Treasures to Keep

VALLE CRUCIS --

Marie Freeman and her golden retriever Harley looked for treasure as they walked through the woods near home.

They went up over a mountain, past a tree where a bear had left his clawmarks high on the trunk, through a field and down a wide, beaten-down trail to discover an opening where an ancient log cabin sat in a bowl-shaped depression that sheltered it from the wind.

Freeman saw where the cattle used to be kept, walked carefully past shards of pottery on the ground and spotted the roof of an old chicken coop. The outhouse stood nearby.

The cabin was her favorite find of a week spent searching the woods with Harley.

"But like a good Girl Scout, I took photos and left well enough alone," Freeman wrote on the blog where she chronicles her life in the mountains. She likes to think of her excursions as little Easter-egg hunts, trying to find that hidden treasure to post with photographs and brief comments on her Blue Ridge Blog at http://blueridge

blog.blogs.com.

Sometimes it's something she didn't know was there, like the cabin. Sometimes it's something thousands have seen, but Freeman approaches with an artist's eye, using the camera she carries everywhere to capture the shake of a horse's head or the squabble of a bird couple or the symmetry in a hillside of Christmas trees in the snow.

The next month, when it was warmer, Freeman and Harley returned to the old cabin.

"Her flowers were still blooming where she had planted them," Freeman said recently. "You could feel the warmth of the sun when I laid down to take (a photo of) her daffodils. She was still blooming. And that's not something you plan. A little Easter egg."

When Freeman started her blog in 2003, it was one of maybe only a handful in the Northwest North Carolina mountains. She has made more than 1,200 posts since then, gets anywhere from 550 to 1,000 hits a day and offers links to nearly 40 other Boone-area blogs.

In her day job, she is a photographer for Appalachian State University, covering school events and shooting photographs for the university's Web site, brochures and other uses.

Her blog started as a bit of spillover space when she was a photographer at a local newspaper. It offered her a place where space is virtually unlimited and colors appear vivid on a good monitor.

She's largely self-taught and works hard at developing her craft, poring over photography books, attending clinics and gleaning all she can from other photographers, including the late Hugh Morton, a well-known North Carolina photographer.

She says that the writing is the hard part for her.

But consider what she wrote when she and Harley returned to the lost cabin, and found the name Carlene on a rusted mailbox in a box on the porch: "The homestead now has a name. The daffodils have been dubbed by me as ‘Carlene's Hopes.' I rested in the middle of the flowers today. I closed my eyes and felt the heat of the sun on my face. I listened to Harley crunch the bones of a deer's carcass she had found while I thought about Carlene. I wondered what Carlene would be doing on a springlike day such as this. Did she hear the female cardinal nag her man? Did she look through the old glass windows to see if a fox was robbing the roost? Did she ever know love? I wondered what questions I would ask Carlene if I ever was fortunate to make her acquaintance."

And the magic of blogging is that someone knew Carlene and filled in some of the details. Carlene was a proud mountain woman, a nurse who liked to tell some tall tales. She had a twin sister who died at birth. She never married. She was jovial and tender, and took enormous pride in her plants and flowers. In her later years, she rode a bus service to town and liked to be picked up first so she could see everyone else's houses.

And the friend sent photographs of Carlene, shot in 1984. In one photo, Carlene stands in a purple-patterned dress, her arm outstretched as she leans against a log support of her front porch, with her hanging plants as backdrop. In another, ivy creeps up the stone chimney and the logs have thick chinking between them.

And so Carlene became a treasured entry on the Blue Ridge Blog.

Freeman's blog is clean (her mother reads it) and apolitical. It's a kind world, of the bittersweet feelings of parents whose two daughters are trying their wings, of walks in the woods with golden retrievers. She tries to keep it a happy place.

"I think the world needs less snark," Freeman said.

But the blog is also her life's story, a place where hurt and pain intrude, captured in blog entries posted under the heading of "Bad days," like the time in September that her brother had a heart attack and her youngest daughter had pneumonia. They both are better now.

But poor, sweet Harley.

"Harley's only fault is that her life was too short," Freeman wrote the day after Thanksgiving last November.

"I am thankful for my dog Harley," she wrote. "She is not my whole life, but she has made me a (w)holier person. We are the Fric and Frac and the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of these here hills. With a wag of her tail, Harley talks me into long mountain treks….

"I am heartbroken to say that Harley died that Harley died today. She was resting her head on my eldest daughter's lap when she went to sleep. True to Harley's unselfish nature, she masked the severity of her illness.… Harley was deathly ill. Her kidneys were failing -- there was to be no more chasing tennis balls in her future, or eating. Or comfortable living.... The four of us talked with the vet. We all knew, especially Harley, what was happening. Harley deserved comfort and dignity in her dying.

"Maybe I can talk more about it later. But not now."

Harley was 9 years old.

And now there's a new dog, Annie, a golden retriever who is 8 months old, still puppyish and a bit of a pain, but friendly and curious.

She likes to go on walks. She's learning to fill the paws of a best dog friend who once accompanied a woman who continues to head out on a hunt for treasures and posting them in her Blue Ridge Blog.

■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.