With the mud ankle-deep inside her music store, and the water stains climbing 8 feet high on the walls, Angie Buchanan said goodbye to 50 years of teaching music in Spruce Pine.
Then she walked through the stinking sludge of Lower Street and tossed her prized cello on a trash pile.
“My life is in there,” she said. “It’s hard. Very hard.”
The Mitchell County town of 2,000 took a beating from the North Toe River, which destroyed its historic brick riverfront and left neighbors still enduring life without power, water or cell service a week after Hurricane Helene roared through…