Are you home if you can’t get in it? We had driven 2,116 miles and returned five and a half days after we started. John opened the garage door with the clicker. We each took an armload of things, but we didn’t get very far. The door between the garage and house was locked. Our son was here while we were gone, and we had asked him to lock the house when he left. He did exactly what we wanted. The only problem was, we assumed all car keys had a house key with them. We failed to add them to the Honda sets when we bought the car a few months ago.

We checked with the neighbors to see if they had a key. We had talked about it, but we never followed through. An emergency call went out to John $, and luckily he was in Asheville, not at his place an hour away. He agreed to come rescue us. Waiting wasn’t bad. We were close enough to the house that our phones and computer could access the internet I sat in the sun on the front porch and read today’s newspaper, while John listened to one of his favorite streaming radio stations. Soon $ was here. We scurried in and turned up the heat. $ helped replace a smoke detector battery that would have driven us nuts if we hadn’t. That incessant chirping, which started after he left yesterday, was unbearable. It was good to be home and inside it.

Getting home was a bit of a gamble. We knew we were taking a chance going through the gorge. $ warned us to check before we came home that way, because many wildfires have made the Smoky Mountains more smoky than ever. We could see the thick haze from Tennessee. If the road had been threatened by fire, it would have been closed. As it was, we saw signs that the tunnels were closed. We could get through, but we had to go single file. It turned out that the tunnels were wide open, but we were following a huge wind turbine blade on a truck. It was a beautiful thing, sculpted in graceful curves. Ahead of the blade was half a house. Neither of those things could have gotten around the tunnel detours. Neighbor Shawn said she saw two blades on I-40, so she must have seen one that went through before or after ours.

Now that we are home, I’ll be putting out fires of a different sort. The computer has been unable to upgrade its operating system, and the phone declares it has no SIM card. If both refuse to operate at the same time, I may just crawl in bed and catch up on sleep. That would be a good idea, don’t you think?