I went to visit my friends Gloria and Curt the other day. They live just uphill from the streets of Biltmore Village, which was, along with the River Arts District, the most wrecked area of Asheville during and after the storms.

        I've spent many lovely hours in Biltmore Village over the years that I have lived in Asheville. It was built to house employees of the Biltmore Estate and their families back in the heyday of the Vanderbilts. The Village is classic "Olde Towne", small Tudor style houses and buildings along cobbled, winding, narrow streets with lots of trees, benches, greenery and an almost overdose of quaintness. It was always a huge tourist magnet due not only to its proximity to the Estate but for the many excellent restaurants and locally owned boutiques (there were some national chain stores too, but I like to think the classy consignment store where I browsed evening gowns once with my sister gave the 'shall remain nameless but you'd recognize it if I said it' clothing outlet a run for its money.)

       Some of my favorite memories of Biltmore Village are from the lunch my dad and I had at the Cantina, a Mexican restaurant, and lunch at Andaaz (Indian) with my sister and niece. I also liked going to the Well-Bred Bakery with my laptop on a summer afternoon to sit in their courtyard and have an iced tea.

       All those places are currently shells.

   

The Cantina's kitchen equipment is piled haphazardly on its patio, covered in mud. The front doors were open, though no one was around. What I thought was a ghost costume left over from Halloween is actually a hazmat suit.

        This was the Well-Bred Bakery and Cafe. A man poked at some debris with a shovel on the patio that used to hold cafe tables. Climbing a mountain starts with one small step, I guess.

Curt joined me for a walk down by the Swannanoa River, which rose (he estimated) about 20 feet above its banks.          

        The debris littering the banks was astonishing, but the starkest evidence of how fiercely the river rose is the several trucks that were washed along and now are wedged at bizarre angles in and near the water.

        We then made our way over to Biltmore Avenue, the main street running through the Village. The businesses on Biltmore Ave that were on the bridge under which the Swannanoa runs look to me to have been the most underwater. Here are the remainder of a Japanese restaurant, a place called Moe's Southwest Grill, and what used to be the quaintest McDonalds I've ever seen (the buildings in Biltmore Village that don't date back to the era of the Biltmore Estate were required to be built in the style of the day, and this fast food joint did just that, echoing the Tudor lines and tan color scheme.)

    There's also great news: the North Fork reservoir's water is being filtered and piped into our houses again! So the boil water notice was lifted this past week and Asheville residents have the all clear to use the water coming out of our faucets as usual. More restaurants can reopen or move back into serving their full hours and menus. Hooray! With luck and good will, the city can recoup some of the revenue it lost from the usually-busy fall leaf-peeping season.

       This news alone is enough to give many, many thanks for.

      The water problems we had here-- and the other losses people endured-- have forced recognition of how much we take for granted, how much we depend on each other, and how much trust we place in each other, our fellow human beings.

       Thank you all for reading this and following along as I've tried to show the equal parts devastation and spring-like resiliency I see here. I imagine those of you who live in places where hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes or any other sort of disaster have hit will sigh with solidarity when I say that although the headlines move on, the story doesn't.