Dear Cyndy,

Than you for your letter. As you know I worry
about your Canaan building plans.  Other than
what I've already written, I have nothing to
add to the subject, and I consider it intrusive
to repeat myself; but if on any issues you think
repetition would be helpful, just ask, and I can
rise to the occasion.

Today Margaret and I took a walk, the first one not
only this trip, but this season. When we were here
in May and June, we stayed around the house, a
disposition not so confining as it sounds, because
the immediate environs are very beautiful. Even the
deer are appreciative, as you can infer from the
image I attached to my last letter.

We drove up to the summit of White Top Mountain,
a 5270 foot peak, the second highest in Virginia,
which looms over the valley and when one peeks
through the gaps in our massive hemlock hedge,
can be seen to rise majestically into the blue sky.
The drive to the mountain is now effortless. A wide
well-graded, paved two lane highway leads to an
elevated gap known as Elk Garden, - a gap in the
southern Appalachians is a Notch or a Col in New
Hampshire and a Pass in the Canadian Rockies. From
Elk Garden there's a 3 mile long single lane gravel
road with turnouts which leads to the summit. The FM
station which I tended there in the summer of 1947
has long since been dismantled, but the memories remain.
This afternoon, we had the mountain to ourselves.
Not even a single other car. We walked a few hundred
feed on the gravel road that skirts the summit and
offers a magnificent 180 degree panoramic view to the
south, into Tennessee and North Carolina toward the
Great Smoky Mountains, the northern peaks of which
one can see when the sky is clear. Today there was a
dense scattering of monumental white cumulus clouds,
but the sun found its way to where we were walking.
One the side of the road, dense growths of goldenrod,
punctuated with stalks of bright violet gentian.
I walked to the crags where, when I was a child, we
had family picnics. I felt at home.

Day after tomorrow, Saturday, my sister arrives.
Eighty-one years old now, she'll be driving from
Detroit, as always fiercely determined to be fiercely
independent, with no one other than myself who cares
or is willing to care for her. After 75 years of 
unremitting friction between us, - of course she says
it's the way I am, and I say it's the way she is, 
and the truth is the profound emotional and intellectual
differences between us which neither of us can make
to go away, I'm not sure I can summon the faith that
things will change, but the determination to change them
is there. We'll see what happens. It'll be interesting:
stuff for a chapter in a novel, if nothing else.

Please keep me informed about any building plans, and
limit them, if at all possible, to window shopping.
Give my best to Ned, and take his advice.

Jochen