Odds' Blog

Day 1

I'm in the storyteller's cottage. It's nighttime, and warm outside. No breeze. I'm a pilgrim to the Mecca of storytelling, Jonesborough, Tennessee. And as any pilgrim is, I'm wide-eyed, in my case at the soft beauty of the Tennessee hills and hollows, lying in the haze, betopped by houses of all various kinds, from the meanest of trailers to the finest of McMansions.

It arrived in a tall, corrugated cardboard shipping box that was almost as tall as I am. The UPS deliveryman had rung the bell, and I'd lifted the third floor window (one of the few new windows in my otherwise ancient house in New Hampshire) and told him to leave it outside the door. It was drizzling. I knew I'd have to go downstairs immediately to get it out of the weather.