August PineStraw 2015 by PineStraw Magazine

Come enjoy the Southern charm and relaxed sophistication of Pinehurst & Southern Pines

Foster

Jamie McDevitt, Broker/Owner 910.724.4455 JamieMcDevitt.com Jamie@JamieMcDevitt.com

Everything downtown Southern Pines has to offer... and MORE! 580 E. Massachusetts Avenue offered at $679,000

107 NE Broad Street Southern Pines, NC

It doesn’t take all day to get a massage ... unless, of course, you want it to.

A typical treatment at The Spa at Pinehurst usually lasts 50-80 minutes. But with spacious lounge areas, saunas, whirlpools, a swimming pool plus healthy snacks and smoothies, you can relax all day. So call the Spa to schedule an appointment that will benefit you long after your treatment ends.

$25 off treatments Monday-Thursday.

Located next to The Carolina Hotel • Village of Pinehurst, North Carolina • 855.318.6710 • pinehurst.com

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August 2015

Volume 11, No. 8 Departments

Features 63 To Forget Who You Are Poetry by Malena MĂśrling

64 Love Over Par By Jim Moriarty

A journeyman pro and a heart stomped like a grape

68 Milky Thighs and Shady Snakes

By Celia Rivenbark

A romance that slithers into your heart

71 Money in the Mattress

By Paul Crenshaw

A lonely detective in quest of five big ones

74 Along the Indian Heritage Trail By Serena Brown

Part Two of our Scenic Byways journey

74 Upstairs, Downstairs By Deborah Salomon

Living over the store gets the glamor treatment

87 Almanac

By Rosetta Fawley

Goat cheese and a kingdom of figs

Cover Photograph by Tim Sayer

15 Simple Life Jim Dodson

18 PinePitch 21 Instagram Winners 23 Cos and Effect Cos Barnes

25 The Omnivorous Reader Brian Lampkin

29 Bookshelf

Kimberly Daniels Taws & Angie Tally

33 Proper English Serena Brown

35 Papadaddyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mindfield Clyde Edgerton

37 Vine Wisdom Robyn James

39 The Kitchen Garden Jan Leitschuh

43 Out of the Blue Deborah Salomon

45 Hometown Bill Fields

47 Seen & Unseen Majorie Hopkins

49 Birdwatch

Susan Campbell

51 A Novel Year Wiley Cash

53 Sporting Life Tom Bryant

57 Golftown Journal Lee Pace

88 99 107

August Calendar SandhillSeen Thoughts from the Manshed Geoff Cutler

109 The Accidental Astrologer Astrid Stellanova

111 PineNeedler Mart Dickerson

112 SouthWords Tom Allen

August 2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

New Colors, Styles of Towels & Rugs.

Opulence of Southern Pines and DUXIANA at The Mews, 280 NW Broad Street, Downtown Southern Pines, NC 910.692.2744

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SOUTHERN PINES | 280 NW BROAD STREET | SOUTHERN PINES, NC 28387 | 910-725-1577

RALEIGH | 400 DANIELS STREET | RALEIGH, NC 27605 | 919-467-1781

Pinehurst: Historic C. Louis Meyer compound with 10 Bdrms, 8 Baths, located adjacent to Forest Creek Golf Club. Features 3 Homes, orignal Farm House - circa 1895, 2 Guest Cottages, 8-Stall Barn, Pool, & Log Cabin circa 1700’s. $4,050,000 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

Old Town Pinehurst: Premier property located on the 5th hole of the famous Pinehurst #2 course! Completely updated. Custom gourmet kitchen. Connected “Carriage House”. 4BR/5FullBA/2HalfBA. www.220midlandroad.isforsale.com $1,900,000 Bill Smith 910.528.4090

Knollwood Heights: “Homewood” a historic masterpiece! Sophisticated Colonial Revival style home with more than 9,000 square feet of elegant living space. Estate includes 4.66 acres of lush landscape. Breathtaking details throughout. $1,590,000 Bill Smith 910.528.4090

CCNC: Handsome Colonial situated on 2.5 magnificently landscaped acres. Renovated from the studs up! Exquisite detail in every aspect of the finishes from marble counter tops to paneled walls. 4BR/4.5BA. $1,550,000 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

Pinewild: Spectacular French Country Executive home, custom designed for the site. Magnificent golf course views, pond, and hillside water feature with waterfalls. Perfect retreat or home for entertaining! $1,399,000 Eva Toney 910.638.0972

Knollwood Heights: Charming estate designed by

CCNC: Beautiful Golf Front home on 5 acres overlooking pond & 10th hole of Cardinal Course. Stunning blend of traditional architectural detail. Light, open plan with lovely amenities. 4BR, 4FBA, 2HBA. $1,325,000 Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

Old Town Pinehurst: “Shadowlawn” an English tudor & one of the finest estates in Old Town. Lush grounds with 1.5 acres. Hardwood floors, 7-frplcs, elevator, whole house generator. Separate Guest House. 6BR/7+BA. $1,250,000 Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

Donald Ross Area: Elegant 5BR, 4BA home completely remodeled in 2009. Massive master suite, gourmet kitchen with double ovens, 2-garage spaces for over 8 cars, and in-ground pool. www.15MelrosePlace.com $1,250,000 Team Townley 910.690.7080

National Pinehurst #9: Golf front perfection overlooking the 13th fairway of Nicklaus course. Ideal for entertaining indoors or outside by the pool! Luxurious home with elegant details. 5BR/5.5BA. $998,000 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

Horse Country: “Landings Farm” has direct access to the Walthour-Moss Foundation. Consisting of 14 acres with more land available. 7-Stall Barn, Fenced Paddocks, 3-Bay Carport w/workshop. 3BR/4BA. $825,000 Debbie Darby 910.783.5193

Pinehurst #2: Golf Front! 3BR, 3.5BA home on 8th Hole of Course #2. Great views and 3,600 sq.ft. of living space. Owner will pay the initiation fee and 1st year dues for an acceptable offer before 8/31/15. www.290InverraryRoad.com $775,000 Team Townley 910.690.7080

text “BHHSNC305” to 87778

Donald Ross in the 1920s. Leaded windows, wide plank oak flooring, 3-Frplcs, & 2BR/2BA Carriage house. 4BR/7.5BA. Broker/Owner. $1,395,000 Bill Smith 910.528.4090

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Southern Pines: 910.692.2635 • 105 W. Illinois Avenue • Southern Pines, NC 28387 ©2015 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of American, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC.

CCNC: Meticulously renovated and maintained! Golf front on 9th fairway of Dogwood course. Inviting and open floor plan for comfortable living and entertaining. 4BR/4BA. $735,000 Bill Smith 910.528.4090

Fairwoods on 7: New Roof, New HVAC, Refinished Hardwood, and Fresh Paint makes this home Move-in Ready! Over 3,700 sq.ft., generous room sizes. 3BR/3.5BA. 120HearthstoneRoad.com $699,000 Team Townley 910.690.7080

Pinewild: Elegant home featuring a 2-story foyer, 4BR, 4.5BA, formal dining room, a chef’s kitchen with custom cabinets, granite counters, breakfast room. See www.40DevonDrive.com $695,000 Team Townley 910.690.7080

CCNC: Golf front home! Great view of Dogwood’s second hole, 4BR/5.5BA, Carolina Rm, Game Rm, kitchen w/island, Master sutie w/his & her baths ~ a home for family living & entertaining. Walk to practice range! $675,000 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

Fairwoods on 7: This home has spacious rooms! Large kitchen & Carolina rooms with sweeping views of the 12th & 17th holes of Pinehurst #7. New heat pump in 2013. www.20FirestoneDrive.com $610,000 Team Townley 910.690.7080

Old Town Pinehurst: Charming Cottage, circa 1920, 2 blocks from the heart of the Village. Old fashioned front porch. Beautiful gardens front & back, overlooking pool with a waterfall. Beautifully maintained & updated! 3BR/3BA. $529,000 Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

Donald Ross Drive: Walk to Pinehurst Village from this 3,700

Old Town Pinehurst: “Juniper Cottage” circa 1896, so very charming. Lots of potential! 9’ ceilings in LR, Den DR & Bedrooms. Hardwood under carpet. Master with a frplce. 2BR, 2BA. PCC available. $496,000 Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

Knollwood Heights: Vintage Colonial golf front home on

Weymouth Heights: Wonderful example of architect Edward Loewenstein’s 1950’s modernist homes. Open plan, walls of windows, expansive porch & patios. Hrdwd floors, updated Kitchen, 2-Fireplaces, Master w/Sitting Room. Pool. 5BR/4BA. $479,900 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

Pinehurst Cottage: Own a piece of history - 1933 cottage, 4,500+sq.ft. of living area on 1.09 acre lot. This home waits for your finishing touches to bring it back to the traditions of yesteryear with todays updates! $450,000 Krista Duncan 910.690.7009

Old Town: Hidden gem! 2BR, 2BA, with potential for

sq.ft., brick, Family Home with 2 main level master suites & upper level guest suite. Manicured & private 1.12 acre estate lot with well for irrigation. $499,900 Krista Duncan 910.690.7009

Pine Needles Golf Course. Original home built in 1928 - Several additions have been made to accommodate a growing family, while retaining the charm & detail of the original design. 4BR, 3FBA/2HBA. $495,000 Kay Beran 910.315.3322

3BR/3BA; heart pine flrs, spacious rooms, smooth ceilings, very private 1/2 acre and adjacent 1/2 acre available for purchase. $440,000 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

www.BHHSPRG.com We open Moore doors.

Pinehurst: 910.295.5504 • 42 Chinquapin Road • Pinehurst, NC 28374 Berkshire Hathaway HomeSercies and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.Housing Opportunity.

CCNC: Ideal golf retreat overlooks Dogwood Course. Broad Street Towns: An urban townhome community, a masMore than 3,000 sq.ft. of living space. Great room enhanced terpiece for those who love the community feel of downtown with a vaulted ceiling, fireplace & window-wall. Screen Porch living. Close to dining, shops, parks & recreation. Beautiful & Deck for entertaining. Four ensuite bedrooms. $439,000 interior design & features. 3BR/2.5BA. $399,900 & Up. Bill Smith 910.528.4090 Kay Beran 910.315.3322

7 Lakes West: Build your dream home with magnificent 180 degree views of Lake Auman! Bulkhead, 2-Docks with boat lift & swim ladder in place. One-of-a-Kind offering! $350,000 Linda Criswell 910.783.7374

Old Town: Charming home with brick sidewalk, front

Pinehurst: Custom Built Home. 4BR/3.5BA, open flr plan, kitchen w/granite & stainless, dining room, hrdwd, stone Frplc, 1st floor master suite, screen porch & deck! $336,000 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

Pinewild: The perfect ranch home! Open living & Dining room is light-filled. Lovely large kitchen with casual dining, and opens to a Carolina room with fireplace. Screened Porch & Brick Patio. 3BR/3BA. $299,000 Kay Beran 910.315.3322

Old Town Pinehurst: Easy stroll to the Village center or clubhouse.

Pinehurst: Built in 2007, over 2,500sf, 3BR/2.5BA, large

Pinehurst: Magnificent lake front lot on Lake Pinewild.

Pinehurst: Warm and inviting home embellished with

Pinehurst: Situated in desirable Unit 1, close to the Village. Lovely lot…a gardners delight! Well constructed brick home has a spacious living room with wood burning fireplace,a Carolina room. 3BR, 2BA. PCC available. $219,500 Debbie Darby 910.783.5193

Village Acres: Ranch style home built by Jerry Harms

porch, Carolina Room, private backyard. Updated with hardwood, new carpet, paint ~ only a short walk to the Village! 2BR/2BA. $344,500 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

All brick home with many upgrades. Large Carolina room overlooks a private, landscaped patio & garden area. Partial finished basement with HVAC. 3BR/3BA. PCC available. $295,000 Bill Smith 910.528.4090

architectural details. Dual sided fireplace in the living and dining rooms. Hardwood in main living areas. 4BR/2BA split plan. PCC available. $249,000 Debbie Darby 910.783.5193

screened porch overlooking the private backyard. For more details see www.1235MorgantonRoad.com $293,700 Frank Sessoms 910.639.3099

Over 400 feet on the water. Well-treed and surrounded by lovely homes. Gated community with excellent amenities! $260,000 Kay Beran 910.315.3322

Construction in ‘07 with over 1,600 sf. This home is in immaculate condition! Low maintenance vinyl and brick exterior. Kitchen has a breakfast bar. 3BR/2BA. $215,000 Jim Saunders 910.315.1000

www.BHHSPRG.com We open Moore doors. Pinehurst: 910.295.5504 • 42 Chinquapin Road • Pinehurst, NC 28374 ©2015 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of American, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeSercies and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.Housing Opportunity.

PineStraw M A G A Z I N E

Jim Dodson, Editor 910.693.2506 • jim@pinestrawmag.com Andie Stuart Rose, Creative Director 910.693.2467 • andie@pinestrawmag.com Serena Brown, Senior Editor 910.693.2464 • serena@pinestrawmag.com Kira Schoenfelder, Graphic Designer 910.693.2508 • kira@pinestrawmag.com Lauren Shumaker, Graphic Designer 910.693.2469 • lauren@pinestrawmag.com Contributing Editors Deborah Salomon, Staff Writer Mary Novitsky, Proofreader Sara King, Proofreader Contributing Photographers John Gessner, Laura L. Gingerich, Tim Sayer Contributors Tom Allen, Harry Blair, Cos Barnes, Tom Bryant, Susan Campbell, Wiley Cash, Fred Chappell, Paul Crenshaw, Geoff Cutler, Al Daniels, Annette Daniels, Mart Dickerson, Clyde Edgerton, Rosetta Fawley, Bill Fields, London Gessner, Marjorie Hopkins, Robyn James, Brian Lampkin, Jan Leitschuh, Meridith Martens, Malena Mörling, Jim Moriarty, Lee Pace, Jeanne Paine, Celia Rivenbark, Astrid Stellanova, Janet Wheaton

PS David Woronoff, Publisher Advertising Sales

Pat Taylor, Advertising Director Ginny Trigg, PineStraw Sales Coordinator 910.693.2481 • ginny@thepilot.com Deborah Fernsell, 910.693.2516 Terry Hartsell, 910.693.2513 Kerry Hooper, 910.693.2489 Perry Loflin, 910.693.2514 Darlene McNeil-Smith, 910.693.2519 Johnsie Tipton, 910.693.2515 Advertising Graphic Design

Kathryn Galloway 910.693.2509 • kathryn@thepilot.com Mechelle Butler, Maegan Lea, Scott Yancey Subscriptions & Circulation

Darlene Stark, Circulation Director 910.693.2488

PineStraw Magazine 145 W. Pennsylvania Avenue Southern Pines, NC 28387 pinestraw@thepilot.com www.pinestrawmag.com

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SOUTHERN PINES

$329,900

Tucked away on quit corner in desirable Longleaf Country Club, this townhome enjoys wonderful privacy and water views from the secluded back deck. Great features include sound system in great room and deck, custom plantation shutters and walk in attic. Open floor plan, gourmet kitchen and HOA to cover exterior maintenance. Convenient to Ft. Bragg, and shopping in Southern Pines and Pinehurst. 4BR / 3 BA 504 Cottage Lane

PINEHURST

$599,900

PINEHURST

$219,000

$379,000

“Talent, Technology & TEAMWORK” Moore County’s Most Trusted Real Estate Team

Built by Doral Builders and located just a short distance from the Pinehurst # 6 Clubhouse, this one story home has a great open floor plan with lots of light and great curb appeal! Charming interior offers hardwood floors, vaulted ceiling in the spacious greatroom, oversized kitchen and covered rear patio. Super Condition! Pinehurst Country Club membership. 3 BR / 2 BA 140 Juniper Creek Blvd.

FOXFIRE

$310,000

$258.000 $179,000 Southern Pines Pinehurst $199,900 Foxfire Lovely and pristine in Longleaf CC Lovely updated golf-front home Cute cottage w/nice renovations 3 BR / 2 BA 3 BR / 2 BA 4 BR / 4.5 BA www.205HunterTrail.com www.4DogwoodCourt.com www.17ChestnutLane.com Gorgeous custom built Contemporary home on Lake Pinewild in Pinewild Country Club. Beautifully maintained home with trey ceiling and gas log fireplace in living room, formal dining room with stunning, contemporary chandelier and glass block wall, kitchen with built-in breakfast bar, double ovens, double dishwashers, pantry and eat-in-area. Two guest suites with ensuite baths. Downstairs recreation room with kitchenette/wet bar and access to rear patio. Beautiful views of the lake. 3 BR / 3 Full 3 Half Baths Pinehurst $75,000 Pinehurst 31 Abington Drive

PINEHURST

Located at the end of a quiet, wooded cul-de-sac, this lovely custom built brick home overlooks the 13th hole of the Pinehurst #6 golf course and boasts lush landscaping. Great open floor plan features a great room with cathedral ceilings, lots of window walls where all of the windows in the back of the home have spectacular golf views, a charming hearth room off the kitchen as well as a sunny Carolina room. The walkout lower level offers a recreational/flex space with a full bath. There is a transferrable PCC membership. 3 BR / 3 BA 98 Sakonnet Trail

PINEHURST

$289,000

$585,000 Aberdeen $145,500 Pinehurst Fantastic, all-brick golf front home Cute home on large corner lot 4 BR / 3.5 BA 3 BR / 2 BA www.80LakewoodDrive.com www.110RavenswoodRoad.com

This gorgeous new construction in Foxfire has a great location that enjoys sweeping golf views from the front of the house and backs up to the park, complete with walking trails, playground and picnic area. The home enjoys wonderful curb appeal and an open floor plan inside with hardwood floors and high ceilings. Screened porch and large deck! The kitchen is really special with painted beamed ceiling, tile floors, granite countertops. Way too many updates to mention. 4 BR / 3 BA $239,000 CCNC 8 South Shamrock Drive $449,000 Pinehurst

This is a beautiful home in desirable Pinehurst #6. Cathedral ceilings, hardwood floors and gourmet kitchen. The living room is open to the kitchen and has gas fireplace and deck access. Spacious master suite features a whirlpool tub and his and her walk-in closets. The fenced yard has a side gate, security system and irrigation system. This is a great house in a great neighborhood! 3 BR / 2 BA 95 Deerwood Lane

$329,000 $890,000 Longleaf CC Custom Built Villa Overlooking Water Custom built all brick golf-front home Brick single story w/view of 17th green Covered porch & large fenced lot Updated Immaculate Golf View Condo 3 BR$959,000 / 2 BA 4 BR / 4 Full & 2 Half Baths 3 BR / 2.5 BA 1 BR / 1 BA PINEWILD $398,000 3 BR / 2.5 BA SEVEN LAKES WEST $565,000 PINEHURST www.16SteeplechaseWay.com www.110HearthstoneRoad.com www.8RoyalDornoch.com www.210StAndrewsCondo.com www.1340BurningTreeRoad.com

$1,295,000 $189,000 Pinehurst $269,000 Pinehurst $475,000 Pinebluff 7 Lakes West $635,000 Pinehurst Stunning custom home in Fairwoods on 7 Charming brick ranch home GorgeoustownhomeintheheartoftheVillage Open plan, gourmet kitchen, pool & more! Stunning All Brick Water Front 4 BR / 4 BA & 2 Half BA 3Stunning BR / 2 BA BR /home 2.5 BA 3 BR / 2.5 BA Just like new describes this beautiful 3custom 3 BR / 4.5 BA This beautiful maintained home, built by Precision Builders, sits majestically on a on Lake Auman. Built by Bolton custom home on Lake Pinewild in Pinewild Country Club with spectacular views meticulously landscaped lot with views of Pinewild CC’s Azalea Coursewww.6HollyHouse.com and pond. This Builders, this home has been completely renovated on the interior with updated baths and of the lake. There is a bulkhead and dock for lake usage. Fabulous light throughout the www.170InverraryRoad.com www.145SugarPineDrive.com www.105MastersWay.com www.135AndrewsDrive.com

home features crown molding and hardwood floors throughout. Other features include large study with fireplace, finished lower level featuring a family room, third bedroom and full bath. Great house and ready to move in!! 3 BR / 3.5 BA 33 Pinewild Drive

SOUTHERN PINES

$362,900

kitchen, beautiful new flooring and interior painting including gorgeous hardwoods in the main living areas and new carpet in the bedrooms. The screened porch has been enclosed to make a charming sun room with wonderful views of the water. A boat dock and nice beach area complete this spectacular home. 4 BR / 3 BA 103 Vanore Rd.

PINEHURST

$419,900

house from ceiling to floor windows in almost every room gives this home an almost magical feeling. Open floor plan has 10-12 foot ceilings and three fireplaces. Built by Blackman Builders, this was the 2003 Home of the Year. This home does have it all! 3 BR / 5 BA 24 Loch Lomond Court

SOUTHERN PINES

$395,000

$269,900 $187,900 Pinehurst $185,000 Southern Pines $225,000 Pinebluff Pinehurst $375,000 Foxfire Great home in family- friendly neighborhood Stunning new construction condo Golf front new construction in The Pines Immaculate all-brick w/golf views Elegant & luxurious w/spacious rooms 5 BR / 3 BA 3 BR / 2.5 BA 3 BR / 2 BA 2 BR / 2 BA 4 BR / 3 BA www.23BerylCircle.com www.100CypressCircle.com www.153LaurelOakLane.com www.18ShamrockDrive.com www.10StantonCircle.com

This charming home, located in the Southern Pines Country Club, has been beautifully One of the originally, beautifully designed Cotswold units, this lovely home features outstanding This gorgeous custom home located on the 4th green of Pine Needles, won the renovated and the care and attention that has gone into every detail shows in the sun-filled quality in workmanship. Spacious living room features center fireplace with built-in bookcases, Judges Choice Award in 2000. Designed by Alan Walters, it features vaulted interior! Seven The property is onSouth the Elks Club Golf Course and overlooksPinehurst two fairways – wonderfully vaulted ceiling and heavy crown molding. A gourmet kitchen offers a large center island, butler’sLakes West ceilings in the great room and Seven kitchen. The homeSouth has shining hardwood $279,500 floors, Lakes Seven $298,000 Pinehurst $895,000 $241,000 Lakes $199,000 private back yard. Located in a quiet, heavily wooded neighborhood, the home offers 5 bedrooms pantry, spacious informal dining and access to the elegant dining room with coffered ceiling. The lots of windows , brick patio and three level deck with hot tub overlooking long Completely renovated golf front home Wonderful onviews. cul-de-sac home Old Town familya home back yard golf frontforw/panoramic and 3Charming full baths, plenty of room a growing family orview grandkids Great galore! There’s large w/private cozy family room has access toGorgeous a private, enclosed patioin andthe also features a wet bar – perfect for casual 2-story homegolf Adjoining lot 103 can be purchased for additional privacy. screened great outdoor entertaining. and a large storage area. Great property! 3 BR / 3.5 BA 3 BR / 3.5 BA 4 BR / 3BA 4 BRworkshop / 3.5 BA 4 BR / 3 BAentertaining! Oversized garage features an upstairs 3 BRporch / 2.5for6BA BR / 3 BA 3 BR / 3 BA 295 Central Drive www.117OxfordCourt.com www.108Rector.com www.50OrangeRoad.com www.11GraysonLane.com www.122DevonshireAvenue.com 720 Barber Road 1 Sodbury Court

View Floor Plans andTours Virtual of Our Listings andListings See ALL Moore Information County at View Floor Plans and Virtual of OurTours Listings and See ALL Moore County and Community Listings and Community Information at

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Re/Max Prime Properties, 5 Chinquapin Rd., Pinehurst, NC 910-295-7100 • 800-214-9007

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Re/Max Prime Properties, 5 Chinquapin Rd., Pinehurst, NC 910-295-7100 • 800-214-9007

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simple life

Peonies, 1959

By Jim Dodson

Because I grew up in the rural

Illustration by Kira schoenfelder

South before the coming of mass air-conditioning, I learned early from a wise and unexpected source the many benefits of staying as still as possible on a broiling August afternoon.

“Be still now, child. Too hot for that nonsense,” Miss Jesse May Richardson gently scolded as I squirmed uncomfortably on the plastic-sheathed front seat of her elderly Dodge while riding home from Vacation Bible School or the weekly trip she made to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket for my mother. “Sit still long enough,” she added, “ain’t no tellin’ what you’ll see and hear.” I asked what sort of things she meant. She smiled, a Southern sphinx, never taking her eyes from the street. “Could be what the birds are saying to each other way up yonder or what the trees are really thinkin’. I can’t tell you what. Be still and find out for yourself.” Miss Jesse May was full of such peculiar sayings, also fully in charge of me that summer of 1959. While my mother recuperated from her second miscarriage in five years, resting through the long hot afternoons beneath a slowly turning ceiling fan, and my older brother was off at church camp having the time of his life, I was left to roam the shaded yard of our old house on Poplar Street or ride my bike to the stop sign at the end of our block, forbidden to go any farther. Fortunately I had books to read, a wooden box full of them, and a King Edward cigar box full of painted soldiers to play with beneath the porch. An early reader, I’d finished half a dozen chapter books that year, beginning with The Boxcar Children and moving on to Winnie-the-Pooh and Wind in the Willows and starting on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series. That summer, whenever I wasn’t conducting wars in the cool earth below the porch, I was working my way through the Golden Book Encyclopedia (Book One — Aardvark to Army) and the Illustrated Books of Greek and Roman Myths and more Tarzan books. Some afternoons after Bible School and before lunch, old Miss Gilchrist’s gray cat Homer hopped the rail and sprawled out on our porch while I sat reading on a creaky rusted glider. More than once I found Homer snoozing in the cool earth and dim world beneath the porch, where I dug forts for my hand-painted knights and Greek

soldiers, conducting my own siege of Troy using a large plastic model of Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger with a booby hatch cut into his belly, a makeshift wooden horse. My mother said Homer was a perfect name for a yard cat in the Trojan War. The screen door above me whined, and slapped. “You need to come in now for lunch. Make sure you wipe off them filthy feet. Don’t be trackin’ nothing in my clean house.” I missed Wilmington so much I could spit. That was where my daddy worked for two years at the Star News after losing his weekly newspaper to a scoundrel in a linen suit down in Gulfport. Across the street from our house in Wilmington was Greenfield Lake with its haunted dark water and lazy paddleboats and cypress trees draped with veils of Spanish moss. I missed the drawbridge to Wrightsville Beach and Newells, where you could slide your bare, sand-burned feet on the cool tile floor; the Little Lagoon just off the causeway, where I learned to swim the first summer evenings we lived there; the wide porch of the Hanover Seaside Club, where the adults always gathered for evening cocktails while we kids eyeballed sand sharks hanging on the Lumina Pier and the awkward smirking teenagers at the roller rink. Wilmington was summer heaven, a place I could have lived forever. It was supposed to be the first stop on the long road home to Greensboro, where my father’s people still lived and farmed outside the city. But somehow we’d mysteriously left and wound up in the sleepiest, slowest town in the world, probably even all of South Carolina. Who explains such things to a 6-year-old? This much is true. I had perfect attendance at the Royal School that year, reading more books than any other kid in my class, earning a small brass lapel pin shaped like an open book with the word “Wisdom” inscribed on it. But save for Homer the cat and Miss Jesse May I had no real companions, no real friends to speak of that long hot summer. Curiously, there was a public swimming pool in the park just two blocks south of our house. But my mother refused to let me go there because she disapproved of the sign that read “No Coloreds Allowed.” When I pointed out to her that I wasn’t colored, she threatened to make me sit on the toilet with a new bar of Ivory soap clenched in my teeth until I learned better. I once foolishly used the word “nigra” after hearing my father’s boss use it in a joke I didn’t really understand when he came to supper one evening, grinning like a cadaver and rattling the ice in his sweating highball glass. That resulted in my first taste of Ivory soap.

