Lo and behold, a property came up for sale through a realtor in the parish—for $10,000, a very large sum for us at the time that became our first mortgage loan. 412 Armstrong Avenue was a very small summer place perched on a large lot with a panoramic view of Hendersonville and the mountains beyond from way up high near the town’s water reservoir. Need I add that it would take a lot of work to make a home? But it was on nearly an acre with room for a garden and what would be a fine view of the city—and northern exposure for an art studio—if there were an additional floor above the existing roof. The house wound up requiring a massive amount of work to update and winterize, including tearing off its roof, shoring-up all of the basement, and adding a three story winding wooden staircase and second story.

I had sworn I would never move into a house that needed work—after all the growing-up years of grinding construction work on family homes earlier in Miami. So much for swearing!

Then, following a very brief stint teaching art studio classes at the local community college, Kenneth decided he’d rather try to make a living with the carpentry and construction skills he’d learned growing up—his family, too, had built their own homes. For years I had said I’d never marry anyone in construction of any kind. So much for that!

Readers of this account can likely see where all of this quickly headed. At the time, I could not. A recent email discussion among family members tells bits of the tale:

From: Theresa Pepin December 7, 2016 at 9:14PM

. . . I should recognize, with appreciation, that Daddy and “the three R’s”—the name he often used for them when he didn’t call them The Three Little Ones—did help Kenneth and me with our first house on Armstrong Avenue in Hendersonville. 

We all tore off the roof of the old house. Then we tore down a wooden building that was going to be demolished anyway in an old camp a few blocks away and brought all of the wood over in the old station wagon, load by load. The three girls took all of the nails out of all of those boards so that Kenneth and Daddy and Kenneth’s father Buddy and his brother Andrew could reuse them on the new roof, walls, and subfloor.

In between his other construction and loader jobs, Daddy helped us with the old house’s plumbing and electrical. I can still see Rita hauling Daddy’s electrical toolbox in to start work.

From: Rita Esterwood December 8 6:36AM

Ha! I remember those car rides with the old wood. Just reading that made me remember the feel of getting to sit for a prolonged period of time and how nice that felt! 

We tore down a couple other houses with Kenneth too didn’t we?

From: Veronica Bower December 8, 2016 at 2:13 PM

I have wonderful memories of my time living with Tede and Kenneth at the Armstrong house . . . . looking for your dog O’Neill . . . the time I cut the tube of caulk for Kenneth caulking the windows. The hole I cut at the end was supposed to be a “small bead size” and not the size of a dime! That patient look he gave me …

I have fond memories of living upstairs and always feeling like it was my own little space in the world!

From: Theresa Pepin December 8, 2016 at 8:32 PM

We are very glad you remember your stay with us fondly. The second floor was very high and had a great view—it was like being in an aerie. Kenneth did some of his best paintings in that studio.

Rose also stayed with us when she took her first in-town job and I often tell a story about her stay. She complained over and over again about how cold the house was even though I thought it was hugely better with the insulation and the wood Jøtul than the freezing old trailer where I had to run kerosene heaters in the bathroom for a couple of hours before I could take a bath in the tiny bathroom. Anyway, Rose moves to her own apartment and she invites Kenneth and me to dinner. Well, we get there and we sit down at the kitchen table with other guests and it is so cold in her apartment that you could see your breath. So we ask Rose: Why so cold? And then she starts to complain at length about how high the utility bills are at the apartment—what a difference being the one who pays the bills makes!

Good times! O’Neill was a sweetie.

Our father insisted on supervising the (over) building of a circular staircase in one back corner of the house to get up to the high second story using, of course, poured and steel-reinforced concrete for the foundation as well as hurricane clips (!?) per South Florida building standards. We used to joke that if the entire Laurel Park mountainside should ever be hit by a hurricane or tornado, at least that one circular staircase would be left standing. (Editorial comment in 2022: Little did we know then that climate change makes that kind of severe weather event a distinct possibility.) I still have our father’s plan for that stalwart staircase:

[plan]

For a long time, the Swiss-Family-Robinson-like house was a true adventure to live in: There was the “open bathroom” on the second floor with no walls surrounding it for months, although there was a roof over the entire second floor, so that was something. I doubt it mattered too much in terms of privacy, though, because it was higher up than anything else in the neighborhood. I cooked mostly in a wedding-gift crock pot in the claw-footed, cast iron bathtub, removing it when we needed to bathe or shower. The only way to get up to that bathroom, until Daddy’s elaborate 3-story circular staircase was completed, was by ladders on the back decks. We spent a lot of time maneuvering our way from the refrigerator out on the lower deck up to the cooking-bathtub until the kitchen could be finished. Pretty good meals, though, when you come right down to it. Kenneth still talked about those meals decades later—it had been such a revelation to him that you did not have to fry something in grease to make it taste good. Or, at least, that was what he said.

Construction permits and inspections were fraught experiences for us in Henderson County since Kenneth was working on houses down in Columbus, NC, during the day and only working on our house in the evenings and on weekends. Following logically from our Pepin expertise in building, I did the electrical plan to submit to the inspectors, in consultation with Kenneth and Daddy. The county and city weren’t quite ready for a female doing that—I am sure they are more so by now—but they eventually approved the plans. The girls and I did most of that installation with Daddy supervising and we passed inspection. When the inspector came to review our insulation, he walked in the door and said: “Who in tarnation did this insulation? It looks like a dressmaker done it!”  Me: “Well, as a matter of fact . . .” But he did pass us, once he’d checked just about every inch of it, unaccustomed as he was to insulation meticulously measured, cut, installed, and taped. I had just about frozen my first winter in the mountains and I was going to make very sure that our insulation was abundant and flawless.

