Visions of Summer

 Everyone wears their Sunday best. The sounds of the band starting up, starts the parade of kids that are hopping off jeeps and trucks to get to the front door in time. You breath in the sweet summer mountain air of mid July, and know this is where you belong. The brook that runs along the old Barn that the dances are held in adds to the great sounds and sights of a summer night in the mountains of North Carolina. The sweet sound of a fiddle and the accompaniment of a guitar, banjo, and stand-up bass start things up as tons of people of all ages go into the barn .The guys  take a girl by the hand and head for the worn dance floor that is just about to fall through but maybe next year. So many have shuffled across these floors for decades .Following Glen Bannermans’s calls as they echo throughout the old barn.  So it begins with the bowing and curtsying, and grabbing the hand of your dance partner. As you look around the room you see all the different people that you have grown up with over these 15 almost 16 years of coming here. Then you see some you don’t know that are experiencing this unique tradition for the first time they don’t quite know what to do awkwardly shuffle stepping across the floor. But the great people that have done this before, and remember there first time always lend a helping hand. After the Dance if you are a true to the tradition of a Saturday night in the North Carolina mountains . You head to the blue cone for some ice cream. It is a small little shack with a big neon blue cone hence the name that sits just in front of the old rail road tracks in town . Everyone sits around, and talks about how there year was, and who likes who, and who was looking good at the dance. Who was going to play ultimate Frisbee tomorrow? Friends having fun without worry just enjoying stories, and laughter shared between them. Then you all go back to a friend’s house to hang out play guitar, sit by a fire, and just hang out listening to the swirling of the creek, and all the noises that are coming with the steady nightfall of the North Carolina Mountains.