacked in tiers. Breads in baskets. Eggs in all their various forms — scrambled, quiche’d, omelette’d, sunny-sided. Little bowls, platters, pitchers of fresh juices catching the light, nothing held back, as if abundance is simply what is done here, not only at the Grove Park Inn but everywhere in these mountains.

Outside that window, beyond the glass, that same unfolding, nature giving so much more than it seemed to hold the day before.

Waterfalls — Linville, Looking Glass, Soco, Crabtree — that were frozen just weeks ago have thawed and widened, fed by rain and runoff. The woods are in that thin-green stage before they turn to full shade on the trails at DuPont Forest and Craggy Gardens. Down low, moss creeps over on stone walls and old steps, softening their edges. Ferns unfurl beside the creeks, a carpet of green lace as neat as anything a careful hand might arrange.

If fall is full of red and yellow and orange, spring turns that wheel — greens and blues and that shy purple that keeps close to the ground: trillium, violets, periwinkle.

In the mountains, we’re used to looking up — at overlooks, peaks, the long view. Spring asks for something else. Look down, it says. There are rewards for the humble gaze.

The farmers markets here are full now, too, with ramps, sharp and unmistakable, and asparagus gathered in bright bundles. You could make a meal from what’s there the same way you move through those two rooms at breakfast: a little of this, a little of that — seeing, in the offering, a whole landscape. More than enough…

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