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2015

simple life

Lunch was a glass of cool Maola milk and either a fresh tomato sandwich with mayonnaise and sweet pickles or sometimes a bologna sandwich on Wonder Bread as white as a church robe with a couple of Miss Jesse May’s homemade peanut cookies. After that, I was supposed to nap for two hours, though I rarely did. Mostly I lay flat on the nubby chenille bedspread staring at the ceiling fan or out my bedroom window, thinking of Tarzan and seeing dusty herds of elephants with what Miss Jesse May called my “special” eye, oblivious to the drone of cicadas that made the August air sound roasted. Eventually, there was stirring, soft footsteps followed by another whine and slap of the screen door. My mother was going out to the yard to work in her new flower garden. She liked to say you were closer to God’s heart in a garden. She also said South Carolina was too hot for proper peonies in August, but she’d planted them anyway and somehow made them bloom, creamy pale yellow, the sweetest smelling things you ever put to your nose. I think they came from Miss Jesse May’s garden, along with butter beans and yellow squash. When we finally moved to Greensboro that winter, my mother dug up those peonies and took them with her. They grow in profusion where she planted them to this day. My mother hailed from West Virginia, the youngest of eleven children — eight large German blond sisters and three strapping brothers — who grew up on a mountain named for their family. Her daddy was a fiddleplaying coal miner. She’d eventually moved to Cumberland, Maryland, and met my father there in 1941, not long after she’d won the Miss Western Maryland contest. My father was a sharp dresser, a newspaper salesman and aviation writer who was about to enlist in the Army Air Corps. He met my mother when she was selling Big Band records at McCrory’s, engaged to marry a rich guy named

You can build a

within your budget!

Earl who owned a Stutz Bearcat. He asked her out even though he didn’t own a record player. They got married six months later. After losing two babies, my beauty queen mama was learning to cook real Southern food courtesy of Miss Jesse May Richardson — ham-flavored greens, seasoned field peas, real cornbread and buttermilk fried chicken. Those kitchen sounds as the shadows on the lawn lengthened are the ones I remember best from those faraway August afternoons in a sleepy town where I had no friends but an old cat and my adventure books for companions. Sometimes Miss Jesse May played gospel music from her transistor radio propped in the open kitchen window while she cooked and chatted with my mother. I could never quite hear what they were saying, but they often laughed together. It’s quite possible that sleepy summer in the world’s slowest town saved my mother’s life. It may even be the reason I chose to become a writer and a gardener. I have Miss Jesse May’s recipe for collards committed to memory. A few years ago, the nice lady who bought my mother’s house in Greensboro invited me to come and dig up some of her pale yellow peonies, something I’ve always meant to do. The first time I saw elephants in Africa, moreover, it wasn’t Tarzan and the Ant Men I thought about. It was my mother and her pale yellow peonies, regaining her spirit and beauty, Miss Jesse May’s gospel music and tomato sandwiches in August, books in a box sitting by a rusted glider, and the sweet mystery — never fully deciphered — of what the birds were saying and the trees might really be thinking. PS Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@pinestrawmag.com.

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August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PinePitch

Stage Gliding

Friday is considered a lucky day in the Hebrides. Spread the luck by attending First Friday in Southern Pines from 5-8:30 p.m. on August 7. The whole family is invited for fun, food and live music from The Balsa Gliders. For more information visit www.firstfridaysouthernpines.com. Sunrise Green Space, 250 North West Broad Street, Southern Pines.

Going Batty War and Peace

Don’t forget your earplugs when visiting the House in the Horseshoe on August 1 and 2. There will be military drills, musket and cannon firing throughout the day, and re-enactments of the 1781 Revolutionary War skirmish between Col. Alston’s Patriot militia and the Loyalists of Col. David Fanning. Take the earplugs out for an inspection of the Colonial militia encampments and to watch various demonstrations and admire crafts from the Colonial period. There will also be a kids’ story time, an 18th century fashion show, and house tours.

Fly over to the Weymouth Woods Auditorium at 3 p.m. on Sunday, August 30, to learn about our region’s bats from a Weymouth ranger. For starters, did you know that bats are the only mammals capable of true flight? That they are hugely beneficial to the environment? We can’t even begin with the myths — they’ll be discussed too. Free and open to the public. For more information, call (910) 692-2167. Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines.

Parking fee $5. For more information, call (910) 947-2051. The House in the Horseshoe, 288 Alston House Road, Sanford.

Toy Story

At The Country Bookshop on August 15 PineStraw’s own Cos Barnes will be signing her new book, Toy House at Tryon, from 3 to 5 p.m. Barnes’ book is inspired by the craft of toy-making, which was practiced at the Toy House of Tryon from the early 1900s. The book’s publication also coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Toy House. It tells the story of a little girl who helps her elderly neighbor hand-paint Christmas ornaments. In the process she learns the history of the Toy House. This is a timeless tale of the legacy of traditional craft and the sweetness of friendship between generations. Bring someone of a different generation to the signing; all are welcome. For more information, call (910) 692-3211. The Country Bookshop, 140 North West Broad Street, Southern Pines.

Many Hands Make Great Food

The moral of the stone soup story: if everyone joins in the preparation of the soup then the process will be entertaining, the soup delicious and both food and story are to share. So take a side dish or dessert to the Stone Soup Pot Luck at Rubicon Farm on August 30 at 6 p.m. Ashley Van Camp of Ashten’s Restaurant and Elizabeth Norfleet Sugg of Rubicon Farm are providing the main course. There will be a featured beer and wine too. Soup stones are optional. Rubicon Farm, 564 Rubicon Road, West End. Tickets $30, all proceeds to benefit the Boys and Girls Club of the Sandhills. Available at Century 21 Patriot, 100 Magnolia Road, Pinehurst and The Boys and Girls Club of the Sandhills, 160 Memorial Park Court, Southern Pines or online at stonesouppotluck.yapsody.com

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Feasts of the Southern Wild

Artistic License

“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind,” said Eugene Ionesco. Take your mind for an adventure this month at the Arts Council of Moore County’s Fine Arts Festival. Opening night is for everyone and it’s on Friday August 7 from 6 – 8 p.m. There will be hors d’oeuvres and wine and plenty of artistic fun. Awards will be presented at 7 p.m. If you can’t make the opening night the exhibition is on through the month until August 28. Don’t miss it. For more information ring (910) 692-2787 or visit www.mooreart.org. Campbell House Galleries, 482 E. Connecticut Avenue, Southern Pines.

It’s a Family Affair

Visit Vito’s Ristorante this month to celebrate thirtyfive years of the restaurant being a Southern Pines institution. Home-grown produce, delectable wines and the friendliest of welcomes all make for an evening of la dolce vita. Not to mention the best tomato sauce . . . Happy birthday, Vito’s! For reservations, call (910) 692-7815. Vito’s Ristorante, 615 South East Broad Street, Southern Pines.

Thinking ahead to the long weekend? Here’s the ultimate Labor Day weekend staycation. September 4-7 the Pinehurst Resort will host Taste of the New South, a food and wine weekend. Treat yourself to all the luxuries of the Carolina Hotel and the most exquisite culinary offerings of the South. There will be talks, tastings and even tailgating. A host of the finest winemakers, chefs, brewers and food writers will be attending. Highlights from the menu include: Friday: Carolina Oyster Roast and Pig Pickin’ with oyster expert Dan Lewis of Coastal Provisions on the Outer Banks Saturday: Real Food 101 with Lisa Leake, author of New York Times bestseller 100 Days of Real Food. Southern Tailgate Lunch. Be a Winemaker for a Day. Vintner Dinner. Sunday: History of the Humble Pig with Mark Essig, author of The Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig. Brews at Thistle Dhu. Culinary Tour Dinner and Silent Auction. For more information and details of special overnight packages visit www.pinehurst.com/taste-ofthe-new-south or call (855) 235-8507. The Carolina Hotel, Pinehurst Resort, Carolina Vista Drive, Pinehurst.

What a Glorious Feeling

Brush up your scuffs, spanks, riffs and over-the-tops in time for the Summer Classic Film Series at the Sunrise Theater this month. Sing along too. It’s the only place in the Sandhills you’ll find Gene Kelly, Dolly Parton, Kevin Costner and Jerry Orbach under one roof. Baby won’t be in the corner. August 6 - Singin’ In the Rain (1952) August 13 - Field of Dreams (1989) August 20 - Nine to Five (1980) August 27 - Dirty Dancing (1987) For more information and tickets, call (910) 692-8501. Sunrise Theater, 250 North West Broad Street, Southern Pines.

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Congratulations to our August Instagram winners! Theme:

Water, Water Everywhere #pinestrawcontest

Next month’s theme:

“Doors & Windows”

It’s our Home & Garden issue, so fling wide the casement! Submit your photo on Instagram using the hashtag #pinestrawcontest (submissions needed by Monday, August 17th)

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Cos and Effect

Bedtime Story

How a family made their bed. Generations later, they’re still lying in it

By Cos Barnes

I sleep in a bed that is 150 years old.

It belonged to my great-grandmother, who gave it to her daughter, my grandmother, the mother of eleven children, whose home was destroyed by fire. It is a Jenny Lind, and it is impossible to decorate with pretty linens and bedclothes because none fit around the footboard. It developed an interesting history after I inherited it. Because my husband ran a furniture plant in Moore County, his talented workers created pieces similar to what was there and added extensions to the headboard and footboard. Using a lathe they were able to duplicate turnings that matched the ones on my great-grandmother’s bed. It is a work of art. I wish you could see it. My grandfather was six feet tall, yet he slept in this bed, which was somewhere between a twin and a double by today’s standards. It was stretched to queen-sized by the factory pros. Because the wood is so old and brittle, the bed is on blocks. Only my son can set it up. Its installation is another work of art. When I moved recently, I still had the original side rails in my garage. Stamped on them was CANEY, my great-grandfather’s name, and Danville, Virgina, where the bed was bought. My grandmother would laugh at the lumpy duvet that graces the bed now. It is nothing like the hand-crocheted one that graced hers. PS Cos Barnes is a longtime contributor to PineStraw magazine. She can be contacted at cosbarnes@nc.rr.com.

The Omnivorous Reader

Wooden Men

In her riveting detailed account of Virginia’s Bassett furniture dynasty, writer Beth Macy proves that some uncertain futures are better than the known past

By Brian Lampkin

Book reviews

should not be about the reviewer’s life. The absence of “I” is always a good sign in any fair-minded review of art. But Beth Macy’s Factory Man had me immersed in my past and thinking, sometimes painfully, about my own father and his factory worker life. Macy’s remarkably researched account of Bassett Furniture, the town of Bassett, Virginia, and family scion John Bassett III is in many ways an examination of an entire American way of life, my father’s included.

Bassett Furniture was once the world’s biggest wood furniture company. From its beginnings in the early 20th century and into the 1990s (the company did $510 million in sales in 1994—the year NAFTA changed everything), Bassett was the predominant brand name in middle-class bedrooms and living rooms. The town of Bassett was the classic company town, owned and controlled for decades by the extended Bassett family; it was an unincorporated town built on Bassett-family-owned land and lacked even a simple town council or police force — law-breaking was handled by the company security. Located just thirty miles over the North Carolina border, the Bassett family’s reach extended to factories in Mt. Airy and nearby Elkin, summer homes in the North Carolina mountains and a presence at the annual Furniture Market in High Point. Macy’s access to the Bassett family — and the family secrets — seems

without limits. This book is a feat of research journalism, and you’ll be tempted to build yourself a cheat sheet to keep track of the disparate members of the Bassett clan. (Don’t. Macy places a family tree at the back of the book, which I didn’t realize until I got to the end.) Macy surely knows more about the combined Bassett family history than any Bassett ever has or ever will. There’s also a gossip’s delight in the ways in which she reveals how the family undermines lines of succession and tries to sabotage success. And, of course, there are passages about sexual impopriety and allegedly unprosecuted sex crimes of the Bassett men. Factory Man is not simple biographical admiration of another wealthy American family or of John Bassett III. Macy does not hide the historical racism, the misogyny, the shameful bullying or the deceptive business practices. Yet somehow there is a tenor of respect, even of honor, for what this family, and particularly this man, has done for American furniture business in general and for the people of southwest Virginia in particular. John Bassett III eventually opens a furniture plant in Galax, Virginia, after losing various power struggles within the family. In a sense, he is banished from the town that bears his name, and he uses this slight as fuel for his ferocious tenacity. He also goes it alone, which allows him to think and act independently of conventional wisdom. His unorthodox approach enables him to fight off the Chinese takeover of the furniture business, and help the people of Galax keep their jobs. In the end, Bassett restores his pride and America finally wins a manufacturing battle. I had a vote in the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Nonfiction Award, and this book received my first place vote. I admire it, and especially Macy’s work and skill, and the story of a factory living on into the 21st century is strangely compelling reading. But as much as this might be a study of a family that loves furniture, it’s really another American story of a family that loves one thing: money (and I suppose the power and prestige that comes with it). And this is where my father comes in.

The Omnivorous Reader

I grew up in the heart of the Rust Belt at the height of its economic decline. Steel, auto and even furniture manufacturers fled south (often to Virginia and North Carolina and typically in search of cheaper labor), and factory jobs became scarce. Workers were left with little leverage and I watched my father give over so much of his life to a family that owned a series of factories. He treated the owners like royalty (unbelievably, their name was “King”), and I watched him both grovel at their feet and rise above them with a genuine care and respect for his fellow workers that the owners could not muster. For years he saved the job of a brain-injured coworker by covering for his deficiencies. He also befriended the sons of the “royal” family (Was this economic survival strategy? Altruistic concern for the floundering? Both?) as they battled various addictions. I watched all of this happen with a growing disbelief in the power and respect granted to owners who deserved, in my view, little of it. Furthermore, I witnessed the misery of the factory life. The machines’ grinding noise, the oily grime, the economic gloom, the palpable boredom. The poet Antler, in Factory, his booklength poem about his own factory experience, wonders, “Is it too late to ask — ‘What good is it if we’re immortal / when we’re bored with eternity . . .’” In other words, are we sure this kind of factory life is worth saving? Macy documents the temporary survival of a fading way of life, but who really misses unimaginative furniture made with substandard products, company-owned towns, cheap labor and soul-draining factory work? The global furniture industry, as currently constructed, moves around the world in constant search for the cheapest labor in the most unregulated countries. It was once America. I’m sure there are books to be written that long for the lost coal-mining jobs in West Virginia or the lost lumber jobs in Washington State. What’s lost becomes romanticized until we forget its real cost to the environment or to workers’ lives. Beth Macy paints a complicated picture of John Bassett III, and each of us will make our own decisions about him after reading Factory Man. For the people of Galax, Virginia, who had jobs preserved or had stores remain viable because the factory stayed vibrant, he may very well be heroic. What would my own family have done without my father’s sacrifice in the oily dark of his factory job? I’ll let the poet Antler answer that question with another question from Factory: “What was I born for? What was I born for? / Is this a factory I see before me?” PS Brian Lampkin is one of the owners of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro.

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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B oo k s h e l f

August Books Where is your favorite reading spot?

By Kimberly Daniels Taws

My grandfather has a chair. Actually, he has several versions of the same chair in several living rooms. They are always low and deep, with a cushion that sinks when you put any weight on it and expels air with a slow psssssstt sound. Each has big round arms larger than my head. No matter how often the area is re-arranged, my grandfather’s chair always has the same angle to the rest of the room. This chair is where he reads.

My grandfather usually reads the informative parts of the newspaper in the kitchen, but the more reflective or in-depth articles are always read in the living room chair. He’ll mention interesting facts or his new understanding on a topic as he reads along. My watchful granddaughter eyes have deduced that this chair is where he reads for himself. He vacillates between thrillers and serious biographies. He believes there is something important for us all to know about those whose actions have shaped our world. This summer, in the chair, he is reading China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia, by James Bradley, and The Political Career of W. Kerr Scott: The Squire from Haw River, by Southern Pines native Julian M. Pleasants. I am sure he has some Stuart Woods audio books to get him from chair to chair. When I moved to New York I only took with me books I owned but had not read. I read them all, over the years, on the subway. That is where I finally read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I then immediately called my friend to change the life stance I had so brazenly articulated at a long dinner party some months prior. Atlas Shrugged fundamentally altered my thinking. I loved reading that book while fellow subway riders nodded at the cover with a knowing smile and tried to catch my eye as I stood to head up into the city that now took on a different feel. I saw it as Rand’s city; everything had changed. Sometimes classics wait on your shelf for years before you get to read them. I

find it is always just the right time when you finally pick them up. A friend of mine has a porch swing. It is a bed covered in soft pillows that seemingly floats in midair, but it is actually hanging from her wisteria-covered pergola. She reads there. Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s debut novel, The Language of Flowers, was an amazing take on love and upbringing with a glossary of Victorian flower meanings in the back. It was perfect reading for that scented setting. Diffenbaugh’s second novel, We Never Asked For Wings, comes out this month. It too should be read in some such soothing and peaceful place. We Never Asked For Wings is the story of an undocumented MexicanAmerican family. Letty Espinosa is a hard-working and hard-playing young mother who relies on her own mother to take care of her children. When Letty’s mother goes back to Mexico for good, Letty is suddenly forced to face responsibility for her young and vulnerable family for the first time. It is an engaging and beautifully written novel with wonderful complexities. While swaying peacefully in your cushioned bower, check out The Marriage of Opposites, by Alice Hoffman, a story of forbidden love set in St. Thomas, USVI, about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro, the father of Impressionism. Reading in an airplane is a kind of blissful decadence. No one will interrupt you unless they are offering you something to drink. It is important to have a cannot-put-down thriller on a plane. When thoroughly engaged in a book you will not think about how uncomfortable your seat is or that child who is playing his iPad movie at full blast across the aisle (earphones moms, or — better yet — a book). The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, is this summer’s best fall-down-arabbit-hole, speak-to-me-if-you-want-but-I-won’t-be-listening book. It is about two sisters who become involved in the French Resistance during World War II in ways as different as their personalities. Other thrillers coming out this month that might do the trick are Margaret Maron’s mystery Long Upon the Land, Sandra Brown’s new title Friction, or The Murderer’s Daughter, by Jonathan Kellerman. Some people like reading in bed, in the bathroom, living room, outside or on a porch, in a canoe, on the beach or anywhere they can. I recently spotted someone reading a particularly good cookbook that comes out in September called My Kitchen Year, by Ruth Reichl, while trying to walk down Broad Street. One of the true joys of summer is to take time for yourself and read — you can reap the rewards no matter where you are sitting.

B oo k s h e l f

CHILDREN’S BOOKS By Angie Tally Appleblossom the Possum, by Holly Goldberg Sloan, illustrated by Gary Rosen. Advanced chapter book readers who adored Tumtum and Nutmeg, Mercy Watson and Mr. and Mrs. Bunny will love this charming story of Appleblossom, a baby possum ready to leave the nest and make her way in the world. Appleblossom knows the rules: Avoid cars, humans and dogs. But the temptation to spy on a human family is just too tempting, and her faithful family launches a hilarious rescue mission. With dynamic illustrations to enhance the story, Appleblossom is the perfect choice for young readers or as a family read-aloud. Ages 6-10. There Was an Old Dragon Who Swallowed a Knight, by Penny Parker Klosterman. There was an old lady who swallowed a fly . . . most young readers will know how that turns out, but in this hilarious new take on the rhyme, readers meet a hungry old dragon who swallows pretty much an entire kingdom including a Knight (not polite!), a steed (galloping at speed) and a moat (he started to bloat). Tremendous fun for ages 3-7.

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The Accident Season, by Morïa Fowley-Doyle. “The Accident Season leaves its marks,” Cara says. Without pause, it happens every October — The Accident Season. Rugs with no buckles incite trips, bridges trekked daily crumble into rivers, bones shatter, skin splits, hearts break. But this Accident Season, Cara, Alice and their ex-stepbrother Sam find themselves entranced with the ghost of a girl who may or may not have answers for them. Absolutely mesmerizing, haunting and beautiful, The Accident Season takes a quick cold grip on your attention and you may just find it slipping into your hands when you didn’t even realize it was there. Perfect for those readers who loved Belzahr or We Were Liars. Ages 14 and up. PS Where’s Waldo, Southern Pines August 1-10 downtown Southern Pines. Visit the Country Bookshop to pick up a passport and begin the search. This event is free and open to the public. Katherine Applegate, Newbery winning author of The One and Only Ivan, will make her only North Carolina appearance in Southern Pines Thursday, October 1 to present her new book, Crenshaw. Only 225 tickets will be available for this once-in-a-lifetime event, which will be held at the O’Neal School auditorium. Call The Country Bookshop at 692-3211 for more information.

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

P r op e r E n g l i s h

Second-Hand Magic

Foxed and tattered, nothing like a good used book for the journey

By Serena Brown

“Gradually the magic of the island

settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.” — Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals.

Whoever came up with the idea of putting a second-hand bookshop among the departure lounge shops at Raleigh Durham Airport is a genius. As one who can cheerfully spend a millennium or two at a bookshop, I’d be happy enough with the store selling new books, but there’s something about the character of the used bookshop within the clinical airport space that is simply perfect. There’s a sense of permanence and of transience. It’s rather like browsing through the books you find in a holiday house, the idea that you’re one of many passing through that place but that something is left behind. A second-hand bookshop sends you in directions that you might not otherwise travel. Would I have been able to find a copy of Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington among the potboilers and bodice rippers of the standard airport book shop? The title seemed fitting for an Englishwoman in North Carolina, so I carried my prize to the till and then read it on the flight to London. It was a paperback copy, the pages foxed and tattered. I read it through the overnight journey . The next time I visited the shop I was in need of book four of a twenty two book series. It was there. The thrill of finding it was so much greater than that of downloading it onto my Kindle. Not that I can deny the excitement of the

Kindle’s wide realm of possibility either, especially when faced with an airport departure lounge. What to choose to read when travelling? It all depends on where you’re going. We have just returned from Corfu, an island dear to the British holidaymaker’s heart for many reasons, not least its sunshine, beauty and friendly inhabitants. I have spent two very happy vacations there, this summer and many years ago as a small child. This in itself is a reason to hold the place dear; but there are also the memoirs of Gerald Durrell. The Durrells were not a family to let schooling interfere with their education. Gerald’s memoirs cover the years of his childhood during which he and his family lived on the island of Corfu. A budding naturalist, he describes the island’s flora and fauna to the finest detail and regales the reader with a series of hilarious anecdotes involving his wonderfully sharp-witted family and their close friends, a dizzying collection of eccentrics, intellectuals and philosophers. I reread My Family and Other Animals and its sequels every couple of years. I laugh till the tears flow every time and I always learn something new. I am ashamed to say that I have yet to read any of Gerald Durrell’s older brother Lawrence’s work. I know him as the “Larry” of Gerald’s books, being constantly interrupted in his writing by the antics of his friends and his younger brother’s menagerie. This summer I will be reading Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, and learning of island life from a different perspective. Gerald Durrell wrote that if he had had the craft of Merlin, he would have given every child the gift of his childhood. I believe that through his books he has achieved that gift, because such is the power of his writing that the reader comes to be dusted with the same pollen-magic of which he speaks, and to know and love every character, every beetle and every olive grove on the island. Give a copy to a child, and remember to read it yourself first. Relive the long summer of childhood. PS Serena Brown is a new mom and a treasured staff member at PineStraw magazine.

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

papa d a d d y ’ s M i n d f i e l d

What Really Happens in Las Vegas Fortunately stays there

By Clyde Edgerton

We are fortunate that our

Illustration by harry Blair

family can afford a summer trip out west. That experience this past June was unforgettable in the best of ways. Some of the more frustrating aspects near the end of the trip are told below — from a child’s perspective. I wrote the first draft and then each of my children, in turn, helped me with the edit.