With me, the three girls also mixed the mortar for the big front wall of the house, when Kenneth rebuilt it completely with stone. We kept telling Kenneth that he should only do a few feet at a time but, of course, Kenneth ignored the dubious looks of his girl-helpers and kept going full speed ahead. He had just placed the final stones on the top crown when we all watched in horror as the wall started to buckle and come down. Kenneth, of course, raced from one end to another trying to save the bulging wall but all of us girls were smart enough to stay well away. The entire thing wound up on the ground.

I had never seen Kenneth so angry—cursing loudly like the sailor he had once been—until he looked around at us and realized we were terrified by how upset he was, well trained by our mercurial father in such instances to register no reaction lest it be the wrong one, and so he started to laugh, and then we all laughed hysterically with him. We stopped laughing soon enough: It was not so much fun to take all that mortar off all those stones and start all over again. But I have to hand it to him: He did learn, and the next day did a mere half wall at a time, which the rest of us still thought was far too much to build at one time.

I look back and can hardly believe the amount of work and the scale of the accomplishment on the part of all of us—as well as a pretty good attitude, most of the time.

* * * * *

After most of the interior work was done, Daddy came back with equipment in tow to grade a garden space in the side yard and a badminton court on a lower, level terrace in back. I remember how much satisfaction he took in working from the loader with Kenneth on the ground to move large rocks into position on the retaining walls—Goliath (6-ft 7-in and 235 lbs.) in the trenches and David (5 ft 4-in and 144 lbs.) at the mighty controls. From among all the sons-in-law, Kenneth was able to spend the most time with Daddy in his last years; they shared much the same skill set for everything from artistic talent to construction, although their personalities were entirely different. Kenneth invariably charmed our often-difficult father into a better mood; for his part, Maestro Pepin even deigned to teach Kenneth music and how to play the fiddle. Soon, Kenneth built a small garden house between the garden and the court. All four of us girls—the Three Little Ones and myself—played on one side of the net against Kenneth on the other—his arm span so great there wouldn’t have been any real play to the game otherwise. He could serve the birdie so high and fast we couldn’t even see it in the sky until it came back down and hit us.

My job at the public library was almost directly at the foot of the long hill that our house was built on, about a mile down. I could save a considerable amount of gas money in those very lean days by coasting all that way. It was like taking a carnival ride first thing in the morning—I was fully awake by the time I arrived, which was a good thing because I’ve never been much of a morning person. Coming back home at the end of the day was a different story.

At the excellent, service-oriented, and very busy library, the community we served was about evenly split between “summer people” and “mountain people.” It was at first hard for me to understand the local patois and I was quickly consumed by the challenge of communicating and matching widely varying needs to information and reading materials. Eventually, I would obtain a pre-engineering degree from Blue Ridge Technical College and I would work full-time for Mother Earth News as an editorial research librarian. I always give credit to Mrs. Elizabeth Marshall, the head librarian at Henderson County Public Library for inspiring me to go on later to pursue a Master’s in Library and Information Science. Someday I will write a tribute to her: She was an amazing woman and director with an intuitive gift for understanding people from all walks of life. When I went on to teach at the university, I often used lessons she exemplified.

We loved our first home and neighborhood. Except for one scary adolescent next door, the other neighbors were mostly summer residents and retired people who had lived eventful lives: One couple from New York City were jazz buffs who had known all the great players of Harlem and the Village; another wintered every year in Marbella; another had family visit from all over the world in between their own travels. Of course, once they saw what we had done with the Armstrong house, they all wanted Kenneth for their winter-time, seasonal caretaker and summer-time handyman. The only resident who ever put us down in the area for not being “to the manner born” was the occasional snooty crone, such as the one at a Garden Club fundraiser where I inquired about the care of a particular house plant for sale, who told me that “if I didn’t already know how to care for it, maybe it doesn’t really suit you.” Of course, that made me want it all the more but I was too young and deferential to insist on buying it from her. I finally found a specimen elsewhere and it eventually grew to occupy nearly all of a large greenhouse bay at Lanntair Farm. Years later, Kenneth and I would substantially support both public libraries and public gardens in our communities. At the same sale in Flat Rock, my mother insisted I buy some wool Hudson Bay blankets at a near-giveaway price. I’d never even heard about them, but have used those wonderfully warm covers for decades and only recently discovered how much they are worth. More lessons learned.

At Armstrong we adopted one of the Pepin family’s dogs, renaming Brownie to O’Neill because I’d recently gotten to know the senator’s work well in a research and writing assignment. O’Neill lived long enough to get to finally rest at Lanntair Farm from his many years of sentry duty guarding family members. The Pepin and Pace families all came for big Sunday dinners—both sets of parents, Kenneth’s grandparents, uncle, aunt, and The Three Little Ones—Roni, Rose and Rita—who were growing up fast. My old upright piano finally arrived from Miami and, for a time, I hosted and played with a ragtime band at the house; I still like to play stride piano that I learned from band members at that time. Rosie and Roni began jobs while going to school after they graduated high school. Both of them moved in with us, in succession, as a transition from the family home in Tuxedo to their own apartments and homes. We made blackberry wine one year that became a particularly notable vintage—it blew up all over the wood cabinets in the kitchen. Very hard to clean. We joked that maybe the girls should have made wine and used it for dynamiting the roads and massive rocks up at Lake Falls in 1972—another story for another time. Perhaps the wine would have done the trick better.

Time flew by. I doubt I was ever grateful enough for any of it while in the Land of the Sky. Happiness is wasted on the young. Every time I go through the area, I go by Armstrong Avenue to catch a view of Kenneth’s stone work on the big front wall of the house—as solid and beautiful as ever. Even after 42 years together, Kenneth and I would always think of those first few years of marriage as the toughest and happiest years of our lives. Long after, there is still a lot to be grateful for in the remembering.