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Virginia & David's Home Page
online since August 19, 1996
updated March 17, 2023

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Below is some basic information about us


Click here to read our 2022 Christmas letter

We are Virginia and David Garrett of Newport, the county seat of Cocke County , Tennessee. The picture of us at left was taken in August 2022 at the wedding of a dear friend's daughter in Pennsylvania.

Weddings and dancing are times we are too happy to be self-conscious, and take decent pictures. Since we have had three big family weddings since 2006 and spent a lot of time dancing since 2007, there are probably more good pictures of us around than there ever were before. Some are in the Galleries portion of this website.

We look for dancing opportunities wherever we can find them. We are also prone to get up & dance anywhere and anytime the opportunity presents itself. We are best at rhumba, chacha, and swing, and can do 5 or 6 other dances reasonably well. We are members of both the East Tennessee Ballroom Dance Club. It's good to be able to go out dancing again after the COVID-19 hiatus.

As you can tell from the picture we still enjoy each others' company after being married for over 51 years.

We have lots of friends scattered around the USA and beyond, and this home page is one of our ways of staying in touch. Think of it as a frequently updated year round Christmas newsletter.

The picture at right was taken a few miles from our home by daughter Arwen quite a few years ago. It helps explain why, though we are not from this area originally, we were (and are) happy to stay here since we moved here in 1978. We are both retired, but the oldest mountain chain on Earth our home.

We love our children (two are homegrown, and one we claim as our "French daughter!"). They are all grown, married, self supporting and happy. Three for three is pretty good. We also have three grandchildren and our French daughter has two children; one is our godson.

Virginia worked at the Cocke County office of the Tennessee Department of Human Services here in Newport from 1984 through 2004, and then as a supervisor at the DHS Regional Call Center in Morristown until 2015. For 16 seasons Virginia also worked a second job at DollyWood, a local theme park. She retired from DHS in April 2015, after over 31 years.

Virginia also loves working in the yard when she can, and has filled it with flowers in the spring and summer. One special pride and joy is the variety of daylilies. We are both also major "backyard birders". To see some of the results of our work, check out our family's house and yard page . For some years we have also had an extensive and productive vegetable garden. A recent project is planting native flowers and other plants; the birds and butterflies love them. Virginia is an active member of the Heartsease Garden Club.

Virginia and David are 1969 graduates of Messick High School, a historic high school in Memphis which was closed in 1981 and demolished in 1982. There are still a lot of old Messick alumni around though. David is the webmaster of Still On The Prowl, the Messick Class of 1969 website. We think both our school and our particular class are exceptional. We gather frequently.
Virginia and David are also both 1973 graduates of Rhodes College , known as Southwestern at Memphis while we were there; click on its link to check out our alma mater, one of the nation's best small liberal arts institutions. Our daughter followed in our footsteps and became the fifth person in our family to get a Bachelor of Arts degree there. (Virginia's two sisters are also alumni).

We also enjoy birdwatching and nature watching in general - we've turned our yard into a mini bird sanctuary, and are concentrating on more native plants to attract butterflies and other interesting insects - , good music of (almost) all sorts, and good movies!

After retirement we became avid hikers. While we do some hiking in the Big South Fork and Cumberland Plateau, and look for trails wherever we travel, we hike mostly in the Smoky Mountains where we live. We love hiking to see waterfalls, wildflowers in season, fungi, and most  especially enjoy all the small surprises of the trail. We are "all season" hikers, we have the gear to enjoy hiking in the ice and snow. We received our 500 mile Smoky Mountain pins in 2018 and just kept going. Weplan a weekly hike together in the mountains. In July 2021 David completed the naturalist certification program offered by the University of Tennessee through the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont and received certification as a Southern Appalachian Naturalist.

Another thing we enjoy is what could be called "nature traveling", taking trips to observe seasonal changes in favorite wild areas. These days we particularly enjoy regular trips to the cypress swamps of South Carolina and Georgia and the coastal marshes of South Carolina and Georgia.

One thing that most people find quite odd about us - we have not had TV service in the house since 1999. Obviously we have a TV since we watch a lot of movies. We aren't diehards, we just don't get anything from TV that would justify the expense. We discontinued the service when we realized we hadn't even watched it in more than 6 months.

David graduated in 1977 from the School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. From 1978 till 2016 he served as (first vicar, then) rector at Episcopal Church of the Annunciation here in Newport. We are still active members of the Newport community, but attend All Saints' Episcopal Church in Morristown since David's retirement. David does every-other-Sunday supply work, usually at Trinity Episcopal Church in Gatlinburg.

David enjoys photography and enters local and regional photography contests. A sampling can be seen in the Galleries part of the website. We live in an area with many rich photo opportunities.

Virginia was part of a local Middle Eastern folk dance troupe, and in 2007 we took up ballroom dancing, and greatly enjoy it! We are members of the East Tennessee Ballroom Dance Club in Knoxville and make their dances as often as we can. We are better at Latin dances than the "smooth" dances like foxtrot, though we do a pretty decent swing.

Animals have always been part of our lives; dogs (especially greyhounds), cats (lots), fish (lots), gerbils, birds, turtles; we're not happy unless other species are around us, even though they're a lot the of hassle! Check out  "critter pages" on the site menu.

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