Category: Atlanta

on the way home

whbeebe

On the way back home I traveled the same route in reverse; my parent’s home to the Doraville station, then cross Atlanta on MARTA to Hartsfield. It was while I was waiting at Hartsfield that I came across this scene that seemed to sum up some of my thoughts and observations on Atlanta.

For example, that Kia sitting in the main part of the airport points out what has changed with regards to auto manufacturing in Georgia. From 1947 to 2008 GM’s Doraville Assembly plant pumped out Olds and Pontiacs, primarily for the southeast region. It made a lot more sense to make them local to the booming Atlanta market than to build them in Detroit and then ship them cross country. The plant, shutdown and empty, sits next to the Doraville MARTA station. The Kia plant is south of Altanta in 85, near the Georgia/Alabama border.

And Doraville itself is no longer “a touch of country in the city,” the way the Atlanta Rhythm Section sang about the community forty years ago in their 1974 album “Third Annual Pipe Dream.” It has instead become part of the vast urban sprawl that covers the entire metro Atlanta area; gray concrete, worn asphalt roads and parking lots, innumerable strip malls, pine power poles strung up with power lines everywhere, punctuated with entrances to old neighborhoods. I miss the Doraville of forty and more years ago, but there’s no going back to it these days. Like they say, you really can’t go home again.

the greenhouse

whbeebe
One of two blooming orchids on the workbench.

Today was another quiet day at my parent’s place. I helped my dad fix one of his sprinkler heads. His sprinkler system has heads that sit just above his rhododendrons. Those rhododendrons are taller than I am, which means this particular sprinkler was that tall. While all the azaleas and rhododendrons are green and growing they’re well past the blooming season. If I want to see them in bloom I need to come back and visit next spring.

I also spent a little time with my dad walking through the greenhouse. It’s good to see it still in operation, but it’s nothing like the “glory days” of ten, and even five, years ago. There was a very bad freeze one winter and the thermostat in the greenhouse failed to activate the heater in time. When my dad woke up early the next morning, a lot of the orchids had already been frozen out. All that invaluable time invested in those orchids was wiped out. Since he’d was already retired he couldn’t afford to just buy and replace.

An old MSN CDROM is being used to scare away birds that might come in the greenhouse. Old CDROMs are hung all over. That’s my dad cleaning out a bird’s nest in the background from the greenhouse heater.

Even though he still has far more orchids than I have (and will ever have), at the height of his orchid collection both walls would be covered with sitting and hanging orchids, many in bloom. They’d cover both walls as well as hanging down the center. By comparision I have six, down from a dozen I had five years ago. One of them is an orchid he gave me that I haven’t managed to kill yet.


The best I can say is I have the memories of those times, and he has a lot of Kodachrome slides of his orchids. There is a record, living and fixed.