Today we finally get almost to the end of our summer trip out west. We are going to leave from Las Vegas tonight and fly all night. We rented a minivan about eight or nine days ago and have been driving a lot. This afternoon, we drove about six hours from up in Utah where a massacre took place. Dad had to look at these tombstones and a monument for about three hours after he told us a long, boring story about a wagon train and all these people getting massacred, which was sad. On the way to the tombstone place, Mom wanted to turn off on all these back dirt roads to get there, and when Dad realized that the people who got murdered had come along the same way — on this road called the Old Spanish Trail — he got all excited and turned onto the dirt road and we got lost until he used the compass in the rearview mirror, which we had to find for him. After all the tombstones and stuff, while we are riding to Las Vegas in the back of the minivan, we watch a movie while Mom and Dad keep looking at these giant rock mountains. All in all, on the whole trip, we stay in the back of the car for over 2,000 miles and look at over 2,000 rock mountains and thank goodness they let us watch a movie once in a while. I think Mom took over 2,000 billion pictures. We are leaving tonight at 10:55 p.m. We get to Las Vegas — where we will fly from — in the afternoon and we see a lot of big pictures of women without many clothes on. We go to an exhibit called Bodies. Real dead bodies are in these rooms. And we go into a store where a diamond watch is for sale for $220,000; and we see a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel; and water shooting up into the air; and tall, gold buildings. We go into a hotel and then into a room as big as a gym where there are all these glittery gambling machines. This is called a casino. Dad loses thirty dollars very fast, while we walk around because a woman said we were not allowed to stand there and watch him. We are now unpacking our rental car at the big airport because it’s time to go home, and we are putting our extra junk into a giant duffel bag that

Dad bought at Goodwill for ten dollars. Mom got some rocks and they are going in the duffel bag. She also found two big colorful towels in a trash can right there at the rental car place and got them out and is putting those into the duffel bag. Gross. We turn in the keys to the rental car people. We get all our bags into a shuttle bus, and are now headed to the airline terminal. It is very hot. It was about 111 degrees one time today. Dad asks Mom for a piece of paper with the flight information. She is sitting on one side of the shuttle bus and we are on the other. She hands it across to him. He looks at it. He gets a funny look on his face. She says, “What?” He swallows. She says, “What?” He says, “We are twenty-four hours early.” It is now the next day. We are staying at the Hampton Inn. We are walking around Las Vegas again. When we park the last time before going back to the airport again tonight to catch our flight, we are in a parking lot underneath a hotel and we walk up some back stairs and into the back of a casino. We are close to a goldfish gambling machine. We will remember where we came in — close to the goldfish machine — so we can find our car later. About two hours later after we walk around a long time and finally eat dinner, we can’t find the goldfish machine. We can’t find our car. Mom and Dad seem frustrated because it is time to go to the airport again. Dad keeps looking at his watch and Mom keeps walking fast. We have to keep following them around looking for our car. This takes a long time. They talk to the police and casino workers about where the goldfish machine might be but nobody knows. We for sure can’t find our car. It is somewhere in Las Vegas. We finally find out that our car is under the hotel next door where there is another casino. Mom and Dad seem frustrated. We find the car and head for the rental car place. We are following signs that say RENTAL CAR RETURN. Then there are no more signs and we seem to be back downtown somewhere and Dad says, “We missed the turn.” He pulls over and starts typing stuff into his phone. We have to do a U-turn. Two of us are fighting. He yells at us to be quiet. We finally find the rental car place and leave the car and start over with the shuttle bus like last night. We fly all night and get home the next morning. It was a good trip. And I am very tired. The best thing of all was the mule ride at the Grand Canyon. PS Clyde Edgerton is the author of ten novels, a memoir and a new work, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW.

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2015

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August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Vine Wisdom

Trending Summer Reds

Keeping things cooler brings out the best in these remarkable labels

By Robyn James

When tempera-

tures rise to triple digits it’s not uncommon to see your typical red wine drinkers heading to the lighter side for a nice chilled white.

They are looking for a cooler, refreshing beverage. That’s my cue to remind people that red wines are best consumed at “cellar” temperature, not “room” temperature. My thermostat at home is typically 71-73 degrees and unless you live in a walk-in cooler, yours is probably in that ballpark. I hate to get too technical, but depending on what type of red wine you’ve chosen, your optimal serving temperature is between 54-65 degrees. Quite a difference from room temperature. Richer, oaky and heavier reds such as Bordeaux and cabernet sauvignon will be best around 65 degrees, and lighter reds like Beaujolais or Valpolicella would be best at the cooler 54 degrees. If you really want to be spot on, you can purchase a wine bottle thermometer that looks like a little tape measure to go around the outside of the bottle. So, whether you want your red wine with your salmon or your filet, here are the hottest trending reds for the summer.

Bodegas Breca Garnacha, Spain, 2011, approx. $12

(This also goes well with chicken, pork or fish) “Made from garnacha vines that were reportedly planted between 1925 and 1945; aged for 21 months in small French oak. Opaque ruby. Ripe blackberry and boysenberry aromas are complemented by deeper-pitched notes of mocha and licorice. At once rich and lively, offering vibrant dark fruit preserve flavors and a kick of peppery spices. Smooth, seamless and sweet on the very persistent finish, which leaves notes of blueberry and espresso behind.” Rated 91 Points, Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar

Twelve Pinot Noir, Oregon, 2012, approx. $23

(This selection works great with chicken, pork or fish) “Crisp and spicy, sharply focused and balanced, with lively acidity under a core of cherry, fresh leather and white pepper flavors, lingering against refined tannins. Best from 2016 through 2020.” Rated 91 Points, The Wine Spectator

Domaine Lafage Tessellae Old Vines, France, 2013, approx. $12

with red meat offerings) “Another incredible wine that’s shockingly good for the price, the 2013 Tessellae Old Vines checks in as a blend of 40 percent grenache, 40 percent syrah and 20 percent mourvèdre that was aged all in concrete tank. It offers brilliant notes of black cherries, blueberry, licorice, clove and spring flowers in its medium to full-bodied, gorgeously pure profile. Showing more and more finesse and elegance with time in the glass, as well as classic Roussillon minerality on the finish, it has loads of fruit and texture yet is never heavy, cumbersome or cloying. It’s hard to believe you can get this quality for the price, but the consumer is the big winner here. Enjoy this rock star effort over the coming four to five years, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see it evolve for longer.” Rated 94 Points, Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate

Charles and Charles Cab-Syrah, Washington, 2013, approx. $13

(This too has crossover ability to work well with heartier chicken or pork dishes or with red meat offerings) “Taut, focused and generous, with red berry and plum flavors set on a supple frame of fine tannins, hinting at peach as the finish sails on.” Rated A Best Value, 89 Points, The Wine Spectator

Tapiz Alta Collection Cabernet Sauvignon, Argentina, 2011, approx. $21

(This is a definite for your steaks, ribs and burgers on the grill) “Toasty and layered, with baking spice, licorice and mocha framing the dark yet vibrant cassis and plum skin fruit. Fine length, with an ashy aftertaste. Drink now through 2017.” Rated 90 Points, The Wine Spectator

Beran Zinfandel, California, 2012, approx. $18

Aromas of smoky and sweet cedar vanillin notes enriched by cranberry, tobacco and cooked dark fruits like warm blackberry pie. A satisfying assortment of flavors follows, with red licorice, dried cherry and ripe berries being most prominent. Hints of sweet tobacco and a slight dustiness also make an appearance in this wine graced with very soft and refined tannins balanced by spirited acidity. PS Robyn James is proprietor of The Wine Cellar and Tasting Room in Southern Pines. Contact her at robynajames@gmail.com.

(This has crossover ability. It works with heartier chicken or pork dishes or

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: The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The kitchen garden

Southern Field Peas The glory of the August garden

By Jan Leitschuh

You’ve got

your meaty crowders, your nutty pink-eye peas, your sweeter pale lady creams. Your black-eyed peas for Hoppin’ John. Your royal Purple Hulls.

This is their season, the peak of freshness and flavor. How lovely then, that they are also associated with an astounding 82 percent less risk of heart disease! Yes, bon appetit! In August, when tomatoes and peppers drop their blossoms in the heat and cukes and melons droop, you can count on sturdy Southern field peas to perform in the garden — and to show up fresh-picked at local markets and on menus. Leave your canned and dried peas for winter. Stock up on fresh peas, and freeze some for pea-less days. The moniker “Southern Field Peas” (or, “cowpea”) refers to a legume species with hundreds of different varieties of peas from four main groups: cream peas, field peas, crowder peas and black-eyed peas. Each variety offers a distinctive taste and color. These delicious peas are some of the first crops grown by man. Now they are grown around the world. Brought to the U.S. from West Africa during Colonial times, adaptable field peas took readily to the hot and often-dry growing conditions of the southeastern U.S. They even grow well in up to 85 percent sand! Take note, Sandhills gardeners; all is not hopeless. If you are lucky enough to find shelled peas at the market, snag them. Fresh field peas possess a special flavor, similar to the way fresh-dug potatoes taste different from cured spuds. Despite their name, field peas are not really peas, but beans. The “peas” are eaten both as fresh shelled beans and, for gar-

deners, dried, on the vine, for winter eating. Some market or farm stand producers have a sheller and offer their peas already stripped of their pod, packaged and stored on ice. Fresh peas are perishable and once bought, should be stored in the fridge. You may have to buy the long pods unshelled at markets. I’ve noticed people shy away from this, and it’s silly. Shelling peas is genuinely part of the experience. It will take you about fifteen minutes to shell a pound, and what’s the rush? Put on the latest Netflix offering, grab a bowl and go to town. It’s like knitting; shelling settles the mind. If you’re of a certain age and from around these parts, it may even recall those pre-air-conditioned times when folks gathered on the porch to rock, catch a breeze and shell peas into a bowl in the lap. Perhaps the best-known Southern pea is the black-eyed pea. That famous white seed with the characteristic black mark at the seed scar is a well-known component of the Southern New Year’s traditional Hoppin’ John. The black mark forms where the seed attaches to the pod, making it look like an eye. Meaty crowders are my favorites, and are widely loved for their small brown seeds and hearty flavor. You can almost believe you are eating beef, but without the saturated fat, they are that umami. Like the black-eyed pea, crowders enjoy widespread use in soul food dishes. This pea takes its name from the manner in which its peas crowd themselves in the pod so closely they begin to square off. Crowders too have a rich, hearty flavor and create a dark pot liquor when cooked. “Dixie Lee” is a common and popular crowder variety grown around here, says producer David Sherrill of Ellerbe, who grows a couple of acres of Southern field peas. The brown peas and greenish pods of Dixie Lee are perhaps not the most photogenic, but aficionados rave about their taste and the rich, sauce-like juice, or “pea liquor” they produce when cooked up. When cooked, the medium-size peas take on a brown color, with a dark

The kitchen garden

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gravy and distinctive flavor. “I would rather have Dixie Lee peas (cooked with bacon grease) with pea liquor and cornbread for dinner than anything else,” raved one Internet enthusiast from Raleigh. “Cream peas” are cowpeas without color. When cooked up, they are just as delicious, but without the dark liquors of colored seeds. Their “pea gravy” is a clear liquid. Purple Hulls have some purple coloring on the pods, but may also fit into the other groups. This pea can be light or pinkish, with a lighter flavor than its cousins. If you’d like to grow field peas in your garden, look for seeds at local farm and feed stores. Sow seeds in ordinary soil about a month after the last frost date — mid-May here. The field pea tolerates no chill. As a legume, the plants fix nitrogen in the soil, improving fertility. That’s always a good thing in the Sandhills. Some farmers grow these solely for “green manure” (plowed under before setting seed to improve the organic matter content of the soil). Others grow them as a protein-rich fodder for cattle, hence the name “cowpeas.” If you do grow field peas, save back a few dozen pods to start next year’s garden. It’s a good ground cover for a rotation crop, or to improve fallow ground. But beware: The deer love these as much as you will. Field peas are low in fat and packed with fiber, including the heart-healthy soluble fiber. Soluble fiber forms a gel-like substance in the digestive tract that binds bile (which contains cholesterol) and carries it out of the body. “If you have insulin resistance, hypoglycemia or diabetes, legumes like dried peas can really help you balance blood sugar levels while providing steady, slow-burning energy. Studies of high fiber diets and blood sugar levels have shown the dramatic benefits provided by these high fiber foods,” says the information website World’s Healthiest Foods. According to the same website, a dietary study of 16,000 middle-aged men worldwide with a variety of diets discovered that legumes (peas and beans) were associated with an overall 82 percent reduction in death from heart disease! If there was a pill that produced a similar result; it would be front page news. Field peas are also a good source of potassium, which may help lower blood pressure and prevent plaque development. Delicious when cooked with smoked pork (such as bacon, country ham or tasso ham), field peas also have an affinity for onions, peppers and garlic. If you can’t get fresh, dried peas are still delicious. Prepare dried field peas by rinsing, then soaking them overnight. Drain. Boil in chicken broth, vegetable broth or plain water, about three cups of water per pound of dried peas. Adjust liquid so that peas are entirely covered and at a level about 1 1/2 inches above peas.

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The kitchen garden

Bring to boil, cover, and reduce heat and strong simmer about 45-60 minutes. Keep watch; ensure that peas are somewhat soupy rather than dry. Add water if necessary. You want to create that wonderful pea liquor. Cooking of peas is not at all complicated, but they do benefit from some flavoring, so boil peas with bacon, ham or salt pork, or herbs. Field peas are often served with a few snap beans tossed in for color and variety. Succotash, which combines field peas and limas, is another Southern classic. After cooking, toss a hefty spoonful over a pile of rice. Don’t use a slotted spoon, or you won’t get any of the rich and delicious “pea liquor.” This month, we have two recipes:

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Six Weeks Peas

1 tablespoon olive oil About 3 tablespoons minced sweet onion Pint of fresh peas 1/2 teaspoon salt Sprig or two of thyme Water to cover Salt & pepper, to taste In a medium saucepan, place olive oil over low to medium heat. Stir in the minced onions, and cook for just a few minutes until they become soft. Add peas, salt, and thyme, and enough water to cover the peas by an inch. Cook until peas are tender. Remove thyme stems. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. From Elizabeth Wiegand, author of The New Blue Ridge Cookbook: Authentic Recipes from Virginia’s Highlands to North Carolina’s Mountains.

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Dixie Lee Peas & Rice

3 or 4 strips lean bacon, diced 1 small onion, chopped 1/2 red bell pepper, diced 2 cups fresh Dixie Lee peas, field peas or black-eyed peas (in season) 1/2 cup uncooked, white, long-grain rice 2 cups water (or half chicken broth and half water) Salt and black pepper, to taste Hot pepper sauce, to taste In a heavy skillet, sauté bacon 2 or 3 minutes. Add onion and bell pepper. Continue cooking until vegetables soften slightly and bacon is crisp. Stir peas and rice into the pot; pour in water. Reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer 20 minutes or until the rice is done. Remove from heat and let the pan sit with the lid on 5 minutes. Toss mixture lightly. Season with salt and pepper. Diners can season individual portions with pepper sauce. Tip: One clove minced garlic can be added with the onion and bell pepper. Susan Slack, blog, A Taste of Carolina. PS Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, avid eater of fresh produce and co-founder of the Sandhills Farm to Table Cooperative. PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2015

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Out of the Blue

Bugger Off Diary of a mad skeeter-hater

By Deborah Salomon

When I’m tired enough, even

a jackhammer won’t disturb sleep. But a mosquito? My seething almost drowns out the buzz. Almost. Because when that miserable little insect dive-bombs my ear, the sound is worse than incoming ordnance. I jump awake, raring to reduce the mini-monster to a bloody splat on the wall. Obviously, mosquitoes bring out the worst in me. A beetle the size of Mickey Mouse scurried around the kitchen sink one recent morning; although horrified, I calmly planned and executed entrapment and removal. Some varmints are just too big to kill. But faced with a tiny mosquito I begin to understand what motivated Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. Besides, I am sensitive to the venom. Those blood-suckers raise a welt that itches for days.

Midnight. The annual joust usually coincides with the MLB

All-Star game. The bat — a flyswatter — is ready but ineffectual since my pitiful 5-foot, 1-inch frame plus height of bed and length of swatter fall short of the ceiling, the little bugger’s landing pad. Nevertheless, I wind up, then leap with a powerful swing, ignoring two orthopedically compromised knees and one screwed-together ankle. What’s a little surgery when I’ve a dragon to slay? But, even with every light on, I swipe in vain, hoping nobody’s spotted me through the window performing what appears to be an aboriginal war dance on the bed, in my nightie, until rivulets of sweat run down my back, while buzzboy regroups. Strike one.

2 a.m.

Frustrated, simmering with hate, I finally doze. Skeeter senses lessened danger and, like a drone over Kandahar, hones his target. Once again, I detect the buzz more dreaded than a rattlesnake. Maybe if I play dead he will become entangled in my hair. Then all I must do is slam my skull until he is crushed.

The buzz stops, indicating a landing. Whack! Bam! Bam! A hit? Lacking a corpse, how would I know? Score a headache, nothing more. Strike two.

3:30 a.m.

I lay prone, arms outstretched in surrender, still wondering how the winged peril got in. A hole in the screen? Probably not, since the windows are closed. By hovering near the front door? More likely. Where are all the spiders I spared, that they should spin webs to catch you? The maddening buzz recommences. I consider alternate implements. A broom, although long enough, doesn’t have proper clout; mosquitoes slip right through the straws. My sponge mop lacks that fatal angle. But maybe, just maybe, those decorative throw pillows lying on the floor, if launched at the ceiling with enough force, might accomplish the kill. On go the lights, once again. Except this time, so do the lights in the house across the street. My neighbors probably think I’m sending out an S.O.S. warning of a burglar, or worse. Worse, indeed. I must work quickly. Grabbing a pillow, I locate the black speck on the ceiling, bend my knees and, like a basketball player who shoots free throws underhand, with all my might heave the pillow straight upward. A hit! A grand slam, outta da park! My nemesis has been mangled, squashed, silenced. My knees and ankle haven’t come unglued. I didn’t resort to noxious spray. The neighbors refrained from calling the police. I practiced patience and won the inning, if not the game — the battle, if not the war. Never mind that it’s almost dawn, I’m drenched in sweat and wide awake. I’ll wash off, make a pot of coffee and lie down on the couch to savor my victory. I love that peaceful hour between night and morning. All is quiet, all is well. My eyes drift closed. And then . . . bzzzzz. PS Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Hom e tow n

Purple Heart

The war my father rarely spoke of that ended seventy years ago this month

By Bill Fields

There not being much to do on sum-

Photographs by Bill fields

mer Sunday afternoons in the 1960s, every few weeks we’d take our assigned seats in the station wagon and head to a field on the outskirts of Aberdeen. People would be jumping out of planes for fun.

The sport parachutists were distant specks when beginning their descent, growing larger as they floated earthward thousands of feet for what usually appeared to be smooth landings on flat ground. They would gather their parachutes and presently begin preparing them for another jump. My father didn’t say much on those family outings to that rural drop zone. There were more Salems smoked than words spoken. But I do recall one brief conversation. “This is what you did in the war, isn’t it?” I said. “No, it wasn’t like this,” Dad said. Like so many World War II veterans, my father never shared much about what it was like, at least not with me. The details of his experience were cordoned off, leaving fragments of explanation. I knew of an island called Corregidor and saw his bad leg, the reason for the Purple Heart stored in a living room cabinet, but that was about it. In contrast to his muted memories, war otherwise seemed everywhere for boys of my generation. If we weren’t playing “Army” with toy carbines, ducking behind pine trees and azalea bushes for cover, we were lining up tiny, plastic fighting men on backyard battlefields. The Americans were green, the Germans gray. When I carried my lunch to school, it was in a “Combat” lunchbox. A field trip to the USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial in Wilmington was as much a part of childhood as a visit to the State Capitol. Vietnam was on the CBS Evening News and in Life Magazine. That war got very real once, when the son of a family friend was killed in action after volunteering for a second tour of duty. His mother was living in an apartment above the dime store downtown where I bought my plastic soldiers. When we went to pay our respects, the grief for the fallen young man filled the small space, making that evening the first time I’d ever felt such enveloping sadness.

It was decades after Dad died in 1980 before I obtained — through military records, books, film footage — a fuller view of what he had gone through in his war, and when I did, his reticence about his paratrooper days in the Pacific Theater made sense. I doubt that the gift of years would have caused him to open up. It was harrowing stuff. As a member of the 161st Parachute Engineer Company, he participated in several campaigns in 1944 and 1945 to liberate the Philippines. On the early morning of February 16, 1945, as part of the Rock Force Assault, he boarded a C-47 for a seventy-five-minute flight to Corregidor, the rocky, tadpole-shaped island in Manila Bay that Japanese forces had claimed in 1942. The paratroopers were each carrying more than a hundred pounds of equipment, jumping from 550 feet to a drop zone of rough terrain measuring only 500 by 1,050 feet in a wind of 25 miles per hour — a speed that would have canceled training jumps to much larger targets. By themselves those numbers speak to the danger, but several newsreels document what the paratroopers faced. Once I found them on the Internet, I watched them many times looking for my father, sometimes with the dogtags that were around his neck that fateful day in my hand. I’ve never been able to identify his among the anxious faces hooked to a static line or the soldiers freeing themselves from their chutes on the ground. But several paratroopers are shown landing with such force on the hostile, bomb-cratered surface that it is easy to understand how Dad shattered his left ankle and why, when the war ended seventy years ago this month, he was still recuperating from his wounds. Those films tell me things my father could not, on a Sunday afternoon or any other time. PS Southern Pines native Bill Fields never lived on Connecticut Avenue but has lived in the actual Connecticut for a long time.

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Seen & unseen

Golden Bells

Remembering a remarkable Grandfather By Marjorie Hopkins

My grandfather, Charles

William Johnson, drank life from the top half of his glass. Tall and lean, in summer he wore an ice cream tan suit with a straw skimmer banded in silk grosgrain. The suit matched the color of his Chrysler, the first such grand automobile in town and judged most fitting for a Nebraska state senator.

He and my grandmother, Ellen Jenson, were married in April 1886, but when their fiftieth wedding anniversary came along they delayed the formal celebration until June, when all the grandchildren would be out of school and everyone could attend. I was 9 that year and one of the few female grandchildren among a bevy of boys. I lived two blocks from Grandpa and was the envy of my cousins who lived on farms outside town, because every day I shared in the excitement of the fixings for Grandma and Grandpa’s big party. Large and small packages, cards and letters arrived daily. Mine was the honored chore of picking up the mail from Mrs. Goding at the post office and bringing it up the graveled street to Grandpa’s. He’d sit in his platform rocker in a corner of the dining room and open the mail. A table radio beside him blared either the news, a baseball game or farm reports. Over the announcer’s rumble he’d call to Grandma, who was usually baking in the kitchen. “Ellen, Morris and Annie say they’ll be arriving Saturday morning. They’re staying with Henry.” Grandma hardly paused in her work. “Now that’s nice of them to drive all the way up from Salina.” After all the cards and letters were read and appropriate comments made, it was time to open packages. Grandma would join us, wiping flour from her hands onto a handmade embroidered apron. Wisps of silky white hair escaped from the bun crowning her head and trailed across the side of her face as she bent to watch. I separated the gifts from their many wrappings of butcher paper, cardboard, tissue and ribbons and carefully handed her the treasures. She accepted each offering in her small, rough hands as she turned and admired it. Overwhelmed with the outpourings of love and respect, she often slipped into speaking Danish. Grandpa nodded his head with pleasure. Each piece, most of them fragile china or crystal and edged in gold, was tenderly placed in a crowded glass-door cabinet. The celebration day arrived clear and sunshiny. More than 250 relatives and friends had been invited to a sumptuous dinner at noon in the church hall, to be followed by a program in the sanctuary. Women from the Ladies Auxiliary had decorated the hall in a coat of tinsel and gold rivaling the brilliance of heaven’s golden streets. Guests had been arriving for days. They filled every available bed in our small town. Some of us cousins gathered that morning at our house and migrated to the church early. We hung over the stair railing watching the ladies in the kitchen

below. Nose-tickling aromas of home-baked biscuits, fried chicken and steaming pies drifted up the stairs and set our stomachs growling. We impatiently waited the arrival of the slow-pokey old folks. I was the first to notice Uncle Willie park his car and come slowly up the walk. His usual jolly smile was gone. We swarmed around him, anxious to know when the festivities would start. “Children,” he began, “your grandpa has taken a spell. He wants you to come home and be with your grandma.” There were mutterings of disappointment as we trooped down the church hill. None of us could think of Grandpa as ailing. He was too filled with life: bouncing us on his knee when we were little; piling us in his car and taking us to the circus; belting out hymns around the piano at family reunions. For the final song Grandpa always said, “Let’s sing ‘When they Ring those Golden Bells for You and Me.’” When we arrived at Grandpa’s house, the silent and tear-streaked faces of the adults on the porch and in the parlor stemmed our mutterings. A wedge of fear crept up my back as Momma took me by the hand. “Don’t be afraid, Marjorie. Grandpa wants to see all of you.” We filed silently into the bedroom and circled the bed, where Grandpa lay propped against the pillows. His face was white and drawn. “Not too long,” Dr. Miller cautioned. Grandma sat in her vanity chair near the head of his bed, her hand in his. “Grandpa’s not feeling too well,” she said. “He’ll soon be better.” “Now, Ellen,” he reprimanded with a patient smile, struggling with each word. “We’ve never lied to the children before. This is no time to start.” He turned his head, focusing on each of us as if taking a snapshot. When Bobby sniffled and seemed ready to cry, Grandpa’s hand reached out. “Now, now, Bobby. You’re too big to cry. Remember all the good times we’ve had, all the places we’ve gone. I’m going where the grass is greener than at the ranch in spring and where the angels sing sweeter than your Aunt Edith at the piano.” His voice grew weak. “Mama’s going to miss me so it’s up to each of you to help her out. You promise to come see her often.” We nodded solemnly. He closed his eyes. Dr. Miller motioned it was time to go. We backed slowly away, not wanting to leave his bedside. Then he opened his eyes and spoke again. His voice was suddenly strong. “Make me proud of you. All of you, make me proud.” Instead of festivities, the dinner at the church was converted into an impromptu celebration of Grandpa’s life. At almost the exact time the program was closing and Oscar Redeen sang Grandpa’s favorite hymn, Grandpa answered the roll call to eternity. The church bells rang loud and long. A local obituary ended: “Our friend and companion has gone, but the example of his well-filled and well-lived life goes on, a light in the darkness, a ray of hope and cheer in despondency, a living example of man’s duty to his home, his God, and his country.” Grandpa left all of us, his grandchildren, an inheritance rich in pride and moral values. I hope we have made him proud. PS Originally from Nebraska, Marjorie Hopkins retired to Pinehurst from Washington, DC in 1992 and now resides at Gracious Living. Two of her books have been published along with several short stories.

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B I R D WA T C H

Broad-Winged Hawk Magnificent hunters in one’s own backyard

By Susan Campbell

Moving means so many things: like

meeting new neighbors. Yes, it may be the family next door or the couple across the street — but there are others in the community: yes, the local wildlife. My recent relocation from a lake in Whispering Pines to a farm in Southern Pines has radically changed what’s outside my windows — and doors. Instead of looking out over open water, here I am adjacent to a small creek and a floodplain. The swampy woods are teeming with birds, all drawn to the abundance of food. Nowadays, insects are the order of the day. One species in particular has caught my eye and particularly seems to enjoy the diversity of prey in the swampy terrain: the broad-winged hawk. Mind you, I do not see these diminutive but magnificent birds regularly, but, as with so many birds during the breeding season, I hear them advertising their presence. Their call is a high pitched whistle, unlike any other bird in our area. Being heard and not seen may be a strategy for these birds, since they are relatively small in size: close to that of a crow. Often living within the boundaries of other, larger hawks, such as a red-shouldered (the case in my neighborhood), being less visible is a distinct advantage.

