The Return of the Pipers

The timing of Easter and Spring Break means that I get a few days off the road and a chance to just enjoy being at home. These last few months since Christmas have involved considerably more travel than what I had originally planned for (and I'm not complaining...really). I do love the work I get to do but I think regular Roediger House blog readers understand well how much I value the time I get to be back in Winston-Salem.

Speaking of people being back in Winston-Salem, that happy and fun couple you see pictured to the right are using their own Spring Break days to return to this fair city. These folks are Karissa and Jon Piper, who now live up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

For my first three years living in the Roediger House, the Pipers were my neighbors from down the street. As I've mentioned previously in a blog post, these two first spotted my house when it was for sale and pushed, cajoled, persuaded, and otherwise compelled me to buy it back in 2003.

We were all rather inseparable for a few years, and then Jon got a fantastic job opportunity in Cleveland and Karissa, who'd twice been a student of mine at Wake Forest, landed a high school teaching position in a school district outside Cleveland that's pretty hard to get a job in.

Because Jon works in the medical imaging business, and because there are hospitals here in Winston-Salem and in Greensboro that are among his client base, he has been able to visit the Roediger House several times. But this was Karissa's first trip back to Winston-Salem in seven years.

That is much too long. So I'll count on them to return again before long.