I hesitated to post this as it was and is a poinant reminder of my Dad's passing last October 13th, and might make some people sad.  The purpose in my sharing this is not to evoke sympathy, but to give you a glimpse of my father in his later years and to show you how eloquently my Son Aaron wrote about him.  I am at peace with his death as he lived to be 90 and he and his body were just worn out.  We lovingly referred to him as a "tough ole bird".  He liked that anology and would smile when you told him that. You would've had to have known my Dad and the rough edges he had that made him who he was.  My oldest Son, Aaron (one of his grandsons) summed it up in this poinant Tribute to PaPaw.  The entire family and community loved it.  I was very proud of Aaron for writing this and it shows how much writing talent he has.  There is a book in him somewhere.  I think we would all like to be remembered this lovingly. ( Dad grew up in the Western North Carolina Mountains and we lived about 12 miles from Asheville when I was growing up).

A Tribute to our PaPaw

 As one of the last of a breed of country people who survived the Great Depression on yellow-eye beans, buttermilk cornbread, salt-pork and their wits, James Reeves and his wife Clem, guided their family through the kind of true "hard times" that are as distant to us now as the frayed and faded photographs of that era.

He was as raw-boned and knotty as the rough-hewn cabin he helped his father build with strong young hands once, in the spring of youth.

He was as simple and rugged as the wormy-chestnut furniture he would build later in his life, with those same work-hardened hands...and he was at times as unexpectedly spry as the melodies he would play on his beloved banjo or fiddle.

In recent years, he was as quietly enduring as the gently rolling mountains he hunted and fished, worked and logged as a younger man. And like those mountains, he too was finally softened by time's own patient hand.

Now, his 90 years have grizzled him as white as the blanket of snow that covers these mountains he will soon sleep under...

And so now as we lay him down to sleep, to nourish and enrich the soil of these mountains that nourished him all of his life, we know he is going home...

Home to rejoin his beloved Clem . . . .

Home to the sun-warmed hillsides of his Sandy Mush boyhood. . . .

Home to the russet and gold splendor God blesses us with in these mountains every autumn  . . . and into the arms of our Heavenly Father.