Not surprisingly, given their size, broad-wingeds often go unnoticed. They are birds of the forest and, given their dark coloration, blend in well with their surroundings. But that doesn’t mean they’re drab. These stocky little hawks have reddish heads and handsome barred underparts that match their boldly barred tails. But only the keenest of birders will probably spot them unless they’re migrating, when they congregate in large numbers (even into the thousands) in certain locations. At these raptor “hot spots” the birds can be seen soaring in circles, forming large “kettles,” on updrafts, gaining altitude early in the day. Broad-wingeds, like many other hawks, use upper air currents to make their long journey a bit easier. Unlike most of our local hawk species, these birds move back and forth between the Eastern United State and central to northern South America during the year. Here in the Piedmont, the species can be found in hardwood or mixed pine-hardwood forest. The courtship ritual is breathtaking, involving “sky diving” — circling high in the sky followed by a rapid dive. The pair will nest in the lower limbs of a mature tree, usually close to water or some sort of opening in the canopy. The parent hawks will feed their young everything from mice to frogs, from lizards to large insects. Since broad-winged hawks are easily disturbed, they are rarely seen outside rural areas. So should you be out hiking at Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve in Southern Pines or at, say, Haw River State Park in Browns Summit, keep an eye out as well as an ear, you just may spot an elusive broad-winged! PS Susan would love to hear from you. Feel free to send questions or wildlife observations to susan@ncaves.com (or 910-585-0574).

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

A No v e l Y e ar

Time and Memory

And the special anniversary celebration that marks our family’s passage By Wiley Cash

November 18, 1922,

marked not only the end of Marcel Proust’s life at the age of 51, it also marked the end of his twelve-year struggle to transmogrify his life into fiction; this he did in a seven-volume behemoth of a novel titled In Search of Lost Time. While T. S. Eliot’s lovable loser J. Alfred Prufrock measures his life in coffee spoons, Proust’s autobiographical narrator measures his life in pages, and there are literally thousands of them.

Can you imagine attempting to put one year of your life on the page? Can you visualize the scope of a year’s worth of minutiae? Do you possess the vocabulary necessary to portray the wonder, fear and beauty a year brings? Can you sustain a narrative that encompasses the richness of one year of life? Now, multiply that difficulty by 50. To quote Prufrock, who has his own issues when conceptualizing life, “How do I presume?” The better question is, “Where do I begin?” Proust’s narrator begins with a madeleine cookie that he eats as a young child. Upon recalling the taste of this treat, he is able to recast the flow of his life in a series of memories, impressions, stories, faces, fragments and ideas. In other words, it all comes back to him with the remembrance of one thing: fifty years of life conjured by a cookie. My parents have shared fifty years of their lives together as a married couple, and I’m certain that during that time they’ve eaten some memorable cookies, but getting them to shake off the layers of memory and tell stories about their lives is akin to scraping a house’s exterior before you’re able to paint it. There are things they don’t remember; things they haven’t thought of in years; things they don’t believe others would be interested in hearing about. But the older they get, the more my siblings and I want to hear these things. In early June my older sister, younger brother and I celebrated my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary with a surprise party in their honor at the Brunswick Inn in Southport, North Carolina. The list of attendees was extensive: my mother’s childhood best friend; my father’s cousins from Cleveland County; a couple named Vickie and Oren who double-dated with my parents in the 1960s; dozens of newer and no less dear friends my parents have made in the seventeen years they’ve lived on the coast. It was an incredible evening of recounting stories, catching up with old friends, and meeting new people I’d heard my parents talk about over the years. As the guests began to leave around dusk, we began the clean-up effort while my parents settled into the room we’d reserved for them. Along with Vickie and Oren, my parents and my wife and daughter and I had the inn to ourselves for the night. Later, with my sister preparing to head back to my parents’ house to keep an eye on their dog and my brother and sister-in-law returning home to Wilmington, we all stood in the inn’s foyer and talked about the party: the sur-

prise of it, how nice it was to see everyone, how much it meant that so many people made the trip to the coast. “That was the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” my mother said. An hour or so later — night fully fallen, our daughter asleep, Vickie and Oren in their room, the house otherwise empty — my parents and my wife and I sat on the second-story porch that overlooks the Southport harbor. In the distance, the Oak Island Lighthouse glowed brightly at the far eastern end of Caswell Beach, its light rotating across the water and through the trees in perfect increments. We talked about how the lighthouse’s beam is visible from the bridge that connects the mainland to Oak Island, where my parents live, and I reminded my mother that when they moved to the beach in 1998, she told me that I would always know I was on my way home when I saw the light from the Oak Island Lighthouse. Our conversation shifted from my parents’ relocation to the coast to the many other places they’ve lived during their fifty years together: San Antonio during my father’s basic training; Germany during the Vietnam War; Shelby in an apartment above my grandparents’ home; Fayetteville, where I was born after my father was transferred; Gastonia, where my sister, brother and I were raised until the three of us left for college and all settled together in Asheville. After a lull in the conversation, my mother turned and looked at me and my wife. “You know, July 6 isn’t our real anniversary,” she said. “We got married a few months before that,” my father said. “It was a secret. No one ever knew.” My mother gestured toward the porch door behind her. “Vickie and Oren knew,” she said, smiling. “They were our witnesses.” “Why did you keep it a secret?” my wife asked. “We didn’t want our families to know we’d gotten married before our wedding day. We drove down to Clover, South Carolina. We were afraid he’d be drafted,” my mother said. “And we knew I couldn’t go with him unless we were married.” While the light from the Oak Island Lighthouse rolled across the face of the water in the harbor, the four of us talked about how funny it must’ve felt for my parents to get married twice and the fact that they had marriage licenses from both North and South Carolina. My parents had told this story to my siblings and me years earlier, but I’d forgotten it, and as I watched the lighthouse’s light illuminate the trees and flash across our faces I imagined that on each pass the light removed another layer of time, of memory, of the mystery of both. Fifty years ago, my parents were married twice, and then they gave birth to my sister, my brother, and me, and now I was here with them and my wife, our daughter asleep only feet away, Vickie and Oren — who a half-century ago witnessed things I’ve only heard about — asleep just down the hall, a madeleine cookie dissolving on the tongue as time dissolves around it, a lighthouse spinning in the distance, shining its light over the fifty years it took to get to this moment, this night, this memory. PS Wiley Cash is a New York Times best-selling author whose second novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, was released last year. He lives in Wilmington.

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

S porti n g Li f e

The Cure for Hot Weather Fishing a farm pond on a summer day brings back memories of a time where staying cool was a boy’s adventure

By Tom Bryant

Good night nurse, it’s hot! Poor planning,

I thought to myself as I climbed in the little KW16 canoe. All my fishing gear, including a .22 rifle to ward off snakes, was pushed up in the bow along with a cooler loaded with cold drinks. I’d be needing that, plus some, if the cloud cover didn’t come soon. The Weather Channel, or Weather Disaster Channel, as I now refer to it, indicated that a front was supposed to come through. It would dislodge the Bermuda high that was blowing hot air like a blast furnace and push it on out to sea.

The Weather Channel has drifted more and more to sensationalizing weather across the country. Anytime I flip on the TV to get the Local on the 8s, I have to sit through news of a natural disaster. Floods, tornadoes, droughts, forest fires — you name it, a meteorologist from the Weather Channel will be near, exclaiming almost gleefully how bad it is, or will be. Because of this dramatization, I try to time it so I can get the local scoop or nothing at all. Today, though, I’d had it with hot weather. You’re supposed to get cabin fever during the winter when a blizzard blows out of the north, stranding you inside with nothing to do but dream of summer and the laid-back fishing season when all you need is a cane fishing pole, a can of worms for bait, a cold drink and a good book. This year, the dream hasn’t worked that way yet. Spring came in kinda slow, a little cool for fishing but just right for turkey hunting season. Then one morning we woke up to summer with a capital S and a series of days with temperatures climbing to triple digits. So we settled down to a routine of up at 6 a.m., do whatever we could outside until noon, and hunker down inside the house, air conditioner humming, until the next morning.

I’d had enough of this routine, so early one morning I loaded the canoe on top of the old Bronco, grabbed some fishing gear, and headed south to the little farm I lease for bird hunting. Early in the farm’s tobacco growing history, a small pond was dug primarily for irrigation; but just like most Southern farm ponds, it has evolved into a natural spot to wet a hook. My dad’s old Garcia spinning reel that my brother had refurbished and presented to me on a long-ago birthday was latched onto a bream rod. The rod was one of my favorites, not too stiff but firm enough to haul in a good-size red breast. I realized that in the great scheme of things I had about as much chance of catching anything big enough for a skillet as I had of breaking a hundred at Dewitt’s skeet range. But hey, I was outside, and I was fishing. I paddled to the head of the pond, anchored by a giant cypress, and splashed some pond water in the boat thinking it might help cool things. I dipped my old pith helmet in the black water, dumped some on my head, and thought of frosty images. This is crazy. After all, it is summer in the South. I’m whining like one of those recently resettled Yankees. I grew up here and should be used to this kind of weather. I grabbed a big juicy night crawler from my bait can, hooked him on and tossed him out to do battle with an ancient farm pond bream, knowing all the time that it was too hot for fish to bite. There’s a problem with all this air-conditioning. Back in the day, when windows would actually open in the average house, folks were geared for summer and had just the right formula to live comfortably. A good example is our old home place down in South Carolina. Built around 1830 and designed for low country sizzlers, the old house is situated to catch the prevailing winds with a big front door and the main hall leading to the back door on a sleeping porch. Tall open windows on the front, and 14-foot ceilings throughout almost give the illusion of living outside. When all the doors and windows are open, a refreshing breeze wafts through the venerable old place. If that’s not enough, a great long rain porch with rockers, swings, gliders and a hammock helps a person relax and enjoy the day when the sun is high overhead. The original design also called for the kitchen to be separate from the house and the main building to be about five feet off the ground, resting on

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pillars with no under pinning, just latticework to keep chickens and hound dogs from taking up residence in the cool space underneath. Growing up in Pinebluff, we had the town lake, which was a haven for cooling off and the place where I learned to swim at the ripe old age of 6. I spent many hours enjoying those cool spring-fed waters. A typical summer day in the little village, before I became responsible and had my first job at O’Neal’s Esso service station in downtown Aberdeen, would find me up and at ’em early in the morning. With my bicycle and trusty dog Smut, I would roam our part of town to see what had developed the night before. Not finding any robbers or interloping pirates to foil, we would head back home for breakfast. The chores that were required of me would be artfully pushed back to the afternoon, and after a brief conversation with Mom giving me instructions on what to do and be careful of, Smut and I would shove off for the lake. Our house was on the lake road and I could actually push my bike away from our front porch and coast, not pedaling once, all the way down to our favorite swimming hole. After a morning at the lake, Smut and I would head back home for lunch. Smut would snooze under a tree in the backyard while I enjoyed a good book and a nap. Then, afternoon roaming progressed to an early evening game of kick the can with good friends. After supper, I would hit the sack early, dreaming of doing it all again the next day. Summer in Pinebluff was glorious. The whole time I was thinking those cool thoughts I had my eye on a big black cottonmouth moccasin lying up in the shallows. He looked as if he had his eye on me, so I eased forward and got my trusty Ruger .22. Long ago I learned that I wasn’t the only thing that loved fishing these black waters, and if it came to an argument with a cottonmouth, I planned to win. The ugly snake slithered up the bank and out of sight, but I kept a healthy vigilance and realized that the entire time I was watching that critter, I hadn’t thought at all about being hot. Crows, looking for some shade, flew into the pines surrounding the pond at about the same time I decided to call it an afternoon. I reeled in my fishing rig, paddled slowly to the take-out point and loaded everything in the Bronco for the trip home. I rolled both windows down and opened the top of the back tailgate. That was the total extent of cooling the little truck offered. “See,” I said to the old vehicle as I fired her up and headed home. “You and I have done without air-conditioning for thirty-seven years, and I think if we work on it, we can get by for a few more.” PS Tom Bryant, a Southern Pines resident, is a lifelong outdoorsman and PineStraw’s Sporting Life columnist.

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

G o l f tow n J o u r n a l

Tom & Son Inc.

With a strong connection to Pinehurst, acclaimed course designer Tom Fazio and son Logan drone ahead into the new age of golf course architecture

By Lee Pace

Six years ago, in the depths of the post-

financial crisis stoppage in the golf design and construction business, Tom Fazio paused one morning in his office in Hendersonville and noted to a visitor that there was no noise — no sound of phones ringing.

“We do not have a single golf course under design or construction in the United States,” Fazio said in May 2009. “That’s hard to imagine after what we’ve seen the last twenty years. But I don’t think those days are ever coming back. “My son Logan is running the business now. He said, ‘Dad, go play golf.’” Business today for course designers with the reputation and longevity of Tom Fazio has at least warmed back up. And with Logan, now 38, in charge day-to-day and willing to travel the globe to find and execute jobs — an inconvenience that Tom loathed and avoided during his professional apex — business is quite brisk for the Fazio Golf Course Designers in mid-2015. “Actually it’s better for me now than it’s ever been,” Fazio says. “Logan does all the travel and he oversees the whole deal. I don’t have to deal with the details of the business operation. I can just handle design issues. I feel like I’m more involved with the design than I’ve ever been.” Fazio continues as a consulting architect at Augusta National, and the firm

has courses under construction at Davant Plantation near Ridgeland, South Carolina; Monterey Peninsula Country Club Dunes Course; River Oaks Country Club in Houston; Silo Ridge Field Club in Amenia, New York; and The Summit Club in Las Vegas. Courses are in the design stage in the Bahamas, South Korea and northern California, waiting various client and regulatory approvals. Logan recently signed the papers finalizing the deal for the Fazio firm to handle a major renovation to Kasumigaseki Country Club’s East Course, the host layout for the 2020 Tokyo Games. The course opened for play in 1929 and was designed by one of the Golden Age’s leading architects, Charles Hugh Alison. “That’s a good, long-term deal for us,” Tom says. “It’s the Olympics. It’s good for Logan, it’s good for our legacy, good for the brand.” Fazio Sr. says that Logan, his oldest son and the second oldest of six children he has with wife Susan, has had the talent and the love for the golf design and construction business since first joining the company in the late 1990s. And he puts some of the same qualities he exhibited as a youngster into his career. “It’s amazing how people don’t change much,” Fazio says. “Logan was a ‘go-to’ guy from a young age. Around the family, we called him ‘The Boss’ because if you wanted something done, you’d give it to Logan. He loved golf and all sports, and if the coach needed a crucial basket, you’d give the ball to Logan. If you needed a crucial stop on defense, you put Logan on the best scorer. “If it was easy, he wouldn’t do it. He always wanted a challenge. Since

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

G o l f tow n J o u r n a l

he started in the business, if I had a project and there was a problem, I’d give it to Logan to solve. If you want to get a golf course built in the Bahamas, which is no easy task, put Logan in charge. If an issue of any kind comes up today, I give it to Logan.” Fazio has spent significant time in and around Pinehurst since the mid-1970s. He had worked more than a dozen years for his uncle George in the design business by 1976, when executives with the Diamondhead Corp., the owners of Pinehurst Resort & Country Club in the 1970s, called to say they wanted to build their first course away from the central resort core. No. 6 would be built on a relatively rugged piece of land about three miles north of the resort. “Getting the No. 6 job was a major step for us in the golf design business,” Fazio says of the course that opened in 1979. “There was next-tonothing new built in 1974 and ’75. Then the call came from Pinehurst. “We were a struggling business trying to get known and get recognition. No. 6 coming along when it did was a dream come true. It was the biggest piece of cheese we’d ever thought about. It had amazing potential.” Also opening that year was the Links Course at Wild Dunes outside Charleston, a course acclaimed for its windswept terrain bordered by sand and long wispy grasses. Fazio’s career matured just in time for the 1980s golf boom. He returned to Pinehurst in the mid-1990s to build Pinehurst No. 8 and the South Course at Forest Creek Country Club, in the late 1990s to design Pinehurst No. 4, and then just after the turn of the new century to add the North Course at Forest Creek. “For me, Pinehurst is such a special place for golf,” Fazio says. “Put Donald Ross in the equation and it’s even more special. It’s been a historical destination for over a century. There’s a special feeling — a feeling for golf and its tradition and history and longevity.” Tom and George Fazio also consulted with Pinehurst management in the late 1970s on a restoration of No. 2, one that in hindsight many years later would appear to be a mini-version of what Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw would do in 2010-11. Mostly the Fazios tried to restore some of the unkempt look to the course that Diamondhead had removed early in its ownership tenure because it wanted a smoother, greener presentation. Fazio in the fall of 2010 toured the work of Coore & Crenshaw with Don Padgett II, at the time the resort and club president and COO, and gave the restoration a thumbs-up. “You can say the word shock when I first saw the golf course,” Fazio said at the time. “The word wow is appropriate as well. I also would

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say that I think it’s going to be fabulous. It’s such a big deal to do. This is a big deal. This is not a little deal. It’s a big deal. It takes a lot of guts and good management to do this. Some people will be shocked at the changes. I think it’s pretty much on target. I couldn’t be happier, being a Pinehurst fan and having had the opportunity to do quite a few golf courses at Pinehurst myself. “The look is so unique and so Pinehurst. A couple of generations of golfers never saw the old Pinehurst, they don’t understand what it was. Now all of a sudden it’s back. This golf course will look strange to some people. There will be a question mark in their minds. But I think they’ll come around when they experience it.” As a historian, student and practitioner of golf course design over many decades, Fazio always wondered how Donald Ross, the architect of seven courses in the Sandhills, got around the nation to design and build so many golf courses— just under 400 in the first half of the 1900s by most estimates. “Travel in those days was brutal,” Fazio says. “Long train rides, cars over bad roads. I cannot imagine how hard that life was.” In a late 1990s conversation he immediately contrasted that with the “soft” life he led — a private airplane parked just minutes from his home and office in Hendersonville to take him anywhere his golf design business demanded. “And I’m home in time for my kids’ soccer games,” he said. Now at the age of 70, Fazio talks with wideeyed amazement at the next chapter in travel, technology and the business of designing golf courses. Not long ago he was hitting practice balls on the tee at Wade Hampton Golf Club in Cashiers, when Logan buzzed his father’s smart phone with real-time images of a golf course under construction hundreds of miles away. “This drone Logan uses flies six feet above the ground and can send me a live feed of a golf hole under construction,” Fazio says. “You can see it from clearing stage to construction to the installation of pipe. You can see it being shaped. I can be anyplace and see a golf hole being built from anywhere in the world. “Years ago, I was amazed I had an airplane. But an airplane isn’t so fast anymore.” Thankfully for golfers everywhere, there were trains to get Donald Ross where he was going a century ago and there are drones to transport images back to Tom Fazio today. PS Lee Pace has written about golf in Pinehurst for 30 years and his most recent book, The Golden Age of Pinehurst: The Story of the Rebirth of No. 2, is available in retail shops and on-line at Pinehurst Resort & Country Club.

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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August 2015 To Forget Who You Are For my Mother

To forget who you are is one way to vanish To go underground is another way To go underground and sleep as ash with the roots Or to sleep as air inside the sound of the sky To appear as a magpie or an eagle Or coltsfoot along the edge of the quarry To assume the shape of shadows that swim in the tall road-side grass below a stand of Elms â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Malena MĂśrling

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Love Over Par

Thanks to bewitching Vampadelle Summer, passion was tiptoeing through Dicky Smythe’s heart like Amazons at a grape stomping By Jim Moriarty

er name was Vampadelle Summer, and she wasn’t to be trusted. No one knew this better than Rewind, who pushed down the lid of the Mercedes trunk as delicately as if he was performing chest compressions on a hummingbird. Respecting the peace and solitude of the deeply disturbed was something Rewind believed in with the same enthusiasm the ancient Greeks applied to naked wrestling. It was simply what one did and no one did what one was supposed to do, when one was supposed to do it, better than Rewind. He was a caddie of the first rank. Besides, 77 wasn’t the end of Western civilization, though this particular 77 felt like Visigoths running amuck in St. Peter’s Square, if par was your status quo ante. “I’m a good iron player. No, I’m a great iron player,” said Rewind’s passenger, Dicky Smythe. The caddie slipped the key into the ignition. The Mercedes purred, a marked contrast to the choppy groans coming from Smythe, his mind trapped in a recurring loop of one horrific shot after another after another. “One of the best,” Rewind offered. “Three greens. Who hits three greens?” Smythe thumb-punched his cell phone, entering numbers into its calculator. “That’s 1-6-point-6-6 percent.” He held the screen up as digital confirmation. Rewind had nothing to add. You can’t fight an Android. “Your head wasn’t where it needed to be,” the caddie finally said as they turned right out of the Congressional Country Club driveway.

Photograph by Tim Sayer. Models left to right: Blair Miller, Richelle Modolo, Jim Moriarty, Kelly Miller, Christian Draughn. Photographed at Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club. PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2015

L o v e O v e r Pa r

“What?” “You were distracted.” “Wasn’t I, though?” Dicky said, and sighed. This was not just any sigh. Its timbre was as distinctive as a bassoon and its look as easy to diagnose as gangrene. Rewind had seen it all too often during his career. It came down to one thing and one thing alone: Love was tiptoeing through Dicky Smythe’s internal organs like Amazons at a grape stomping. Rewind’s player had been struck by Cupid’s arrow squarely between his takeaway and his flying right elbow. “Why don’t you get some sleep?” Rewind said. “Good idea,” Dicky replied, lumping his cashmere sweater into a ball and putting it under his adorable ear as he leaned against the passenger window, tinted the color of blood pudding or, more to the point, what Rewind feared was the darkness of Vampadelle Summer’s heart. So depressed was Smythe he passed out like a college freshman face-down in the fourth book of Paradise Lost, depositing a frothy drool on his argyle Pringle. Rewind knew it was none other than Vampadelle Summer who had informed Dicky of his adorability, ear-wise. The author of the blog Trampoline Effect, Summer had planted herself on the golf circuit with the ruthlessness of Pizarro claiming Peru. Early in the week at Congressional, and for reasons known only to herself, she’d taken a particular shine to Dicky Smythe, resulting in a blog entry about him titled “From The Lone Cypress with Love.” It was the story of the courageous career trajectory of the son of a bond trader who grew up in Pebble Beach; learned the game under the tutelage of renowned golf instructor Bones Regis (creator of such phrases as “Just beat the livin’ crap out of it, kid.”), who finally got his playing privileges in the big leagues after three years on the Crazy Horse Cabaret Mini-Tour in North and South Dakota and who now appeared on the cusp of, according to Vampadelle Summer, journeyman stardom. Dicky Smythe, of course, fell deeply and inexorably in love with her, not to mention her shapely calves and size-five cross trainers. Rewind was painfully aware that love was something a golfer should undertake with the same anxiety as a grip change or perhaps the defusing of an unexploded World War II buzz bomb. Either can lead to a calamity on a scale not seen since Vesuvius buried Pompeii. Dicky Smythe had just, as it were, moved his emotional thumb into a weaker position. The rest was now up to fate and the good graces of Vampadelle Summer. Like any experienced caddie, Rewind was allowing for the worst. So exhausted was Smythe, from love or losing or both, he didn’t stir from his uneasy sleep during the five-hour drive to Blues Crossing, North Carolina, until Rewind pulled the car up to the portico entrance of the massive old hotel and the valet, dressed in plus fours, yanked open the door. “Welcome to The Pantheon,” said the valet as he doffed his herringbone cap and watched the sleeping Dicky tumble out onto the pavement. “Are you all right, sir?” he said, looking down. “Fine,” Smythe replied, making a show of stretching the tender L3 and L4 vertebrae of his lower back as he gathered himself off the ground. He looked up at the great hotel ablaze with lights. This was a far cry from the Crazy Horse Cabaret Mini-Tour. The Pantheon itself had evolved over the decades, spreading colonnades, rotundas and cherubic fountains, to become just the sort of hideout where guests could decant port wine in the

Bonaparte Room and reminisce about the gold standard as cries of “Fore!” echoed through the pine forest. The Pantheon was not, however, immune to the vicissitudes of market bubbles. Financial Armageddon had forced the hotel to change hands from time to time. One man’s called bank note was another’s blue light special. The most recent rollover involved its purchase by Gideon Fitch, the North Carolina baron of rare earth elements. It’s of no use trying to explain rare earth elements here other than to say they are not traded on a traditional bourse but in private deals, much like cocaine, and with a similarly festive profit margin. Gideon Fitch did two things once the creative destruction of capitalism placed The Pantheon in his care. He opened a casino, The Golden Fleece, and he founded a golf tournament, The Pantheon Classic. Dicky Smythe had come there to win it. That, and the affections of the blogger Vampadelle Summer. While the valet emptied the contents of Dicky’s trunk onto a luggage cart, the golfer stood mesmerized. Perhaps, it was the Vegas ambience of the façade, but his pasty color made it seem far more likely Dicky was suffering yet another searing golf flashback. As Rewind slipped the valet a fiver for his troubles, another, larger Mercedes pulled up close behind them, its front bumper nudging Dicky out of his trance. From the driver’s side appeared none other than Jimmy Wildheart, the winner of the Super Pac National Pro-Am at Congressional Country Club. It was Wildheart who had played in the penultimate twosome alongside Dicky Smythe and witnessed each and every one of the unfortunate 77 blows. Although it would be wrong to suggest Wildheart took delight in the struggles of his playing companion, he was not altogether without cheerfulness about it either. Coupled with his sterling 64 and the over-par rounds of the last twosome of Billy Ray Toomey and Tinkie Bjornover, Wildheart had strolled to victory with all the care of a man who’d been informed one of his ex-wives had been fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet and placed under house arrest. “Dicky!” Jimmy Wildheart called out to the other half of his former twosome as if they had been childhood companions who hadn’t seen one another since that embarrassing episode in sixth grade involving Miss Withers and a fruit cup. Dicky Smythe turned his haunted gaze away from The Pantheon. “Jimmy,” he said. “We would have been here sooner but we decided to stop at the Taxidermy Hall of Fame,” Jimmy said, closing the big Mercedes’ door with a rich thud. “They have the most amazing fudge there.” Dicky replied the only way he could. “Oh.” Like a caddie who knows his man doesn’t have enough club to clear the hazard, Rewind had a tingling sense of foreboding. “Great playing back there,” he said to Wildheart, motioning with his thumb over his shoulder. “Thanks,” Jimmy replied, coming around the car and opening the passenger’s door as another plus four-adorned valet worked to fish the Wildheart luggage from the depths of a trunk large enough to hold a VW Beetle like a nesting doll. Out of Jimmy Wildheart’s Mercedes, like Jonah exiting the whale, stepped none other than Vampadelle Summer herself. The distance and speed with which Dicky’s stomach plummeted to the pavement would have sent a lesser organ to Middle Earth. Rewind’s chin dropped to his chest. No sooner do you recover from fortune’s head butt than it goes straight for the kidney, he thought. The woman Dicky Smythe

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

L o v e O v e r Pa r

was sure would be the search engine in his pursuit of love was traveling in the company of the very man who had just beaten him by no fewer than 13 strokes. To be blunt, it was a setback. “Hi, Dicky!” Vampadelle said. Though Smythe couldn’t bring himself to find any facet of Vampadelle Summer less than enchanting, he was aware she frequently spoke with a level of enthusiasm a decibel or two below a regiment of pillaging Cossacks. If Dicky didn’t necessarily find this enthusiasm endearing, he was at least able to overlook it the way you might overlook the sheer weight of an ingot of gold. It was simply one of its properties. That she was happy to see him was, of course, some consolation. That she should express that delight while disembarking from Jimmy Wildheart’s courtesy car was less encouraging. So much so that, in fact, he was having trouble expressing his true feelings. “Whazthegggerbuntttter, uh?” Like any naturally gifted journalist, Vampadelle Summer had the ability to divine a quote word for word from virtually any utterance, even Dicky’s, and then to repeat it with what she believed to be stone tablet accuracy. “I just got an exclusive!” she said, by way of interpreting Dicky Smythe’s mumbles and simultaneously explaining why she was appearing from where she was. Let’s just say that the notion of “an exclusive” was as comforting in that instant to Smythe as the knowledge that his 77 in the Super Pac National Pro-Am had allowed him to do the limbo under 80. It was true, exclusivity in the romantic sphere had not been among the topics Dicky had yet found the courage to broach, either in public or in private, with Ms. Summer. The last time they’d spoken they’d barely gotten far enough to discover the adorability of his ears, a fact arrived at initially when Vampadelle Summer asked him about a topic she believed to be a matter of keen interest to her readers, namely the activities of pros during rain delays. His competitive nature being what it was, Dicky was determined not to allow Jimmy Wildheart to get his nose out in front on the home stretch to exclusivity, but he feared he might be too late. Like all golfers, there are gloomy days when you look at the swamp and all you see are the alligators, never the snowy egrets. This was just such a day. “Plluzzumwhenaffumpet,” he continued. “Jimmy is soooo interesting!” Vampadelle continued. “Did you know he taught himself how to juggle?” In fact, Dicky knew quite a lot about Jimmy Wildheart. Who didn’t? Wildheart already had one four-toed foot in the Hall of Fame, having shot off the least useful one on his right foot in a quail hunting accident when he was 12. Among the many things Jimmy Wildheart was capable of juggling were his three ex-wives, Wendy, Wendy and Destiny Wildheart. Vampadelle Summer donned the backpack containing her viperous laptop. “The post will go up tonight,” she said to Jimmy as she planted a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you soooooo much.” “I’ll have the valet take the luggage to your room,” Jimmy said. “Off to reception!” Vampadelle announced. It was with a suitably restrained level of admiration that Jimmy Wildheart, Dicky Smythe and Rewind watched Vampadelle Summer scamper up the steps and enter The Pantheon. This is precisely where the two golfers would have happily gone their separate ways, no more anxious to relive the day’s events than a pair of Trappist monks would enjoy trading stock

tips. The quiet, however, was shattered by the owner of the resort himself. “Jiiimmmy!” Gideon Fitch boomed. Fitch was a man of monumental proportions. His head would not have been out of place topping an Easter Island statue. It would have overmatched any human body with the exception of his own. His voice could propel words vast distances and his handshake was less a greeting than a strenuous interrogation technique. The owner of The Pantheon lumbered down the marble staircase on a meaty pair of legs whose knees had long since ceased to reside in the same ZIP code. “Saw you on TV with Jimmy,” Fitch said to Dicky Smythe, referencing the 77 only by way of his pernicious smile. The resort owner extended his hand in greeting, engulfing Dicky’s own like a boa constrictor smothering a spring lamb. The great man’s jowls trembled like lemon Jell-O as he squeezed. “Dicky Smythe,” said Dicky, introducing himself breathlessly, “with two y’s.” As the grip pressure tightened, the golfer grew faint. His left eye began to twitch. Fortunately for Dicky, Fitch practiced catch and release. The industrial magnet turned his attention to Jimmy Wildheart. The winner of the Super Pac National Pro-Am immediately stuffed both hands into the large pocket of his golf bag pretending to dig about for his Rolex. “Let’s get you settled, Jimmy,” Fitch said, giving Wildheart a disappointing slap on the back instead of his customary death grip. The rumor was Gideon Fitch had offered Jimmy Wildheart a $1 million line of credit in his casino to entice him to play in The Pantheon Classic. Of course, such under-the-table appearance monies were frowned upon by the officials of the golf circuit, which, nonetheless, chose under all circumstances to look the other way whenever it happened. “You’re in the Mellon Suite. Top floor.” It wasn’t that Fitch was in a hurry to seal his business deal with Jimmy Wildheart. Rather, he was buying low and selling high. Wildheart, among the best the world had to offer at golf, was no less in the absolute top drawer when it came to losing at poker. He doubled down when he should fold. He bit his lip when he bluffed. He tossed chips into the center of the table like a nymph scattering $1,000 rose petals. Gideon Fitch knew the sooner he got Jimmy Wildheart settled at a blackjack table in The Golden Fleece, the quicker his million, plus what he guessed would amount to a tidy percentage of Wildheart’s winnings from the Super Pac National Pro-Am, would be in the plus column. Dicky watched them walk up the steps and disappear through the same revolving door as Vampadelle Summer. Perhaps it was the lingering pain in his hand, or oxygen deprivation, but in that instant Dicky Smythe was struck by an overwhelming sense of predestination, a feeling in the solar plexus as familiar to every tournament golfer as acid reflux. He knew, just knew, to a deadbolt certainty, that not only was he going to win The Pantheon Classic but Vampadelle Summer as well. “I’m a big believer in fate,” he said to Rewind. “I have a good feeling about this. That’s all I’m going to tell you.” Rewind sighed. Resilience can be a bitch. PS Jim Moriarty joined the staff of Golf World magazine in 1979 when it was still based in Southern Pines. He covered the PGA Tour taking photographs and writing for Golf Digest and Golf World for 35 years. He has written two golfthemed novels, Open Season and Voodoo Links, and lives in Southern Pines with his wife, Audrey.

Illustration by harry Blair

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Milky Thighs and Shady Snakes A romance that slithers into your heart

Fiction by Celia R ivenbark

ornsby Pelletier hoped like hell that nobody would ever figure out that he slept with the giant reticulated python, Freddy, every night after he set the alarms at the serpentarium. Settle down. No funny business. Hornsby Pelletier was from an upstanding family of the Lower Cape Fear. OK, Burgaw, but not the kind of people that would do questionable things with big snakes after dark. That was the problem with everybody these days. Smutty minds. He heard it every day when he swept up the gum wrappers and tourist detritus that littered the sidewalk and lobby. The middle school boys were the worst offenders. They knocked on the Plexiglas cages that housed Hornsby Pelletier’s closest friends even though the sign clearly said not to do that. Then, they breathed heavy on the glass. Their breath was always sugar-scented from too much Kilwins fudge and they’d make a great sugary fog on the glass just so they could write four-letter words your mama would find flat shameful. Hilarious. Finally, inevitably, the tragically underpaid North Carolina public school teacher who had the misfortune to escort them for the day would take notice and make them wipe away the obscene message with their shirtsleeves all the while thinking “Mo-rons.” It was all Hornsby Pelletier could do to keep from swatting these rule-breakers “accidentally on purpose” with his push broom as he silently walked in his serpentarium-issued coveralls behind another class field trip. So why did he secretly sleep with the giant python? That was simple. The boas and iguanas and crocs and vipers were friends to him. Not in some stupid movie way like Night at the Museum. No dioramas were going to come to life with Teddy Roosevelt making out with Sacajawea. This was real life, not fantasy. It was really very simple. Just a man and his companions amiably passing a night together. One of them had a Kindle. It wasn’t so bad. The only thing that made him a trifle sad was that he could never have a beer with his “friends” because they didn’t technically have hands. Just once, he’d like to amble over to the Barbary Coast with a couple of the angrier-looking cottonmouths draped over his shoulders and ask the loudest asshole at the bar: “What chu lookin’ at?” Man, oh, man, that would be something. It had occurred to Hornsby Pelletier that he liked reptiles a damn sight more than people. Well, most people. The mysterious blonde who came to the serpentarium every single Tuesday afternoon and simply stared at the python for exactly fifty-five minutes before leaving . . . she would definitely be worth getting to know. He loved to watch her watch that giant snake. She never even seemed to notice any of the other reptiles. When the notoriously gregarious emerald tree boa, Saffo, sidled over, she appeared not to even notice. Amazing. No one could resist Saffo’s famous charms. He was Mr. Personality and this woman couldn’t

have cared less. This just made her even more mysterious in Hornsby Pelletier’s eyes, and, therefore, more desirable than a downtown parking space with ninety minutes left on the meter. One day, the mystery blonde stayed a full sixty minutes before sighing her usual deep sigh, flipping her thick hair to one shoulder and, in a move so fluid it didn’t even seem humanly possible, securing it with a rubber band. Such grace! It made Hornsby Pelletier’s jaw drop. His heart fell along with it. No one like that would look twice at him. Although, they did share a mutual fascination for the python. Maybe if he approached and told her he slept with it every night, she would find him interesting. Maybe she would run away screaming. Yep. Most likely it would be Door No. 2 for Hornsby Pelletier. Everything about the mysterious blonde was captivating. She was the only person, besides himself, who understood the python. Oh, sure, everybody had loved the python when there was a big story in the paper about how it got sick after Ricky Meeks’ transistor radio somehow fell into the cage and the python ate it whole, but the town rallied. Wilmington was like that. Ricky got a new radio and the vet made a house call to make sure things, well, passed through without incident, rather like a caravan of bikers coming through town every May on its way to Myrtle Beach. Every May they vrrrrooooomed down Market Street, causing the windows in the old mansions downtown to shake near-bout loose. Hornsby Pelletier, not normally a praying man, lifted a plea to the Almighty that they would just keep on goin’. And they always did. Right over the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge and past the Battleship North Carolina and, not that they’d know it, the best sweet peaches on earth at Eagle Island Produce. Good riddance. Hornsby Pelletier was so caught up in his peach reverie that he almost didn’t realize it was time to lock up and set the alarms. Or that, and he couldn’t quite believe his eyes, the mysterious blonde was still standing in front of the python’s habitat. They liked to call it a habitat, but he still slipped up and said “cage” sometimes because, hell, he was from Burgaw and there was a very low tolerance for P.C. bullshit among the country folk. Sometimes, the locals even laid it on a little heavy just for laughs when Yankees came to town. One time, his kid sister had captivated a gaggle of New Jersey tourists with a completely fictitious account of how her daddy was also her uncle, cousin and brother. It was fun to mess with them like that. And easy as shootin’ fish in a barrel of moonshine. Hornsby Pelletier double-checked the bird clock on the wall. Two minutes past the sparrow’s ass (closing time) and the mysterious blonde showed no signs of budging. He approached her with something like reverence. More of reverence’s second cousin twice removed. He was shaking a little, which was embarrassing. He was, after all, not a bad-looking sort. Old girlfriends had told him he had “potential.” He was fit, had a stubble that some women found appealing and had eyes “just like Bradley Cooper’s,” according to his most recent girlfriend. The one

M i l k y T h i g hs a n d S ha d y S n a k e s

who was local but tried to talk like a Valley girl and, like, totally left when he said he slept with the python every night. The truth was, if he wasn’t wearing coveralls with HORNSBY PELLETIER on the little stitched-on upper left pocket, he might have been mistaken for one of the “movie people” in town. And, for the first time, Hornsby Pelletier wondered if that’s what brought the mysterious blonde to Wilmington. She was exotic, like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet. But, of course, younger and hotter. She was surprisingly vulnerable-looking, like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy. She was athletic, like Robert Downey Jr.’s stunt double in Iron Man. Yessiree bob, like his Burgaw grandpappy used to say, she was the total package. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked, surprised to hear his voice sound strong as fresh-roasted beans from Port City Java. “No,” she said, somewhat sadly. “I am afraid that no one can help me.” “What is it you need, ma’am, er, miss, er . . .” Hornsby Pelletier had a perfectly awful talent for getting that one wrong. “Oh, it’s Miss,” she said, extending a perfectly manicured hand. Well, actually just the nail part was manicured but you get the idea. “I’m an unmarried woman who is living here temporarily, and I have always dreamed of sleeping with a python.” Hornsby Pelletier’s face must’ve looked odd right about then because she hastened to say: “No, not like THAT! Just sleep with him, feel his oddly dry skin rub against my milky thighs.” “You had me at oddly dry,” said Hornsby Pelletier. Damn. This was going way better than he could’ve imagined. “Well, it just so happens that I can help you with that! I not only work here but I’m the night watchman, too. To tell the truth, I like to sleep with Freddy myself. My thighs aren’t particularly milky, but he does make a really fine neck pillow if you arrange him just right.” “Wow. This is amazing. All this time I thought you were just a surprisingly handsome broom-pusher with no real ambitions beyond chasing those mouthbreathing middle-schoolers out of here but now, I discover that you and I share this kinky fantasy!” “Oh, no, ma’am,” Hornsby Pelletier said, instantly regretting it. “It’s Miss, I told you.” She was suddenly chilly. Her stare was cold-blooded and reminded him of the way Trixie, the black mamba, sometimes looked at him if he didn’t give her an extra frozen white mouse now and again. “I mean to say, it’s not kinky. I look at Freddy as my friend. If you have something else in mind, well, you may need to go to Leland.” “What? Cross the bridge? What do I look like, a biker?” “No, all I meant was that you seem nice. And there’s the whole hair-tie thing you do . . . but I’m into human, er, consortium, not reptile hanky-panky. And I’d like to hope that you are the same.” “OK,” she said, squinting at his name tag, “Hornsby Pelletier, I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I mean, usually I start with my left foot and then my right and then my left foot again and then my right foot again and then . . .” Crap on a cracker, this woman was a nut job, Hornsby thought. Time to get her out of here. It had been too much to hope that his true love was a beautiful, mysterious fellow python enthusiast with exceedingly nimble fingers and movie-star hair. Yes, he’d just have to settle for an ordinary woman. A sturdy girl from Burgaw, or maybe even Wallace, who would just have to understand that, when darkness fell, he would prefer to rest his weary head on a coiled-up python that could, in truth, turn on him and kill him in a matter of seconds if he took a notion. And then it hit Hornsby Pelletier. It hit him like something that hits things a lot. Like a hammer hits a nail. Or a car hits the one in front of it when the Wrightsville Beach drawbridge finally opens. No, no. Hornsby Pelletier needed a sturdy local woman, someone sweeter than a box of Britt’s doughnuts. The normal glazed kind, not the stupid maplebacon-Sriracha-kimchi ones they sold the tourists. He needed a woman who

understood that he had a sense of adventure. It was precisely because the python could so easily kill him that he wanted to spend the night with it. He was a danger junkie! Which was kind of cool. Sadly, while Hornsby Pelletier made a move to escort his dream girl out of the museum, she made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “Hornsby Pelletier,” she purred. “Why don’t we get out of here and get a drink? Talk about our mutual fascination with pythons and Pythagoras!” “Sorry, what?” “Oh, sorry. I’m really into alliteration. Suddenly, seemingly, shamelessly into it!” This broad was tiresome with a capital T. But he was thirsty and there was a BOGO on wine at Elijah’s on Wednesday nights. What the hell? She wasn’t kidding about the alliteration thing. Penelope (“Penny”) Poundsaver was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and she talked till two-twentytwo. A.M. When decent people are sound asleep with their snakes, thought a thoroughly bored Hornsby Pelletier. Which reminded him. Did he actually lock up earlier? He couldn’t honestly recall. “I have to go,” he said, finally. “Party pooper,” said Penny Poundsaver, pouting prettily. Craptastic. Now HE was even thinking in alliteration. He walked her back to the Hilton, dodging some drunk Marines, some frat boys from UNCW headed up to Jefferson Davis’ statue to put a PBR can in his outstretched verdigris hand (again) and pausing to drop a few coins into six different saxophone players’ cases. Wilmington had buskers now. “Buskers boost business!” chirped Penny Poundsaver. He hot-footed down the Riverwalk back to the serpentarium where, shit, the door was wide open and the biggest cage, er, habitat was empty. A note on the glass told all: PUNKED BY PENNY POUNDSAVER! She had a cohort, which made her the hort, he supposed. While she distracted him with her womanly wiles, the cohort had freed Freddy. “He’s gone, Hornsby,” said a soft voice from behind him. Was his ass talking to him? No, it was Samantha, the ticket-taker he had worked with for nearly three years now. He liked Samantha but she was an enigma wrapped in a riddle to him. OK, not really. They just worked different shifts. But there she stood. She had been hiding in the shadows like a Gaboon viper in leaf litter. He’d never seen Samantha the ticket-taker out of her coveralls and, well, she looked way better without that weird crotch bulge that happens when a girl wears ill-fitting pants. “You’re thinking I look better in normal clothes, aren’t you?” “Yes, and also wondering why you are the only person who has ever called me just by my first name.” “It’s because I love you,” said Samantha. “I’ve always loved you, Hornsby, but short of making like a baboon and showing you my nether parts, I could never get your attention. I knew that bitch was up to something. I followed her cohort and I got Freddy back. You see, I know you sleep with him. I’ve known it for years. Freddy’s over at the Bellamy Mansion right now, wrapped around the carefully restored newel posts.” “Samantha, you’re beautiful,” Hornsby Pelletier said, barely recognizing the awe in his voice. She was beautiful and sexy and she got him AND his love for Freddy, the world’s most dangerous best friend. Also, he knew she was from Burgaw and could keep him in blueberries for life. “You know what I’m thinking?” she asked. “That Freddy could be the best man at our wedding?” “Uh, no, that’s weird. I was thinking that since we’re already up that we should drive down to the beach and watch the sunrise over Johnnie Mercer’s Pier and maybe grab a crabmeat omelet at Causeway Café . . .” “Samantha soon-to-be-Pelletier, I think I love you.” PS Duplin County native Celia Rivenbark is a nationally syndicated humor columnist and best-selling author whose skewed take on pop culture comes slathered in Southernisms. She lives in Wilmington with her husband, daughter and four cats.

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Money in the Mattress A stripper on the run. A worried mother. A lonely detective in quest of five big ones. Someone’s going to wind up horizontal

Fiction by Paul Crenshaw

inatra sang that New York is the city that never sleeps, but North Carolina naps every afternoon. I had been to The Big Apple earlier that week and was back home in N.C. when I realized we must sleep a lot here because of all the mattress stores. Just down the road in High Point is the furniture capital of the South, but when we aren’t napping here, we recline, and I was reclining in the blue glow of the TV when I realized something about the girl I was looking for. I’d been driving down Battleground, wondering where she might be. Her mother had hired me to find her and so far I’d struck out. I don’t like striking out, but I had come up as dry as an ABC store on Sunday, so I went home to my office/ apartment just off Elm, in the part of downtown that hasn’t yet been revitalized. I had just poured a drink when I saw an advertisement for one of the mattress stores, in which a man slept on a mound of cash. I stared at my ice cubes and thought of Battleground and all the mattress stores and suddenly it struck me. I still didn’t know where she was, but I had part of it. The money. The most important part. The mother came in on a Sunday. This was an afternoon in late June and the heat had already settled into summer. She wore a white summer dress and cowboy boots like I had seen college girls wear when I went down Tate or Spring Garden. She wasn’t a college girl. She was pushing 50, though she tried to look 30. One of those women who refuses to acknowledge age. And, I have to say, age had not acknowledged her. “My daughter is missing,” she said. Her voice sounded like ice cubes melting into weak scotch. “So is mine,” I told her, which was true. I was watching the train rumble past. The whole building shook. “I’ll give you five large to find her.” Five large? I thought. I wondered how many cop shows she had watched. Most of my jobs were finding out whether the bank president was sleeping with his secretary, which he usually was, and no one paid five large — or said it. “When did you last see her?” “A week ago. In New York.” Her breath hitched. “I think they’re going to kill her.” Turns out that was the only truthful thing she told me. It’s also how I ended up flying to New York that afternoon. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue the whole flight. I didn’t know whether that was truthful or not. She hid the money in the mattress. That was what I thought when I stood in her apartment in New York, the city where no one ever sleeps. There was a long slit. Some of the stuffing had come out. The men she robbed — “They’re bad men,” the mother told me — must have torn through it, looking for the money. The mother made sure I saw it. She looked like a hooker with a heart of gold but was really a harridan with a heart that had hardened, although I only found that out later. After we’d rolled around in the sack a few times.

By the time I went back out, the city had shut down. A few college kids hung downtown as the bars let out, but I wasn’t looking for college kids. I was smoking again — I always smoke when I’m trying to figure out the particulars of a case, and the cigarette smoke curled up with me in the cab, which made me think of things burning — and something the mother had said. The apartment in New York was a dump. One of those holes in the wall that still rent for a thousand a month, but are barely bigger than a closet. She had just shown me the ripped mattress, and I remember thinking most of the room was ripped as well. “Her rent is due tomorrow,” she said, dabbing at her eyes, and I thought then it was a natural reaction to a mother hearing her child is in trouble — focus on the thing you can control. “I’m putting everything in storage until we find her.” I remember thinking she should just burn everything. But she wouldn’t burn it. Of course she wouldn’t burn it. We spent an eventful night in New York and flew back to Greensboro the next morning. She said her daughter had come here. I asked her how she knew. “Mother’s intuition,” she said. Horse shit, I thought. It was beginning to dawn on me that all was not right with this story, but I had to keep shuffling cards until the joker turned up. The slit-open mattress had been the first shuffle. The second was the advertisement, and the third was this woman who wouldn’t dispose of worthless furniture. My next shuffle was to hit the mattress stores, see who got deliveries from New York. We get a lot of furniture shipments in this area of North Carolina. Adirondack chairs, chaise lounges, couches, divans, settees, davenports, ottomans, all those names that have lost any meaning. There are also a lot of mattress stores. They sell box springs, too. The thing that goes under the mattress. That was part of it, I thought, driving down Battleground toward the big buildings, but I needed to find the daughter, and the only thing I had to go on was the mother. She was 50, and tried to look 30. The daughter was 30. I figured she’d try to look 20. I went to the bars near UNCG and Greensboro College, where sometimes sorority girls stop in and order Sex on the Beach, or Cosmos if they want to seem classy. I’d already done the background on the daughter — I did that on my computer in the hotel room while the mother readied herself to seduce me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t that hard to do. I spent a lot of time working. The few women I meet always ask what I do. When I tell them I’m a private detective they say “What? Like The Big Sleep? Raymond Chandler stuff?” They take in the cheap suit and shoes, and that pretty much ends it. She’d been working, the daughter, in a strip club. In New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice, where every strip club is a front for some low grade mob wannabees, and I guess she’d stuck around long enough that they let her into the office where the safe was kept.

She must have stolen the money on a Saturday night and fled south, to a city so hot in summer its namesake died of sunstroke, knowing they wouldn’t open again until Monday. But she was smarter than most strippers, even the ones putting themselves through college. She knew she couldn’t just run because they’d find her. She had to disappear. So I was at the college bar searching for a woman who would look 20 but be slightly older. Who would act stupid, but have some brains above the breasts. It didn’t take long. It wasn’t that night, but I had time. I was getting paid by the mother, and she was occasionally stopping by to mess up my sheets, as motiva-

tion to keep me on the case. When I saw her, I knew it was her. She sat with a sestina of sorority girls on Spring Garden at Old Town Draught House, but she wasn’t drinking, wasn’t laughing when one said “Here’s to Sex on the Beach” and the girl next to her said “I wish!” With enough money you can disguise yourself as anything. And who would look for a college girl when trying to find a thief who’d stolen a million-five? She had learned the art of hiding in plain sight. I suspect she’d read Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” back when she really was a college student. But I wasn’t ready yet, so even after I found her I staked out the bar to see what nights she came in. I began noticing the long black cars with tinted windows that

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

M o n e y i n th e M att r e ss

were also watching her. I wondered if they would ever give up, like she thought they would. I wondered if I’d find a gun to the back of my head one night. I wondered if anyone would care. While I waited, I made a few calls to New York. A good P.I. has people everywhere. I had a few there. I had a few here, too. And I had a few who worked shipping in both places. Good friends are hard to find. Most people, you have to slip some cash. If I played my hand right, I’d have plenty coming.

Photograph by Tim Sayer. Model: Abigail Schell

Two weeks later, she was at Old Town again with her sorority sisters. I wondered what they’d think if I told them she was 30. That she stripped in New York in a place where an extra hundred would get a man more than a strip tease. But the way they dressed, I wasn’t sure if they’d care. The girls who go to Allure on Saturday nights look the same. I waited until she stepped out to smoke. I lit her cigarette for her. I said, “They’re coming for you, Denise, and I’m the only one who can stop them.” She didn’t try to deny it. “I guess my mother hired you?” she said. She didn’t wait for me to nod. “You found me,” she said. “Congratulations.” “I’m not sure you know how serious this is.” She looked away. “I’m not sure you know anything about it.” “I know they’ll kill you and bury you in New Jersey.” She didn’t try to deny that either. It would have been smarter if she had. Smarter if she realized mob guys didn’t give up just because you laid low for a few months before spending the money, even low grade wannabes like these. “How do you know they’ll figure it out?” I laughed then. I couldn’t help it. I realized that she was just smart enough to get herself killed. Her plan had holes big enough to swing a dead giraffe through. It wouldn’t even have worked for a plot on one of the detective shows her mother must have watched to come up with phrases like five large, but it was ingenious in its own way. Poe would have been proud. But the guys chasing her had figured it out, and they would make her disappear soon. Fish food, and the like. “They already have,” I said. When I laid it all out to her, she told me which warehouse. And when. She was shaking when she said it. I called the mother. “I’ve found her,” I said. Then I told her everything else, including how we were going to end this. She protested, but I knew she would. As I knew her protests would keep her from seeing that I wasn’t telling her the whole truth. I made the daughter wash off the make-up. Get rid of the Delta Zeta shirt she wore, the sorority pins. “I hired you to find her,” the mother said. “Not get us all killed.” I had finally seen what the mother’s heart was made of. I won’t say stone, but definitely a type of ore. Not one that rhymes with old, cold, and Leopold. “We both know why you hired me,” I told her. When we went to the warehouse, they thought the shipment had arrived. The mob men were closing in, I had told them, and that part was true. I had dropped a call to them, telling them when and where, that for safe passage for the girl, they’d get the money. I was hiding among the box springs and mattresses. Well behind them, in case there was gunplay. I sent the mother and daughter out. The mob men were huge. They didn’t bother to hide the holsters beneath their suits. I had told Denise what to say — so sorry, you’ll get the money, please don’t kill me, et cetera.

I let her cry for a short time. I let the mother worry. That was for lying to me. The rest of it — the thing that was about to happen — was for putting my life in danger. And because I’m tired of this city. Which was why I pulled my pistol and fired a few rounds into the lights, to create as much confusion as possible. The police were already arriving, as were the girls from Denise’s sorority, and I needed to be leaving. It really was a plan Poe would have been proud of. It was the box spring, you see. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t ripped. Most people hide their money in the mattress. The mob guys thought that, too. They’d ripped up everything in the room but the box spring. As she knew they would. She was already on a plane to Charlotte by then, where her mother picked her up at the airport. She’d brought just enough money to create a new life, but she couldn’t bring a million-five because if they caught her — or customs did — she’d spend the rest of her life six feet under the Meadowlands of New Jersey. So she’d left it in plain sight. Her mother had put everything in storage instead of dumping it, or leaving it for the super to take care of. Which told me the money had still been there. She’d kept her head low. She thought they’d eventually back off. And when they backed off, she was going to ship it here, to a city with so many mattress and furniture stores, no one would be looking for a lone box spring. One stuffed with a million-five in cash. The mother had hired me for protection in case they found her daughter. She wanted me to keep an eye on her until the danger had passed. With a million-five, she could pay me for a long time. And the occasional visits late at night were to sweeten the pot. She should have known that I, like all PIs, have four ex-wives. Numerous mistresses. A daughter who doesn’t care much for me. That’s part of the profession. Didn’t she ever watch any old shows? We are, those of us who have pebbled glass office windows in an old, unairconditioned building in the run down part of town, immune to feminine charms. What I told the police on the phone was part true. There was criminal activity in Greensboro. I just lied about the type. I told them there was a sex-trafficking ring that ran up the I-95 corridor, and that it was started by mob men from New York and perpetuated by the mother and daughter, who pretended to be college students so they could snatch up sorority girls and sell them to Eastern Europe. They were meeting in an old warehouse downtown, the one with Green’s Burrough still painted on the east wall. I had also sent a message to the sorority sisters that there was free booze at a certain downtown warehouse. They should spread the word. A white lie, I say. There is a sex-trafficking problem in the area, one police need to pay more attention to. And I needed some time to get away. I had the box spring shipped to a different warehouse. By the time the police sort out everything, I’ll be having drinks with little umbrellas in them. A millionfive — minus the couple grand I used to grease the palms of shipping agents — goes a long way in these climes. I hear they sleep on sand where I’m going, so I won’t have to see a mattress store ever again. I will miss the mother. The look she gave me as I left the warehouse may haunt me. But sex on the beach will help with that. PS Paul Crenshaw is a Greensboro resident and Elon proffessor. He has been published in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review and Brevity.

Scenic Byways Part Two

Along the Indian Heritage Trail

Soothing waters, sacred burial grounds and a giant named Andre By Serena Brown • Photographs by Laura L. Gingerich

“W

hat is your goal for the day?” asked Jesse Wimberley as he jumped into the car with Laura Gingerich and me. “Ummm,” said Laura. “How profound,” was the best answer I had. It was quite early in the morning for questions of that magnitude. Laura had a more comprehensive go at a response: “What interests me about this route is the water, and also Flora MacDonald.” We were setting out on the second part of our journey along the Sandhills Area Land Trust’s Scenic Byways. The day’s route, the Indian Heritage Trail, was to take us along Highways 73 and 731. We would travel into Richmond and Montgomery counties and soak up some history along the way. Richmond County used to be the second most prosperous county in North Carolina, thanks to its cotton plantations and textile mills. Now the mills have mostly gone but the farming continues. This is old South country: rolling parkland, fine old plantation houses, hardwood forests and shady creeks. We drove out on 73, admiring the trees and the beauty of the road. We rolled into a tiny settlement. On the left hand side of the road was a pretty creek and an old railroad building. Part of the creek was covered. There were steps leading down to the banks, reminiscent of an ancient ruin. A little way back were the picturesque remains of the general store. We were at the eponymous spring of Jackson Springs. Four trains a day used to bring visitors and vacationers to this place, where

the spring is located at the creek’s edge. Dragonflies were gathering in the morning sun. “There was a huge dance pavilion here,” said Jesse, pointing out the steps on the opposite bank to the spring. Jesse’s mother attended parties here. She told him that everyone hoped for a sweetheart when the sweet bay was blooming, how its scent made the velvety romance of this place sublime. We could hear a flycatcher calling. We drove on, stopping for some breakfast refreshment at David’s Produce stand in Ellerbe. We came away with watermelons, peaches and an inferno of a ginger ale. The Ellerbe Springs Inn is an historic gathering place. The Native Americans believed the water there had healing properties. Capt. William Farr Ellerbe bought land around the springs in 1820 and built a summer home. In the second half of the nineteenth century it became a popular resort. Locals and guests alike flocked there for the waters and the peaceful atmosphere. Today the place exudes the same magic. “We parked the camper right there on the hill and fell in love with it,” said the inn’s new owner, Mark Buckeridge, who walked us around the property with his little dog Pebbles. There’s a splendid house of white wood with lovely old windows and a fine flight of steps leading up to the front door. Mark Buckeridge showed us the well-appointed room that Eleanor Roosevelt used in 1940. He took us through the work that he and his wife, Donna, have been doing to restore the building to its former glory. If you stop by for a night or two ask for room number seven, the Summer Room; it’s lovely.

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The spring is to the right of the house, where the lawn slopes down to the stream that runs in leisurely fashion through the grounds. Laura and I walked there to watch the frogs plopping into the water from their reedy look-outs. We learned more about the spring during our visit to the Rankin Museum of American Heritage in Ellerbe. The Rankin Museum is a perfect small museum. We studied the history of the area, of North Carolina and the United States through the superb collections of early pottery and arrowheads. We discovered fossils and effigies and heard about moonshining. We gazed (mostly upward) in awe and wonder at the Andre the Giant exhibit. The much-loved wrestler and star of The Princess Bride made his home in Richmond County. Edified, we continued on our journey. We passed the driveway to Andre’s home. “We are now straight up in the Piedmont,” said Jesse. “Yup,” said Laura, “where the soil is a little redder.” It was as though we had been climbing imperceptibly while we had been traveling. The views were majestic. Miles and miles of the Pee Dee Valley stretched beneath us and far, far away to the horizon. “This is a beautiful road,” Laura murmured. We were on the old Plank Road from Fayetteville. We hardly saw another car, even when we stopped to take photographs of the Rosenwald schoolhouse that nestled at the side of the road at Covington. It was deep plantation country now. We passed long, grand old drives and magnificent houses. We turned in at one. The fields flanking the driveway were combed with perfect rows of vines. We were at The Little River Vineyard and Winery. General manager Will Russell took time to show us around, pointing out the chambourcin grapes and explaining the importance of the terroir. On our return we parked by a magnificent 1920s barn. It was once used for storing hay; now it’s a venue for weddings and parties. What better place for a celebration than a vineyard? As we continued driving and crossed into Montgomery County, the names of the roads on the map called to us and invited adventure: Lovin PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2015

Hill, Thickety Creek, Pleasant Grove Church. Town Creek Mound Road was our destination, more specifically the Indian Mound and Museum there. We were guided by an indigo bunting as we walked through the wildflower meadow to the mound. A tiny woodland creature skittered across our path, moving too fast for us to identify. The Town Creek Mound was a habitation and gathering site for Native Americans of the Pee Dee culture. The mound itself would have been a meeting point for the leaders of different clans and was an important location for religious ceremonies and lavish feasts. We walked slowly through the village, imagining the native people living off the landscape that surrounded us, going about their daily lives and worshipping at their spiritual ceremonies. We wondered what it would have been like to have lived in that culture. As we dropped back into the shade of the woodland trail we agreed that, thanks to the trees, it might have been easier to find shelter from Southern summers than from bitter Northern winters. We journeyed on, and a little later we came to the river. I watched a sliver of plane bark running over the rocks and saw schools of minnows flashing like foils in the pools. We were all silenced, reverent in our own flowing-water trances. “Isn’t this the perfect place to conclude our wonderful day?” asked Jesse. “Oh, I could sit here forever,” Laura answered dreamily. “I have. I’ve spent an entire afternoon before.” And so we sat a while longer. It was only then that I realized the day had gotten away from us and we had yet to follow the trail of Flora MacDonald. Oh well, an adventure for another summer day. PS

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

To get a map: Sandhills Area Land Trust 140 A S.W. Broad Street Southern Pines Phone: (910) 695-4323 or The Pilot Offices 145 W. Pennsylvania Ave. Southern Pines

S to r y o f a ho u s e

Upstairs, Downstairs Living over the store gets the glamor treatment By Deborah Salomon Photographs by John Gessner 78

nd now, for something completely different. A young family lives in minimalist splendor — shades of Tribeca and SoHo — in downtown smalltown Southern Pines. Toddler’s playground and Mommy’s office: across the street. Daddy’s business: on the ground floor. Restaurants and entertainment: within sight. Parking: onstreet, free. Different, but hardly new. Residential urban renewal blossomed in the 1990s, when factories became lofts and crumbling office buildings, apartments. The obvious advantages — shorter commute, more amenities. New York and Chicago led the way. But look at Asheville, where ghostly department stores morphed into milliondollar condos overlooking sidewalk cafes. Trendy digs attract colorful occupants. With that brush, paint Baxter Clement on a broad and textured canvas: musician, teacher, actor, entertainer, bon vivant. The Southern Pines native, a graduate of North Carolina School of the Arts and Blair School of Music

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

at Vanderbilt University, made a splash in New York with several rock bands, including The Blondes — something relatively different for the scion of a family residing in an historic, antique-filled Knollwood manse, where Bill and Ruffles Clement have hosted sit-down dinners for thirty. In 2006, Baxter fled the bright lights of Broadway for the brilliant azaleas of Broad Street, where he soon established the Sandhills School of Performing Arts and, in tribute shows to Buddy Holly and Johnny Cash, became one of the Sunrise Theater’s hottest tickets. “I felt a special thing about this strange town filled with unique people,” Baxter says, comparing his childhood home to the setting of It’s A Wonderful Life. In 2009 he purchased the brick storefront on North East Broad Street known as the Schlemmer Building, circa 1913, with a decidedly different past: the downstairs — a bowling alley and casino. Above flourished a bordello. Baxter used part of the main floor for teaching while the upstairs became his bachelor pad. Enter a startling difference: Showbiz Baxter, of electro-shock hair, interesting outfits and raging talent, meets lovely, serene Taylor, from Kentucky, whom Baxter wickedly describes as “a Republican stockbroker/financial adviser.” Baxter’s father arranged the introduction. Really . . . how different is that? “On our first date we went to the first First Friday,” on the green opposite what would become their home, Baxter recalls.

hen Taylor initially saw the modest second-floor apartment, it was chopped into cubicles, without closets. Wood floors reposed under layers of vinyl and carpet. Beyond funky, the place was, in Baxter’s words, “a dump.” But Taylor saw exposed brick walls, high ceilings and huge windows. “The simplicity, no clutter. I had a Zen moment.” More like an Architectural Digest moment. They married and lived over the store before the expansion-renovation. Acclimation to life on the main drag included train whistles not thirty yards away. “The first night I slept here I had forgotten about the train,” Baxter PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2015

says. “I woke up horrified.” Even so, after siren-filled Manhattan he was more accustomed than Taylor, who had lived in quieter locales. “I was scared Southern Pines might be too small, but being downtown, it doesn’t feel at all small,” she discovered. Now, Amtrak not only bookmarks their day, but fascinates 2-year-old William Baxter Clement IV.

traditional suburban home was never discussed. “Baxter had a dream. I didn’t think it could come true,” Taylor begins, seated in the immense main living room. The Clements’ living space, two years in construction, defies classification. Townhouse? Flat? Condo? Loft? Whichever, space borders cavernous: 11-foot ceilings, an open spiral staircase and nearly 4,000 square feet arranged shotgun-style, with a living room at each end, a roof terrace and tiny garden below. Only a third is the original bachelor pad; the remainder was built over the bowling-alley roof. “I drew the plans on a cocktail napkin,” Baxter says. First, they walked the roof, laying out rooms with tape along a 40-foot hallway little William uses as, naturally, a bowling alley fitted with antique wooden pins. The floor plan flouts convention, with the master bedroom opening onto the front living room, which, in lieu of dining or breakfast room, has a small round table in one corner. In the middle, like an exclamation point, rises a lone structural column. Stairs from the main entrance tucked into an alley lead directly into the kitchen — a study in black, white and gray — with a granite island but no hanging cabinets or wall art (“The food is the art,” Taylor says), only an ornate carved garden bench and light streaming through oversize windows. “We like light, not lights,” Taylor explains. To maximize this, bedroom doors have fulllength frosted glass inserts, affording privacy without darkness. In fact, throughout the loft, (mostly) unshaded windows, stark white walls and light comprise a décor element.

August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Three bedrooms, including William’s nursery livened with classic airplane prints, stretch along the long hall ending at the second living room, or music room, for its Steinway baby grand, also the only TV — no cable, just streaming and DVDs. Baxter doesn’t follow calamities on CNN. “I don’t even know they happen.” Oddly, this salon with a massive window wall is bisected into conversation areas by chair and sofa groupings facing away from each other. “The room didn’t make sense until (a designer friend) suggested this,” Taylor says. Above all, literally, the Clement venue begs large social gatherings.

o surprise that furnishings in this spartan tchotchke-free zone jump out like objets d’art. Taylor and Clement were passionate about their selections. “I looked through a lot of magazines,” Taylor says. Not stopping at pretty pictures, she also installed her own sink Disposal and designed the hanging fixture within the spiral staircase. “We bought slowly, piece by piece,” Baxter continues. They found sleek 1950s post-modern/Scandinavian essentials at local estate sales. When Taylor discovered her perfect leather sofa could not navigate the narrow staircase, a scaffold was built to enable entry through the windows. Contemporary plays off massive heirloom case pieces, many carved in dark woods, from Ruffles Clement’s collection. Stretch out in the obligatory Eames chair while admiring a mirror composed of many beveled elements, befitting a French chateau. No rugs, except for a geometric in William’s room. “I love the way bare wood looks,” Baxter says. Paintings may be scarce, but Baxter indulged his fascination for ancient implements of war. Samurai armor hangs high on a wall; nearby, a sealed glass case displays knives, swords and epaulets worn by a soldier at Waterloo. Neither misses having to look after a yard. William, beyond adorable in a Christopher Robin context, completes and influences this urbane family’s urban dwelling. Taylor and Baxter decided that everything, throughout, should be usable, durable, pet- and child-safe. A tufted leather living room bench became his aircraft launchpad, and a miniature piano awaits sticky fingers.

iving over the store wasn’t that different in other times, other places. Immigrants often simplified staffing and child care by installing families above or behind the bakery, laundry or restaurant. The same advantages apply to Taylor and Baxter Clement. In June, Baxter opened a shop called, fittingly, Casino Guitars, in the storefront previously housing a coffee shop. Behind it, his school and recording studio attract participants from morning to night. “Our life is a juggling act. If I forget something at work, I pop upstairs and get it,” Baxter says. Going home for lunch takes ten seconds. While Taylor is at her office, he listens in on William’s nap by baby monitor. Students and

their parents are invited upstairs to discuss issues. “It’s like a nonstop boarding house” for out-of-towners, Baxter says. Suburban friends stop by, while downtown. “Being available — that’s part of my strangeness,” otherwise known as hospitality. So there it sits, a package deal: one building, two dogs, one child, intertwined purposes — Baxter’s dream implemented by Taylor’s diligence in brick, mortar, glass, moldings, leather, granite, hardwood, taste and panache. Close, yet vastly different from the stately winter residences of the Boyd/Weymouth era. Vive la différence! PS

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August 2015P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

A L M A N A C

August

By Rosetta Fawley

“A small garden, figs, a little cheese, and, along with this, three or four good friends — such was luxury to Epicurus.”

Words to Grow On August is National Goat Cheese Month. And surely 2015 must be a particularly good year for goat cheese because it’s the Year of the Goat in the Chinese calendar. In nature’s clever way, August is also the month that figs are at their best. What could be more delicious than figs with goat cheese? They make a blissfully easy starter for a high summer dinner party. Take two to three figs per person and cut them in half lengthways. Cut a log of goat cheese into half-inch slices, one slice per person. Broil the goat cheese slices until a light golden color. Arrange the figs artfully on a small bed of arugula and place the goat cheese on top. Serve with Champagne. The Almanac has no idea whether Champagne goes with these flavors, but she does find it livens up a party. A good dry sherry works too.

Get Your Goat Cheese Here “Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil,” wrote Cicero to his friend Terentius Varro in 46 BC. This is commonly translated as, “He who has a garden and a library wants for nothing.” How true. The literal translation is “If you have a garden in your library nothing will fail.” Keep reading, keep growing. Cicero wrote that letter during the reign of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (63 BC–AD 14), who is sometimes called Octavian but better known as Augustus. He was the first Roman emperor and the first to be Augustus. The word comes from the Latin title, meaning venerable, and the month was named after our imperial friend in the year 8 BC. It was considered his lucky month. Augustus was the great nephew of Julius Caesar. There are those who believe that Julius Caesar was left-handed, though the evidence is shaky. Either way, August 13 is International Left Handers’ Day. Famous southpaws include Morgan Freeman, Matt Groening, Whoopi Goldberg and Hans Holbein the Younger.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

My Kingdom for a Good Fig “All figs are soft to the touch, and when ripe contain grains in the interior. The juice, when the fruit is ripening, has the taste of milk, and when dead ripe, that of honey. If left on the tree they will grow old; and when in that state, they distil a liquid that flows in tears like gum. Those that are more highly esteemed are kept for drying, and the most approved kinds are put away for keeping in baskets. The figs of the island of Ebusus are the best as well as the largest, and next to them are those of Marrucinum. Where figs are in great abundance, as in Asia, for instance, huge jars are filled with them, and at Ruspina, a city of Africa, we find casks used for a similar purpose: here, in a dry state, they are extensively used instead of bread, and indeed as a general article of provision.” From The Natural History by Pliny the Elder, Book XV, Chapter XXI, translated by Bostock and Riley.

The Fall Garden Beckons Luxuriate in the heat but don’t forget that now is the time to plant your fall vegetable garden. It’s all the “c”’s in the first half of the month: cauliflower, cabbage and Chinese cabbages such as Pak Choi and Jade Pagoda. It’s not too late to plant collards or cucumbers either; just try to get them in by the middle of the month, a little later on the coast. Plant spinach at the same time. From August 15 onward add kale to the leafy greens. Mustard, leaf lettuce and turnips too. Kohlrabi can be planted through the month. All these vegetables are fairly hardy, but do harvest the cauliflower and leaf lettuce before the first deep frost. That’s difficult to imagine now, isn’t it?

Arts Entertainment C a l e n da r

Sip & Paint with Jane

Luck Legacy Kiln Opening

•

Saturday, August 1

Monday, August 3

KIDS GOLF TOURNAMENT (continuing from July 30). The 2015 U.S. Kids Golf World Championship is for golfers age 12 and under. It will be played at Pinehurst Resort and several other area golf courses. Pinehurst Resort, 80 Carolina Vista Drive, Pinehurst. Info: (888) 387-5437 or uskidsgolf.com.

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SIGN UP FOR CANADIAN ROCKIES TOUR (LAST DAY). Sponsored by the Moore County Historical Association and handled by Collette Tours, this tour takes place October 2 – 11, 2015, and includes Vancouver, Jasper, Lake Louise, the Columbia Icefields, and Calgary. Info: (910) 639-3823 or (910) 692-2051 or info@moorehistory.com.

•

TECHNOLOGY SATURDAY. 2 – 4 p.m. Technology exploration with stop-motion animation and coding on a Raspberry PI. Free and open to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

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60TH ANNUAL ROBBINS FARMERS DAY (Continuing from July 30). Arts and crafts and activities that include a wagon train festival, a horse parade, entertainment, special demonstrations, and square dancing in a carnival atmosphere. Downtown Robbins, 101 N Middleton St., Robbins. Info: (910) 295-7808 or robbinsfarmersday.com.

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LIVE MUSIC. 7 – 10 p.m. Jen Hillard performs at the Wine Cellar & Tasting Room, 241-A NE Broad St., Southern Pines. Free to the public. Info: (910) 692-3066.

Sunday, August 2

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NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Looking for Lizards.” Learn more about these fascinating creatures with the park ranger. Visitors Center, Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167.

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A DAY AT THE FARM. 12 – 4 p.m. Fun for the entire family: tractor-drawn hayrides, pony rides, bounce house, barrel train, food vendors, and demonstrations. Cost: $15/child for family hayrides; general admission and other activities free. A portion of the proceeds goes to support the Leilani Mae Horse Rescue. Peaceful Meadows Farm, 831 Priest Hill Road, Carthage. Info: (910) 986-4774 or mooreequineevents.com

Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Dance/Theater

Saturday, August 1

•

Nature Study Program

EXPLORATIONS: ORAL HISTORY. 3 – 4 p.m. This informational session about planning an oral history project for the Town of Southern Pines is part of the library’s “Explorations: A Forum for Adults” series of events. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

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NATURE NUTS HALF-DAY CAMPS. 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. Session: 11: “Animal Tracks and Signs.” Observe scat, tracks, and other signs to identify animals. Play the Thicket Game and learn how an animal sees a forest. For grades K through 5. Cost: $25/member; $35/non-member. Info: Pre-registration and payment required at least 5 days prior to session. No refunds for cancellations after 7 days prior to session (910) 486-0221. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 N Eastern Blvd., Fayetteville. Info: (910) 486-0221 or capefearbg.org.

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ART CLASS (OIL PAINTING). 9:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. “Creating with Oils,” taught by Diane Kraudelt, is a beginning oil painting class. Instruction covers techniques, brushes, paints, canvas prep, color mixing, and more. Supplies included. Cost: $72/member; $77/associate member; $82/ non-member. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979.

Monday, August 3—5

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WRITE ON: A CHILDREN’S WRITING CAMP. 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. Campers will study poetry, fiction, and storytelling. For grades 3 through 5. Cost: $35/student. Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities, 555 E Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-6261. Reservations required.

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PINEWILD YOUTH GOLF CLINICS. 9 – 11 a.m. These three-day clinics are for boys and girls ages 8 to 16 and focus on golf fundamentals, etiquette, rules of play, and more. Appropriate golf attire and own clubs required. Cost: $85. Assemble by the flagpole in front of the clubhouse, 5 minutes prior to start time. Golf Academy at Pinewild Country Club, 6 Glasgow Drive, N.C. 211 W, Pinehurst: Info: (910) 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org.

Monday, August 3—7

• • • Film

KAMP KIDWORKS (Fitness Center). 7:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Co-sponsored with FirstHealth Center for Health and Fitness, this safe, supervised program includes swimming,

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

•

Sports

crafts, games, sports, and more. Registration forms will be available at the Pinehurst Recreation Department and the Fitness Center. Cost: $47/resident; $70/non-resident. (Nonresident Fitness Center members need to call (910) 295-1900 with membership number to receive the discount online.) Camelot Playground at Cannon Park, 90 Woods Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org.

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KAMP KIDWORKS (PES). 7:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. This safe, supervised program of daily activities includes swimming, crafts, games, sports, and more. Registration forms will be available at the Pinehurst Recreation Department. Cost: $50/resident; $75/non-resident. Gymnasium @ Pinehurst Elementary School, 100 Dundee Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org.

Tuesday, August 4

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BABY STORYTIME. 10:30 – 11 a.m. Stories, songs, and fun for newborns and children up to age 5. Free and open to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

Wednesday, August 5

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FAMILY STORYTIME. 3:30 – 4 p.m. Stories, songs, and fun for newborns, children up to age 5, and their families. Free and open to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

•

NATURE NUTS HALF-DAY CAMPS. 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. Session 12: “Water and Water Systems.” Discover how ponds, creeks, the Cape Fear River, and the Cape Fear River Basin are all connected and important. For grades K through 5. Cost: $25/member; $35/non-member. Pre-registration and payment required at least 5 days prior to session. No refunds for cancellations after 7 days prior to session. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 N Eastern Blvd., Fayetteville. Info: (910) 4860221 or capefearbg.org.

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ART TALK. 5 – 6 p.m. Denise Baker, former head of the Art Department of Sandhills Community College, will give a provocative and engaging talk on art. The Country Bookshop, 140 NW Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3211 or information.thecountrybookshop@gmail.com.

Thursday, August 6

•

FAMILY FUN NIGHT. 5:30 – 6:30 p.m. “Everyday

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Heroes.” Hands-on activities for kids, take-home summer ideas, snacks, and stories about fire-fighting, crime-fighting, and military heroes. Free and open to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

Friday, August 7

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FIRST FRIDAY. 5 – 8:30 p.m. A family-friendly, community event with live music by Balsa Gliders. Food, beverages, and entertainment. Free admission. Sunrise Green Space, 250 NW Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: firstfridaysouthernpines.com.

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JAZZY FRIDAYS. 6 p.m. Enjoy a bottle of wine and dancing with friends under the tent while The Mike Wallace Quartet entertains you with live jazz music. Cost: $10/person. Reservations and pre-payment are required for parties of eight or more. Food vendor will be on site. Cypress Bend Vineyards, 21904 Riverton Road, Wagram. Info: (910) 369-0411 or cypressbendvineyards.com.

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35TH ANNUAL FINE ARTS FESTIVAL. 6 – 8 p.m. Opening reception and awards ceremony featuring artists from all over the U.S. Campbell House Galleries, 482 E Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2787 or mooreart.org.

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and which are harmless and actually beneficial to mankind. Visitors Center Auditorium, Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167.

(910) 944-3979.

Wednesday, August 12

•

Monday, August 10

•

SIP & PAINT WITH JANE. 5 – 7 p.m. Join resident artist Jane Casnellie for an evening of sipping and painting and take home your own masterpiece! No experience necessary. All materials provided, including a glass of wine. Cost: $35. Hollyhocks Art Gallery, 905 Linden Road, Pinehurst. Info and registration: (910) 255-0665.

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SANDHILLS PHOTOGRAPHY CLUB. 7 p.m. Club meeting and competition. Competition topic is “Close Up (Creative).” Guests are welcome. The Hannah Center Theater, The O’Neal School, 3300 Airport Road, Southern Pines. Info: sandhillsphotoclub.org.

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OUTDOOR JAZZ CONCERT AND BBQ DINNER. Dinner at 5 p.m., concert at 6:30 p.m. Sandhills Community College Jazz Band, directed by Rob Hill. Cost: $7 per plate for dinner; concert is free. On the lawn at Sandhills Community College, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: mccune-7lakes. home.mindspring.com.

Monday, August 10—28

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35TH ANNUAL FINE ARTS FESTIVAL. 9 a.m. – 5 p.m, Mon – Fri; and 2 – 4 p.m. every 3rd weekend of the month. Exhibit featuring artists from all over the U.S. Campbell House Galleries, 482 E Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2787 or mooreart.org.

•

KAMP KIDWORKS (FITNESS CENTER). 7:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Co-sponsored with FirstHealth Center for Health and Fitness, this safe, supervised program includes swimming, crafts, games, sports, and more. Registration forms available at the Pinehurst Recreation Department and the Fitness Center. Cost: $47/resident; $70/non-resident (Non-resident Fitness Center members need to call (910) 295-1900 with membership number to receive the discount online.) Camelot Playground at Cannon Park, 90 Woods Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 2952817 or pinehurstrec.org.

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ART CLASS (GELLI PRINTING). 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. This beginners’ class provides an introduction to using Gelli Plate printing to create papers and canvas. This is a soft printing surface that can be used for monoprinting or as a stamp. Gelli Plate is provided. Costs: $27/member; $30/associate member; $34/non-member. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979.

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LIVE MUSIC. 7 – 10 p.m. Ryan Book performs at the Wine Cellar & Tasting Room, 241-A NE Broad St., Southern Pines. Free to the public. Info: (910) 692-3066.

Saturday, August 8, and Sunday, August 9

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EARLY MORNING BLUES DRESSAGE SHOW. 8 a.m. – 12 p.m. The Pinehurst Harness Track, 200 Beulah Hill Road S, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 215-0816 or carolinadressage.com.

Sunday, August 9

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SUNDAY AFTERNOON MOVIE. 2:30 p.m. Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net

•

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Ticks, Chiggers, and Spiders.” Participants will learn how to identify which spiders and ticks are poisonous and disease-carrying,

•

Tuesday, August 11

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TAPAS EVENING. 6 p.m. Women of Weymouth fundraiser featuring old-fashioned Southern cuisine. Cost: $45/person. Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities,555 E Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-6261 or weymouthcenter.org.

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Saturday, August 15

•

SATURDAY CRAFT DAY. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. The library provides materials for children in grades K through 5 and their families. The theme will be “Duct Tape Creations.” Free and open to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

•

ART CLASS (WATERCOLOR). 10:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. “Soft and Loose Watercolor” with Sandy Scott. Learn techniques to create atmosphere and perspective. Prerequisite course, “Beginning Watercolor,” is recommended. Cost: $64/ member; $72/associate member; $80/non-member. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info:

Dance/Theater

ART CLASS (FIGURE DRAWING). 9:30 a.m. –12 p.m. Artist Linda Bruening teaches this class for beginners and more advanced students. Drawing exercises focus on body proportions and positions and include a live model. Costs: $28/member; $32/associate member; $35/non-member. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979.

BEACH FRIDAYS. 6 p.m. Enjoy a bottle of wine and dancing with friends under the tent while The Sand Band entertains you with live music. Cost: $10/person. Reservations and pre-payment are required for parties of eight or more. Food vendors on site. Cypress Bend Vineyards, 21904 Riverton Road, Wagram. Info: (910) 369-0411 or cypressbendvineyards.com.

Tuesday, August 11, and Wednesday, August 12

•

LADIES NIGHT OUT. 5:30 – 9 p.m. An evening of fun, shopping, food, and fashion. Hors d’oeuvres, dessert samples, product samples, door prizes and more from local vendors. Cost: $10 in advance, $15 at the door. The Fair Barn, 200 Beulah Hill Road S, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 2951900 or vopnc.org.

•

Music/Concerts

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NATURE NUTS HALF-DAY CAMPS. 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. Session 14: “All About Insects.” Learn about a variety of insects, and what makes them unique and important to life in an urban forest. For grades K through 5. Cost: $25/member; $35/non-member. Pre-registration and payment required at least 5 days prior to session. No refunds for cancellations after 7 days prior to session. Info: Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 N Eastern Blvd., Fayetteville. Info: (910) 486-0221 or capefearbg.org.

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NATURE NUTS HALF-DAY CAMPS. 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. Session 13: “Pollinator Palooza.” Learn about pollinators and the importance of pollination. Visit a live beehive. For grades K through 5. Cost: $25/member; $35/ non-member. Pre-registration and payment required at least 5 days prior to session. No refunds for cancellations after 7 days prior to session. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 N Eastern Blvd., Fayetteville. Info: (910) 486-0221 or capefearbg.org.

Art

Thursday, August 13

Friday, August 14

• •

FAMILY FUN NIGHT. 5:30 – 6:30 p.m. Hands-on activities for kids, take-home summer ideas, snacks, and storytelling by Tyris Jones. Free and open to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

Monday, August 10—14

Key:

•

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 10 – 10:45 a.m. “Water, Water, Everywhere! (for Wee Ones).” Water-related games and activities for 3- to 5-year-olds to learn about things that live in the water. Parental participation required. Visitors Center, Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167.

Saturday, August 8

NATURE JOURNALING PART V: OBSERVING THE SKIES. 8:30 p.m. Make constellation crafts for your nature journals and observe the Perseid meteor shower from the meadow. Park and meet at the Weymouth Center parking lot on the Boyd tract, 555 E Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Bring flashlights and bug spray. Info: (910) 692-2167.

• • • Film

TEEN MOVIE. 2 p.m. While subjected to the horrors of World War II Germany, young Liesel finds solace by stealing

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

•

Sports

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

HomeStyles ca l e n d a r books and sharing them with others. In the basement of her home, a Jewish refugee is being sheltered by her adoptive parents. Free to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

•

8th ANNUAL BACKYARD BOCCE BASH. Registration 8:45 a.m. A lighthearted tournament open to teams of four men and/or women. Cost: $350/VIP team; $150/BYOB team; $100/standard. Benefiting the Sandhills Children’s Center. Pinehurst Harness Track, 200 Beulah Hill Road S, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 692-3323 or sandhillschildrenscenter.org.

•

LIVE MUSIC. 7 – 10 p.m. Ethan Hanson performs at the Wine Cellar & Tasting Room, 241-A NE Broad St., Southern Pines. Free to the public. Info: (910) 692-3066.

Sunday, August 16

•

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Adventures of a Beginning Birder.” Park Ranger Williamson shares her experiences and describes bird species found in North Carolina and around the country. All outdoor enthusiasts are welcome! Meet at the Visitors Center, Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167.

Interested in Advertising?

•

SUNDAY FILM SERIES. 2:30 p.m. Atticus Finch, a lawyer in the Depression-era South, defends a black man against an undeserved rape charge, and his kids against prejudice. Free and open to the public. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or sppl.net.

Monday, August 17—20

•

NORTH & SOUTH SENIOR AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIPS. The 64th annual senior men’s and 56th annual senior women’s golf tournaments play on courses No. 1, 5, and 8. Pinehurst Resort and Country Club, 1 Carolina Vista, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 235-8140 or pinehurst.com.

Call 910.692.7271

•

WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP. 9:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. “Pushing the Envelope in Watercolor — Express Yourself.” With artist Mel Stabin, learn to work simply and quickly and to master watercolor’s sometimes unpredictable and spontaneous qualities. All skill levels welcome. Cost: $480/full member; $540/associate member; $590/non-member. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979.

Monday, August 17—21

•

YOUTH POTTERY CLASS. 1 – 3 p.m. Participants will create 10 unique pottery pieces with white earthenware clay and paint with underglazes. Cost: $70/resident; $140/nonresident. Fair Barn, 200 Beulah Hill Road S, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-0166 or pinehurstrec.org.

Tuesday, August 18

•

MEET THE AUTHOR. 5 p.m. Katy Simpson Smith will discuss her debut novel, The Story of Land and Sea, about the lives of three generations in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution. The Country Bookshop, 140 NW Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3211.

•

SENIORS DAY OUT: BROADWAY AT THE BEACH. 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. Visit Ripley’s Aquarium and the Broadway shops. Have lunch at the aquarium or one of the restaurants. Cost: $33 residents/$66 non-residents (includes transportation and admission to aquarium). Lunch is on your own. Assembly Hall Lobby @ Assembly Hall, 395 Magnolia Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org.

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Thursday, August 20

•

SUMMER BOOK CLUB. 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. Signup and pick up your books at the Douglass Center or the Southern Pines Public Library. Books are provided through the Library’s Book Club Kits. The Game Room, Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or (910) 692-7376.

••• • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports

• • •

Dance/Theater Fun History

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JUNIOR INVITATION GOLF TOURNAMENT. The 32nd annual Mid Pines Junior Invitational golf tournament is for golfers under the age of 18. Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club, 1010 Midland Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 291-5813.

•

17TH ANNUAL LUCK LEGACY KILN OPENING. 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. Sid Luck and guest potters present traditional and utilitarian pottery, including salt-glazed pieces. BBQ, cold drinks, and bluegrass music by Southern Magnolia. Free to the public. Luck’s Ware, 1604 Adams Road, Seagrove. Info: (336) 879-3261 or lucksware.com.

Sunday, August 23

•

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Coyotes.” A park ranger provides an opportunity to learn more about these animals. Visitors Center Auditorium, Weymouth WoodsSandhills Nature Preserve, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or sandhillsnature.org.

Monday, August 24

•

SANDHILLS NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY MEETING. 7 p.m. “Recreating Piedmont Prairies in North Carolina.” Mike Vaughn will speak on his experiences. Visitors welcome! Weymouth Woods Auditorium, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or sandhillsnature.org.

Monday, August 24; Saturday, August 29; & Monday, August 31

Moving Boxes & Supplies

•

ART CLASS (OIL PAINTING). 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. “Follow the Leader” is a 3-day course. Joan Williams provides step-bystep instruction to create a poppy painting. Open to anyone who has taken a previous “Follow the Leader” or other oilpainting class. Paints and canvas will be provided. Cost: $325 (no discount). Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979.

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•

LIVE MUSIC. 7 – 10 p.m. Kyle Garris performs at the Wine Cellar & Tasting Room, 241-A NE Broad St., Southern Pines. Free to the public. Info: (910) 692-3066.

Care • Compassion • Comfort

•

Friday, August 21—23

•

Practicing the 3 C’s

•

WINE AND WHIMSY. 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. Come to this painting class and enjoy a glass of wine or beer while painting your masterpiece (this month, a bicycle and beach). Cost: $20/ member; $25/non-member. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 N Eastern Blvd., Fayetteville. Info: (910) 486-0221.

Saturday, August 22

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Tuesday, August 25

•

JAM SESSION. 7 – 9 p.m. This jam session is free and open to the public. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-6261 or weymouthcenter.org.

Wednesday, August 26

•

TAYLOR GUITARS ROAD SHOW. 6:30 p.m. An evening of guitar talk and demonstrations with Taylor factory staff from El Cajon, California. Casino Guitars, 115 NE Broad St, Southern Pines. Info: (917) 279-5167.

Wednesday, August 26—27

•

ART CLASS (OIL PAINTING). 9 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. “Oil Painting with Courtney” is a 2-day course. Artist Courtney Herndon focuses on composition, color, and value, using the alla prima or wet into wet style of painting. Cost: $88/ member; $99/associate member; $110/non-member. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979.

Thursday, August 27

910-400-5459 SEVEN LAKES

145 W. Plaza Drive www.PackShipPartySupply.com

•

SENIOR TRIP. 7 a.m. – 7 p.m. Visit to North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher in Kure Beach. Tour the aquarium and visit the beach. Cost: $28/resident; $56/non-resident (does not include lunch). Depart from Campbell House at 482 E

••• • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports

• • •

Dance/Theater Fun History

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

ca l e n d a r Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration (due August 3): (910) 692-2463 or oxendine@southernpines.net.

•

SOUNDS ON THE GROUNDS. 6 – 9 p.m. Liquid Pleasure, a 1970s tribute band, performs in this Young Affiliates Summer Concert Event. Food and beer trucks will be on site. Cost: $5/in advance (available at Weymouth Center Office or The Country Bookshop); $10/at the gate day of event. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-6261 or weymouthcenter.org.

Saturday, August 29

•

MOORE COUNTY COMMUNITY FLEA MARKET. 8 a.m. – 3 p.m. Shop for crafts and flea market items from a variety of vendors and booths. The Fair Barn, 200 Beulah Hill Road S, Pinehurst. Free admission. Info: (910) 295-0166 or thefairbarn.org.

•

LIVE MUSIC. 7 – 10 p.m. Becca Rae performs at the Wine Cellar & Tasting Room, 241-A NE Broad St., Southern Pines. Free to the public. Info: (910) 692-3066.

Sunday, August 30

•

• •

BROWN BAG LUNCH/GAME DAY. 11:30 a.m. Bring your lunch and enjoy fellowship and activities, including card games, board games, and the Wii. The Douglass Community Center, 1185 W Pennsylvania, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

•

Mondays

•

MOORE COUNTY FARMERS MARKET. 2 – 5:30 p.m. Produce only, fresh and locally grown. FirstHealth Fitness Center, 170 Memorial Drive, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 947-3752 or moorecountync.gov or localharvest.org.

•

PAINTING CLASS (ALL MEDIA). 2 – 5 p.m. For all levels of experience. Artist Eileen Strickland covers basic information on materials, techniques, color theory, and composition. Cost: $35/resident; $70/non-resident. Classes will be held in the Recreation Room, 300 Kelly Road, Pinehurst. Please pre-register. Info: (910) 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org.

•

YOUTH TENNIS LESSONS. 6:45 – 7:45 p.m. For ages 10 through 15. Lessons cover the basics of the game, including proper grip, forehand, and backhand strokes. Cost: $5/resident; $10/non-resident. Rassie Wicker Park tennis court #1, 10 Rassie Wicker Drive, Pinehurst. Bring racket and tennis shoes. Please pre-register. Info and registration: (910) 295-2817 pinehurstrec.org.

ADULT SAND VOLLEYBALL. 2 – 4 p.m. Get a good workout and meet some new friends. Participation is free. Memorial Park Court, Adjacent to US 1, Southern Pines. Info: southernpines.net.

Wednesdays (thru September 9)

Tuesdays, beginning August 11

•

WEEKLY HAPPENINGS Sundays

•

SANDHILLS FARMERS MARKET. 3 – 6 p.m. Fresh and locally grown fruit and vegetables. Village Center Parking Lot, 1 Village Green W, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 687-0377 or moorefarmfresh.com.

TAI CHI FOR HEALTH. 10 – 11:30 a.m. Practice this flowing Eastern exercise with instructor Rich Martin at the Cape Fear Botanical Garden. Cost: Single class: $15/member; $17/non-member; monthly rate: $50/member; $60/nonmember; three-month rate: $145/member; $175/non-member. (No refunds or transfer for these classes.) Cape Fear Botanial Garden, 536 N Eastern Blvd., Fayetteville, Info and registration: (910) 486-0221. YOUTH TENNIS LESSONS. 5:45 – 6:45 p.m. For ages 6 through 9. Lessons cover the basics of the game, including proper grip, forehand, and backhand strokes. Cost: $5/resident; $10/non-resident. Rassie Wicker Park tennis court #1, 10 Rassie Wicker Drive, Pinehurst. Bring racket and tennis shoes. Please pre-register. Info and registration: (910) 295-2817 pinehurstrec.org.

LUNCH AND LEARN AT THE GARDENS. 12 – 1 p.m. Discussion with Chris Burrows, grounds superintendent of Pinehurst Resort. Free and open to the public. Bring your lunch (drinks provided). Ball Visitors Center, Sandhills Horticultural Gardens, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info and registration: (910) 695-3882 or email: landscapegardening@sandhills.edu.

•

SUMMER CAMPS FOR KIDS. A variety of activities and crafts for kids of all ages. See the Spring and Summer Brochure on the Southern Pines Recreation and Parks web page for details, dates, costs, and availability. Info: (910) 6922463 or southernpines.net

Tuesdays

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Bats of the Sandhills.” Discover the myths and truths about these delightful creatures and their huge benefit to our environment. Visitors Center Auditorium, Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167.

Monday, August 31

weekly in-town trip. Cost: $120/resident; $163/non-resident. Cafeteria at Pinehurst Elementary School, 100 Dundee Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org. Call for availability and waitlist.

BRIDGE. 1 – 4 p.m. A card game played by four people in two partnerships, in which “trump” is determined by bidding. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W Pennsylvania, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Wednesdays, beginning August 19 (thru September 9)

•

TAI CHI. 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. Lee Holbrook will instruct these classes based on the gentle circular movements of Tai Chi. Recreation Room, 300 Kelly Road, Pinehurst. (Please pre-register.) Cost: $21/resident; $42/non-resident. Info and registration: (910) 295-2817 pinehurstrec.org.

•

Thursdays

•

COOKING CLASS. 6:30 p.m. Chef Maria DiGiovanni leads hands-on preparation of menu items (gnocci, Thai, ravioli, Moroccan, Lebanese, connolis, or pasta). Reservations and prepayment required. Call for prices and specific menu. The Flavor Exchange, 115 E New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: 910-725-1345 or the flavorexchange.com.

Tuesdays, beginning August 11

•

Wednesdays

•

MOORE COUNTY FARMERS MARKET. 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. Produce only, fresh and locally grown. Armory Sports Complex, 604 W Morganton Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 947-3752 or moorecountync.gov or localharvest.org.

YOGA. 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. This class is for beginners and those who want a gentle, mindful yoga practice. Bring a yoga mat and a towel. Cost: $30/resident; $60/non-resident. Classes at the Fair Barn, 200 Beulah Hill Road S, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org.

MAHJONG (Chinese version). 1 – 3 p.m. A game involving skill, strategy, and calculation (played by 4 people). Douglass Community Center, 1185 W Pennsylvania, Southern Pines. (910) 692-7376.

•

FULL-DAY CAMPS. 7:45 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. Activities will include games, crafts, sports, swimming, and more. Camps will use Cannon Park and Camelot Playground and also take a

Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Dance/Theater

CLASSIC SUMMER FILM SERIES. 7:30 p.m. Some of the greatest classic films of our times: Singin’ in the Rain (Aug 6), Field of Dreams (Aug 13), Nine to Five (Aug 20), and Dirty Dancing (Aug 27). Cost: $6. Sunrise Theater, 250 W Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8501 or sunrisetheater.com.

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

•

Sports

Arts & Culture

SUMMER 2015 CLASSES OIL and ACRYLIC

CREATING WITH OILS Diane Kraudelt - Monday, August 3, 9:30-3:30 $82 Supplies included. OIL PAINTING WITH COURTNEY Courtney Herndon – Friday/Saturday, – August 21/ 22 9:00-3:30, $110 OIL PAINTING WITH COURTNEY Courtney Herndon – Wednesday/Thursday, – August 26/ 27 9:00-3:30, $110 FOLLOW THE LEADER - (OIL) Joan Williams – Monday, August 24, Saturday, August 29, and Monday, August 30 10:00-4:00 $325 no discount - Supplies included (Painting a 30 x 40 gallery wrapped canvas – Poppies)

WATERCOLOR

SOFT AND LOOSE WATERCOLOR Sandy Scott – Tuesday/Wednesday, August 11/12, 10:00-3:30 $90

DRAWING

FIGURE DRAWING (WITH A LIVE MODEL) Linda Bruening - Thursday, August 13, 9:00-12:00 $35

OTHER MEDIUMS

GELLI PRINTING Pat Halligan – Saturday, August 8, 10:00-12:00 (Gelli plate included) $30

WORKSHOPS 2015

AUGUST 17-20 – “PUSHING THE ENVELOPE IN WATERCOLOR” Mel Stabin $590 SEPTEMBER 16-18 – “INSIDE ACRYLICS” Phillip Garrett $375 ET GALLERY EXCHANGE STRE

“SMALL GE”MS OF ARTr Show

League Membe ion Opening Recept m 6p – m August 2, 4p h August 25 Show runs throug

Check us out & register at www.artistleague.org 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen • 944-3979

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

ca l e n d a r

Thursdays, beginning August 13

•

ADULT TENNIS LESSONS. 6 – 7:30 p.m. Taught by Bob Joseph, these lessons include instruction and match play. Participants must provide a racket. Pre-registration required. Cost: $50/residents; $100/non-residents. Classes held at Rassie Wicker Park tennis courts, 10 Rassie Wicker Drive, Pinehurst. Info and registration: (910) 295-1900 or pinehurstrec.org.

Fridays

•

PAINTING CLASS (OIL). 1 – 4 p.m. For all levels of experience, artist Eileen Strickland, covers basic information on materials, techniques, color theory, and composition. Cost: $35/resident; $70/non-resident. Classes will be held in the Recreation Room, 300 Kelly Road, Pinehurst. Please pre-register. Info and registration: (910) 295-1900 or 295-2817 or pinehurstrec.org.

•

FREE COOKING DEMO. 5 p.m. A great way to start off the weekend and get scrumptious ideas. No reservations needed. The Flavor Exchange, 115 E New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1345 or theflavorexchange.com.

•

STORYTIME FOR CHILDREN. 10:30 a.m. The Country Bookshop, 140 NW Broad St., Southern Pines (910) 692-3211.

Saturdays

St. in historic Aberdeen. Exhibit hours are noon – 3 p.m., Monday-Saturday. (910) 944-3979.

•

MEET THE ARTIST AT WORK. 12 – 3 p.m. Come visit a different artist each Saturday (August 1, Jane Casnellie; August 8, Julie Messerschmidt; August 15, Charlie Roberts; August 22, Linda Griffin; and August 29, Diane Kraudelt). Hollyhocks Art Gallery, 905 Linden Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 255-0665 or hollyhocksartgallerycom.

Broadhurst Gallery, 2212 Midland Road, Pinehurst. Showcases works by nationally recognized artists such as Carol Bechtel, Jason Craighead, Linda Ruth Dickinson, Bruce Dorfman, Kathleen Earthrowl. Meet-the-artist opportunities available. Monday-Friday (closed Wednesday), 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., Saturday, 1 – 4 p.m and special appointments. (910) 295-4817, www.broadhurstgallery.com.

•

SANDHILLS FARMERS MARKET. 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. Fresh and locally grown fruit and vegetables. Village Center Parking Lot, 1 Village Green W, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 6870377 or moorefarmfresh.com.

•

MOORE COUNTY FARMERS MARKET. 8 a.m. – 12 p.m.. Produce only, fresh and locally grown. SE Broad St. and New York Ave. Southern Pines. Info: (910) 947-3752 or (910) 690-9520 or moorecountync.gov/index.php/farmers-market.

The Campbell House Galleries, 482 E. Connecticut Avenue., Southern Pines. Monday-Friday 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and every third weekend of the month from 2 – 4 p.m. (910) 6924356, www.mooreart.org. Exchange Street Gallery, Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange Street in historic Aberdeen. “It’s Southern, Ya’ll,” works of Pat McMahon and Betty DiBartolomeo. September 2-28. Regular hours noon to 3:00, Monday-Saturday. (910) 944-3979. The Gallery at Seven Lakes at the St. Mary Magdalene building, 1145 Seven Lakes Drive. Just nine miles from the Pinehurst Traffic Circle up 211, this gallery is dedicated to local artists. Wednesday-Thursday 1 – 4 p.m. Hastings Gallery in the Katharine L. Boyd Library at Sandhills Community College, Pinehurst. Gallery hours are Monday-Thursday 7:45 a.m. – 9 p.m., Friday 7:45 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Saturday 8:30 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Art Galleries

ABOUT ART GALLERY inside The Market Place Midland Bistro Building, 2160 Midland Road, Pinehurst. The gallery features local artists. Open Monday-Friday 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. (910) 215-596. Artist GAlleRy OF SOUTHERN PINES, 167 E. New Hampshire Avenue., Southern Pines. Features art and fine crafts from more than 60 North Carolina artists. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday-Saturday. (910) 692-6077.

HOLLYHOCKS ART GALLERY, 905 Linden Road, Pinehurst. Features artwork by local award winning artists, Diane Kraudelt, Linda Griffin, Jessie MacKay, Julie Messerschmidt, Charles Roberts, and artist/owner, Jane Casnellie. Monday-Saturday 10:30 a.m. – 9:30 p.m. Sunday 4 – 9:30 p.m. (910) 255-0665, www.hollyhocksartgallery.com.

Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange

Lady Bedford’s Tea Parlour,

Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Dance/Theater

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

•

Sports

Dining Guide

195

Live Music & Entertainment

Reservations Suggested

Elegant dining in a family-friendly atmosphere, pairing American Cuisine with exotic tastes of Thailand.

Thank you for

10 Great Years!

american fusion cuisine supporting local farmers

Perfect Venue for Holiday Parties - Book Now! Banquet Rooms Available

lunch tues-sat 11-3 dinner wed-sat 5:30-9:30

Tues - Sat 11:30am-2:30pm • 5:00pm-9:00pm Sunday 9:30am - 1:30pm

chef prem nath

195 bell avenue southern pines 910.692.7110 www.195americanfusion.com

910-295-3240 • 910-295-4118 Midland Country Club • Midland Road

www.tableonthegreen.com

Restaurant Authentic Thai Cusine

U.S. Hwy 1 South & 15-501 1404 Sandhills Blvd. Aberdeen, NC 28315

Smoke Free Environment Lunch

Closed Monday Tuesday - Friday 11:00am - 2:30pm Saturday Closed for Lunch Sunday 11:30am - 2:30pm

Dinner

Tuesday - Sunday 5:00pm - 9:30pm Saturday 4:00pm-9:30pm See our menu on MooCo under Oriental Restaurants

(910) 944-9299

Carryout and Vegetarian Dishes 96

Come enjoy our Italian Atmosphere for great food with friends and family! Tues., Wed., & Thurs. Fri. & Sat. Sun. & Mon. 5pm to 9pm 5pm to 10pm Closed

We accept reservations. 515 S.E. Broad St | Southern Pines, NC 28387 910-725-1868 | www.curtscucina.com

August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

August!

August PineNeedler Answers

ca l e n d a r 21 Chinquapin Road, Pinehurst. Features local artists. Tuesday-Saturday 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. (910) 255-0100, www. ladybedfords.com. The Old Silk Route, 113 West Main St., Aberdeen. Specializes in Asian original art, including silk paintings, tapestries, Buddhist Thangkas and Indian paper miniatures. Monday, Thursday-Saturday 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. (910) 295-2055. SANDHILLS WOMEN’S EXCHANGE, 15 Azalea Road, Pinehurst. All merchandise at the Exchange is handmade by consignors who live in the community. 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Lunch served 11.30 a.m – 2 p.m. (910) 295-4677. Seagrove Candle Company, 116 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Showcases art of the Sandhills and Seagrove area. Monday, Wednesday-Saturday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., (910) 695-0029. SKY Art Gallery, 602 Magnolia Dr., Aberdeen. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (910) 944-9440, www.skyartgallery.com. Studio 590 by the pond in Dowd Cabin, 590 Dowd Circle, Pinehurst. This historic log cabin is the working studio and gallery of artists Betty DiBartolomeo and Harry Neely. Fine oil paintings, commissions and instruction. (910) 639-9404. White Hill Gallery, 407 U.S. 15-501, Carthage, offers a variety of pottery. (910) 947-6100.

Nature Centers

Sandhills Horticultural Gardens (32 acres of gardens). The Sandhills Horticultural Gardens are handicapped-accessible. Daylight hours year-round. (910) 695-3882. Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve (898 acres). 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. (910) 692-2167. VILLAGE ARBORETUM. 35 acres of land adjoining the Village Hall on Magnolia Road, Pinehurst. (910) 295-1900.

Historical Sites

Bethesda Church and Cemetery. Guided tours for groups by appointment. 1020 Bethesda Road, Aberdeen. (910) 944-1319. Bryant House and McLendon Cabin. Tours by appointment. (910) 692-2051 or (910) 673-0908. Carthage Historical Museum. Sundays, 2 – 5 p.m. or by appointment. Located at Rockingham and Saunders streets, Carthage. (9 10) 947-2331. House in the Horseshoe. Open year-round. Hours vary. 288 Alston House Road (10 miles north of Carthage), Sanford. (910) 947-2051. Malcolm Blue Farm and Museum. 1 – 4 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Group tours can be arranged by appointment. (910) 944-7558 or (910) 603-2739. North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., Monday-Friday, at the Weymouth Center for Arts and Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Avenue., Southern Pines. (910) 692-6261. Shaw House. Open 1 – 4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. (910) 692-2051. Tufts Archives. 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday-Friday, and 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Saturday. (910) 295-3642. Union Station. Open 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. Located in downtown Aberdeen. (910) 944-5902. Sandhills Woman’s Exchange Log Cabin. Open 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. (910) 295-4677. PS To add an event, email us at pinestraw.calendar@gmail.com by the first of the month prior to the event. Or go to www.thepilot.com and add the event to our online calendar.

from page 111 Sandwich Month! National

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G E M S

5 6 8 2 3 1 4 7 9

9 2 3 5 4 7 1 6 8

MOORE COUNTY FARMERS MARKET Sat. August 8th 9:30 to 11:30 Food Demo by Chef Sueson Vess” “Sat. August 29th 9:30 to 11:30 Food Demo by Ashtens” Tomatoes, Strawberries, Fruits, Veggies, Jams, Meats, Flowers & Plants, Goat Cheese, Prepared Foods, Baked Goods, Crafts, Peaches, Blueberries, Corn Mondays- FirstHealth (Fitness Center) Facility courtesy of First Health

170 Memorial Dr • Pinehurst 2pm-5:30pm Will be open through October 26th Open Year Round • Thursdays - 604 W. Morganton Rd

(Armory Sports Complex) Facility courtesy of Town of Southern Pines Southern Pines 9am-1pm Saturdays - Downtown Southern Pines

Facility courtesy of Town of Southern Pines Broad St & New York Ave 8am-Noon Will be open through October 31th

Call 947-3752 or 690-9520 for more info.

The Dining Guide

of the Sandhills To a d v e r t i s e , c a l l 910-693-7271

hwwebster@embarqmail.com Web search Moore County Farmers Market Local Harvest www.facebook.com/moorecountyfarmersmarket SNAP welcomed here

Fabulous finds in Fayetteville WE’VE GOT

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SONOMA

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August 2015P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen Pinehurst 4th of July Parade Saturday, July 4, 2015 Photographs by Jeanne Paine

Moore County Shrine Club

Trey Navo, Holly Webb

Avery, Lila & Griffin Cheatwood with Roscoe State Rep. Jamie Boles

Pinehurst Fire Dept. Honor Guard

Bella & Liam Brauch Marine Corps League

Dawn McCullen with Shelby

Ava Ellis with Bentley

Dr. Rick & Carol Pillsbury with Balloo, Bama & Bear

Harlel

Nala

BLACK ROCK

VINEYARDS & WINERY Come taste our Mid-Atlantic Southeastern Wine Competition Silver Award Winning Chambourcin & Viognier.

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(at the traffic light)

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(910) 947-3036

Buying Vintage

and Military Watches

Buy, Sell or Trade Specializing in Primitive & Country Furnishings

ROLEX & TUDOR Especially 1950s-1980s era GMT & SUBMARINER WARPATH MILITARY COLLECTIBLES

115 N. Sycamore St., Aberdeen, NC (919) 995-3488 shop • (919) 673-9388 or (919) 673-9387 cells

100

Antiques & Newtiques 5336 NC Hwy 211, West End, NC 27376

Sunshine Antique & Mercantile Company

Thursday- Saturday 10 to 5 Monday-Wednesday by appointment or chance

Plumbing & Heating Co., Inc since 1948 license #670

819 Hope Mills Road, Fayetteville Ed Hicks (910) 425-7000 edhicks82@aol.com • warpathmilitaria.com

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Tues-Sat 11am-4pm • Sun 1pm-4pm www.westendpastimes.com

Antiques Collectibles Fine Furniture Old Dolls Old Toys & Trains Glassware China Civil War Militaria US Coins Located in Town & Country Antique Mall • Hwy. 1 Aberdeen (across from Aberdeen Lake/Park) 910-944-3359 • 910-638-4542 • apbrill@earthlink.net

August 2015i��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen

Shaneitha and Eric Nance

15th Annual Blues Crawl Downtown Southern Pines Saturday, July 11, 2015

Photographs by Al & Annette Daniels

Laura & Kenny Love

Cayden Jai Doust, Steven Deiondre Doust, with Niki McSwain

Victor & Erin and their children Livvie and Eli

Catherine Delavergne, Patricia Wallace

Rae Kinney, Maren Anderson Stephen and Chris Fore

Patrick & Donna McDonald

Tina Adams, Bill McDonald Baby Elizabeth with parents Cathy and Lucus Southerland

The Ironing Board Sam Duo performs inside the Nosh Deli

John Earp, Paul Dunham, Carol Duffy, Darlene Dunham, Patrick Duffy, Jodi Heimrich

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2015

101

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Email: dak@pinehurst.net www.daksoffice.com 102

August 2015i��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen

Lanson, Mitch & Milym Lancaster with Odin

Regan Deanes

Southern Pines Farmersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Market Saturday, June 27, 2015 Photographs by Jeanne Paine

Rev. Dr. Sam Walker, RaeAnne Kinney

Susan, Nicole & Kris Lindamood with Bailey Sandy & Gary Carroll

Olivia Dowdy Brown, Hinton Brown

Landon, Chad, Jill & Preston McCurry

Alexa & Rowan Gearhart

Sara & Harry Webster

Tara Westcott

Jennifer & Alyssa Furie with Mica

Rebecca & Lillian Few

Branigan, Taryn & Josie Donahue

Catherine Taylor, Lynn Camasso

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ECLECTIC BEAUTY IN SOUTHERN PINES 460 S Bethesda Rd $335,000 MLS #166046 4bd/3ba 2500sf Large deep lot in SoPines CC neighborhood. Well maintained home with many updates. Easy commute to Ft Bragg or short distance to Downtown. Must see to appreciate this wonderful property. Call Kim for details & appointments.

Kim Stout 910-528-2008

104

August 2015i��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Brad Charles

SandhillSeen Walthour-Moss Foundation Father’s Day Dog Show Sunday, June 21, 2014

Janie Boland Page Nesser, Landon Russell

Dottie Greenleaf Buck McGugan

Kevin Riley

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105

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August 2015i�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

T h o u g hts F r o m T h e Ma n sh e d

Deadheads and a Toast to a Great Lake’s Comeback By Geoff Cutler

Lake Huron is high

with water. My cousin had his first hole-in-one, and the Grateful Dead’s “Fare Thee Well Tour” rang out from our cottage windows. Actually, quite a number of our friends interrupted the Fourth of July weekend at the old resort in Michigan and flew to Chicago to see the last show. Others had already been to see the band play in California. At our rapidly advancing ages, who would have thought we would still be so devout? And yet, there it was. Men and women in our 50s and 60s, aging disciples of Jerry, Bob, Phil, Bill and Mickey, flitting hither and yon to see the band play just one more time. You can’t watch “The Dead” and not feel Jerry Garcia’s missing presence, but Trey Anastasio of Phish on lead guitar filled that void quite nicely, and the music played on.

Normally, we drive out in late July and stay through the first week of August. That way we get to see the July people and the August people, all friends I grew up with. The resort is old, established in 1896 by my great grandfather as a place for him and his wife to live, and his friends and employees to have a summer home along the shores of this Great Lake. For the last couple of years, we’ve added America’s holiday weekend to our time in Harbor Beach. We fly out. And it’s quick. We leave Southern Pines at 7 a.m. and are unloading the rental car by 2 p.m. Plenty of time for a quick nine holes before dressing, cocktails on the porch, and then dinner in the clubhouse. Driving up M-25, we got our first intermittent glimpse of the lake. We always drive too fast on M-25 because it’s the last leg of our journey, and like when we were kids, we just can’t wait to get there. But even at speeds that risk our capture by the local constabulary, we could see the lake was up, way up. For years, Lake Huron has been low, stagnant and mucky. There’s been a lot of seaweed where we want to swim, too many dead fish rolling up out of the surf and onto the beach, and landing a boat anywhere

in the vicinity of the dock has required great skill on the part of our boat-owning captains. Parts of an old wreck that foundered on the rocks ages ago were actually visible from our shore. But thanks to frigid winter temperatures that froze 98 percent of all the Great Lakes, and mountains of snow that melted as summer approached, the lake is replenished and revitalized. After loading The Dead into his onboard stereo, Donald, still orbiting about in his own little dead zone from seeing the Santa Clara show, took a passel of us out on his boat. Out a couple of miles beyond the lighthouse and our break wall. We sipped cold ones in the late afternoon sun with “Samson & Delilah” in the background, and marveled at the deep cobalt blue. When we dove off the back of the boat, it was like diving into a tub of chipped ice. And you knew then, unable to form words from the cold, that nothing dirty, nothing mucky, nothing weedy survived that temperature. The lake was back, and it was good. Back on shore, either then or some other time . . . who really cares about time when your head’s filled with The Dead, my cousin David drained a long hole-in-one. He celebrated this unlikely event by taking us, I mean anyone in the resort who wanted to come, up to our town’s watering hole. Now, most golfers lucky enough to achieve this feat will buy a round or two. Not David. He opened a three-hour tab for us. We swilled and cheered and caught up with those we hadn’t seen yet, and David went behind the bar with his laptop to set up a simulcast of The Dead show playing that night in Chicago. The sounds came out of the bar’s stereo, but we couldn’t really hear too well, what with the noise we were making, and I guess the proprietor, also a distant cousin, turned the music down a little for those patrons from town who didn’t much care for “The Dead.” Can you imagine? After the golf tournament the next day, Terry interrupted the ceremony to honor the builder of our new golf shack to officially thank David for his generosity. Those of us ruing our high scores and still in mortal combat to banish the demons of the night before raised a cheer of thanks to the man with the ace. We said our own fare-thee-wells to our friends when the holiday weekend was through and said we’d look forward to seeing everyone again at the end of summer. With any luck, we’ll say those hellos and goodbyes for many years to come. I’ve a sneaking suspicion, based on the fun it looked like the Grateful Dead was having on stage, and the joy they gave to their fans, that we may not have seen the last of them, either. PS Geoff can be reached at geoffcutler@embarqmail.com.

107

Using Dikson Italian Hair color technology for less damage, zero fade, complete gray coverage and no carcinogens. And offering a variety of organic styling products. 104 Bradford Village, Southern Pines (910)692-2825 | www.thehaircottage.com

Please visit our website for location and directions.

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KEES Appliance Center 108

104 E. Main St. Downtown Aberdeen

910-944-8887

www.keesappliance.com

August 2015i�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

T h e A cc i d e n tal A st r o l o g e r

The August Forecast By Astrid Stellanova

I’m peachy keen this summer

August is a month that celebrates something I love, which is, in a

word, peachy. When peaches come in season late May, I eat them till I just about bust, probably sometime around September. I’d eat the pits if they weren’t so hard to digest. Juicy peaches dripping with a dollop of whipped cream — Lord a’mercy, that is a match made in celestial dreams. Favorite fantasy? A good-looking man to peel me a white peach and feed it to me. Slowly. Beau, if you are reading, that’s romantic, Honey.

Leo (July 23–August 22) Child, all your friends want is for you to live up to your ego. You were born under a complicated sign in a complicated month; the first atom bomb detonated on August 6, 1945, and Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. All of which tells the Universe that August is a tough time of the year, with more than a little trouble afoot. You are good at keeping your cool, so you will soldier on through whatever storm strikes. Sprinkle some sugar over whatever sour thing happens; use your fabulous talents to keep quiet and smile mysteriously. You are too cool for school this month, and the world is going to hear you roar! Virgo (August 23–September 22) This is what keeps your friends baffled: You seem to always fall for the stranger with an aura of nothingness. That’s right — you are sharp but emotionally you get buffaloed by the first fool to buy you a drink. Slow that nonsense down. In the bar of life, you are frequently overserved. Don’t let smooth talk make you act as dumb as the box of dirt they are trying to palm off on you as black gold. Libra (September 23–October 22) Sometimes, you just don’t know when to let bygones be bygones. The troubles of the past keep getting resurrected because you just can’t let go. If you bundled up your troubles and threw ’em in the road, Honey, you would go back and try and get ’em! This is a good month to get your chin up and try to let the past be past. If you had any idea what a nice month is ahead, you would not want to revisit times gone by. Scorpio (October 23–November 21) You are so in love with your own sense of mystery that you forget that nobody else actually cares. Open up and let people know you better — you have a lot of acquaintances, but you could really use a friend. Friends make the going easier when things get rough, and we all hit rough water sooner or later. Speaking of water . . . some tall drink of water is going to offer you something your heart desires. Don’t throw rocks at it. Sagittarius (November 22–December 21) When you are overworked or overstressed, or plain overly dramatic and get into a snit, you are a “vampire on a paper route” type of tired and angry person. It is true that you have had more on your plate than you ought to have to balance, but when you get past this milestone you are going to find an easier path to walk. Sugar, when you come to the fork in the road, take it, or your friends are going to have to shoot you with a tranquilizer dart right about the middle of the month. Capricorn (December 22–January 19) You have got some comical ideas about your own destiny and place in it. This is a good month to take a hard look at your resume and get real. Take a class in something you need to master. Honey, operating a stapler or a glue gun ain’t office skills, and sorting the recyclables for the trash pickup don’t make you a captain of industry. Challenge yourself and don’t leave your talents unused.

Aquarius (January 20–February 18) Sometimes, you seem unusually baffled by the simplest things. This month it would take a third hand just for you to scratch your backside. Life doesn’t have to be this complicated. Speak your truth, and let the chips fall where they may. All those people you have been trying to protect need to stand on their own two feet and not lean on you. Besides, Sugar, you ain’t got but three hands any old how. Pisces (February 19–March 20) Take care of the biscuits, Honey, and your life will be gravy. That basically means (if you are trying to decipher this piece of advice, and I imagine you are) you have got to get into the kitchen of life and make some real dough before you are qualified to jump on the gravy train to glory. This will require you to get in and knead it yourself, not to recruit somebody else. And when you get it right, the dough is going to rise sure enough, Sweet Thing. Aries (March 21–April 19) There is nothing lonelier than an Aries when the Ram runs outta money. Honey, you have been the bank for some needy friends and family, but now you have to curtail your generosity and set some money aside for your own oatmeal fund in your old age. I can hear your bitchin’ from here. Yes, your heart was in the right place, but this is Astrid telling you it is time to try austerity. At least for a month, which is the amount of time it takes for your entire attention span to be chewed up. Taurus (April 20–May 20) There is some kind of cuckoo genius inside you that just knows how to predict trends and get in front of a curve. Use this talent, because you finally have a moneymaker of a concept that could make you rich faster than American Pharoah can eat up a dirt track. Kickstarter was made for your kind of smarts; others will soon see the potential in your new contraption. Gemini (May 21–June 20) If the hands fall off your watch, look up. It could be your astral connection is speaking to you from Uranus. Have you ever thought about how many unusual coincidences fill your so-called ordinary life? It’s about time you recognized that you have got some big woo-woo powers. I can see it in the star chart, Sugar. Cancer (June 21–July 22) Summer is not your best time, which makes no sense to you. But some of your most difficult things have happened during the long hot summer. You need a relaxing change of scenery and a little change of perspective. Which means, this year you might have to go a little further than the county line if you really want to feel renewed. Push that boat off the shore and paddle like hell till your frustrations go. PS For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.

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August 2015i�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

August PineNeedler August!

National Sandwich Month! National Sandwich Month By Mart Dickerson 1

25 27

DOWN

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

36 40

49 51

67 dozes 68 liquid residue

43 46

34 Large water36 body ACROSS owned 58 Tinted ACROSS 35 Goodbye, in38Italy 1 Open-mouthed take with 59 you Ponder, with “over” 36 Owned 6 Wire fence sticker 61 abv. 1 open mouthed 39 delivery serviceDeclare 10 Swabs 63 Teen skin ailment 6 Wire fence sticker 38 Take with you 40 Island nation swabs 39 Delivery service 14 Best (abbr.) 10 Summer 42 heart rythym 64 test Continent Sandwich summer sandwich (abbr.) 14 best ingredient 43 off-broadway 65 award Ship’s caulking 40 Island nation 15 Not near ingredient 44 lil' __ 66 Because of this 16 Fort troop 42 Heart rhythm not near shrouded 67 Dozes 15 Bragg 45 test (abbr.) Fort bragg movie troop 16 Madonna 48 Mysterious 17 1997 68 Liquid residue 43 Off-Broadway 1997truck Madonna movie Wine tub 17 large 49 award 18 Very 44 Lil’ __ large truck 18 Very 50 totals 19 Calif. university DOWN Ca. university 19 in 45 Shrouded 51 best saummer sandwich last 20 Was front 1 Cain killed him 20 Was in front 48 Mysterious ingredient 21 Witch’s concoction 2 secretly “I __ at the office” 21 Witch's concoction 49 Wine tub 54 hide on ship, 23 That is to say 3 ’70s drug 23 that is to say 55 Chinese fod additive 50 Totals 25 Snow toy 4 Urn 25 snow toy 58 tinted 51 Best Summer 26 African antelope antelope Ponder, with "over" 5 Endowing 26 african 59 Sandwich last 27 Spoiled, like oillike oil 27 spoiled, ingredient 61 declare 6 Grounded 30 Best best summer sandwich teen skin 7 ailment 30 Summer 63 secretly 54 2nd Hide on ship, Not many (2 wds.) Sandwich 2nd ingredient Continent 8 Male sheep 64 additive 55 Chinese food ingredient 34 large water body 35 Goodbye, in Italy

65 ship's caulking 66 because of this

Sudoku:

Fill in the grid so every row, every column and every 3x3 box contain the numbers 1–9.

1 3 2 7 5

9 8

9 5 4 3

Puzzle answers on page 97

Mart Dickerson lives in Southern Pines and would welcome any suggestions from her fellow puzzle masters. She can be reached at gdickerson@nc.rr.com.

11 12 13 22 24 25 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 35 37 40 41 43 46 47 48 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 60 62

Cain killed him " I __ at the office" 70's drug urn 9 Revive (2 wds.) endowing 10 Loose, flowered Grounded Hawaiian dress not wds.) 11 many Fairy(2tale opener Male sheep 12 Medicine dose revive (2 wds.) 13 Remain loose, flowered hawaiian 22 Crimson dress 24 Picnic visitor Fairy tale opener 25 Look over Medicine dose 27 After-bath wear remain 28 Land measurements Crimson 29 Horse Picnic visitornoise 30 Fat look over after-bath wear 31 Comfort land measurements 32 Bride’s dishes horse noise 33 Eroded Fat 35 Ice shape Comfort 37 Dreadful bride's dishes 40 Flooring choice eroded 41 The alphabet Ice shape 43 Small living room/ dreadful den stool Flooring choice 46 Sidesteps the alphabet 47 smallConsume living room/den stool 48 Hubbub sidesteps 50 Book of maps Consume 51 Not this hubbub book of maps 52 That hurts! not 53 this Restaurant dinner listing that hurts! restaurant listing 54 Ladies’dinner undergarment ladies undergarment 55 Fighter Tyson Fighter tyson 56 “__ as a bug in a rug” "__ a bug instones a rug" 57 asPrecious Precious stones 60 America america 62 Pinehurst No. 2 goal Pinehurst #2 goal

3 4 9 1 5 4 2 4 6 7 9

1650 Valley View Rd., Southern Pines Adjacent to Hyland Hills Golf Course on US 1 Open: Wed.-Sat. 10AM-5PM • Sun. 1PM-5PM 910.692.0855 • www.windridgegardens.com

111

s o u th w o r d s

Moving Day

By Tom Allen

A few months ago, my parents’ health

necessitated a move to an assistedliving facility. As their only child, I was responsible, along with my wife, Beverly, for cleaning out their house — a home built sixty years ago, finished a few months after they married.

Their assisted-living suite was fully furnished. Aside from clothes, a few pictures and personal items, little came with them. Three days after this transition, I went back home — their home and my home, for eighteen years, until I left for college — to start the process of saving, tossing, giving away. “If walls could talk,” goes the phrase. They do. Tables, chairs and poster beds converse as well. Alone, when I returned, I entered via the front door, a scarcely used portal that opened into the living room. That space, like the connected dining room, looked as it did the August morning I left for college, thirty-five years ago. Rarely used, the rooms held more dust than memories. My parents were kitchen and den folks. The dining room table was a catch-all, from old newspapers to Walmart bags. The living room sat quietly, like the parlor of a spinster aunt who never welcomed a suitor. The kitchen was as they left it. Table wiped clean. Stovetop cleared. Counters a bit cluttered. My dad downed a glass of orange juice prior to their exit. The glass rested in the sink, waiting for someone to rinse and dry. Salt and pepper shakers, along with a basket of assorted snacks and placemats that marked my parents’ seats at the kitchen table, seemed to ask, “When are they coming back? It’s almost time for supper.” In the den lonely mug rugs, waiting for a glass of sweet tea or a Diet Pepsi, sat on a table between their recliners, comfy seats from where they watched the Atlanta Braves, ACC hoops and countless college football games. News, sports and the occasional game show were entertainment staples. A remote rested in my dad’s recliner. “Hey, turn on the television. Time for the 6 o’clock news.” The scent of Pine-Sol lingered in the bathrooms. The morning caregiver, at my mom’s request, made sure they were clean before my parents’ departure. Vanities held assorted dental care items and partially used bottles of Aqua-Velva and Oil of Olay, aromas I will never forget. “Better stock up on toilet tissue at Food Lion. It’s on sale this week.” Can tile floors speak as well? The caregiver returned the day after my parents left, to vacuum, wash linens and make the beds. Like children leaving for summer camp, my parents toted their favorite pillows. A few Tums rested on my mom’s nightstand. Chewing a

112

couple before bed was a nightly ritual. The phone on my dad’s nightstand blinked. Had someone left a message? I pressed “Play.” Just a hang up and just as well. No one was home. The clean-up process started in my dad’s bedroom. Drawers and closets first — tax returns, bank statements, paid utility bills. A few mementos were saved — his high school diploma, final term grades from military academy, a picture of him and his sister as children. That was enough for one week. I’d be back in a few days. Before leaving, I walked into every room. Each echoed a story and sparked a memory. Moving on wasn’t going to be easy. My mom’s bedroom was next on the agenda. Drawers and closets were emptied. Photo albums slowed the cleanup and started my tears flowing. Pages of hand-written prayers and a journal packed with reflections revealed a woman of great sensitivity, married to a lovable yet stoic man. In the weeks to come, more drawers and closets would be cleaned. The refrigerator would be emptied, dishes packed, furniture stored. The yard would be tidied, utility rooms cleared and a storage shed readied for the next owner. I’ve lived half a century and moved six times. Whether it’s a dorm room or a house, I always walked through one last time. I gave thanks for the good, began to let go of the sad. I moved out, moved in and moved on. The day my parents left their home of sixty years, my mom got up from her recliner, walked out the door and never looked back. My dad lingered, checked that the lights were turned off and the thermostat turned up. He made sure the doors were secure, locked, dead-bolted. “We might come back for a few days this summer.” I smiled. His declining health more than my mother’s necessitated the move. A new home and hospice care awaited. “Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see.” Two years ago, in August, our oldest daughter left for college. Her departing rite was to stand in her bedroom, look around one last time, then turn and walk out the front door. She would be back, of course. She’d sleep in the same bed over holiday breaks or the occasional weekend visit. Her drawers and closets held clothes from other seasons, ready to retrieve at some point, yet she, like her father and her grandparents, was moving out, moving in and moving on. “Wow,” she said, walking to her car. “Today’s the last day this will be my address.” She still gets mail at 5 Indigo Road in Whispering Pines, but I knew what she meant. “You’re probably right, but you’ll always have a home” — the same thing my father told me on a sweltering day in August, when I headed for college and life’s next chapter. My parents’ house is on the market. I hope it sells soon. Not so much for finances but fulfillment. A house is meant to be a home, a place awaiting someone who’s just moved out, longs to move in and needs, more than anything else, to move on. PS Tom Allen is minister of education at First Baptist Church, Southern Pines.

August 2015i�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Illustration by Meridith Martens

Cleaning out a childhood home, and helping your parents settle in a new one, is painful — the first step to moving on in life

Another Custom Beauty in McLendon Hills Stewart Construction -

building in McLendon Hills since 1998

Look for the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Markâ&#x20AC;? of a Great Builder 910-673-1929

mark@stewartcdc.com