August PineStraw 2022

2022-23 Subscriptions & Single Tickets Available Now! • SandhillsBPAC.com Ticket packages start at $199 for six shows.

SandhillsBPAC.com 910-695-3800

3395 Airport Rd., Pinehurst ▬

CONCESSIONS AVAILABLE

Beer • Wine • Soda • Snacks

Welcome Chris Hunt

Chris has joined Menendez & Ritter Retirement Group and is dedicated to delivering comprehensive Financial Planning and Investment Advisory services to his clients. He specializes in working with corporate executives, business owners and affluent families. Since 1991, the Menendez & Ritter Retirement Group has been developing lasting, meaningful and open relationships. Chris is ready to continue that legacy with you.

Chris Hunt - Financial Advisor 110 Turnberry Way | Pinehurst, NC 28374 | 910.693.2430 | www.fa.wellsfargoadvisors.com/mrrg | christopher.hunt@wfadvisors.com

Investments and Insurance Products: • NOT FDIC Insured NO Bank Guarantee MAY Lose Value Wells Fargo Advisors is a trade name used by Wells Fargo Clearing Services, LLC, Member SIPC, a registered broker/dealer and nonbank affiliate of Wells Fargo & Company. © 2021 Wells Fargo Clearing Services, LLC. All rights reserved. CAR-0522-01702

Hometown People, Hometown Coverage

Why Choose FirstCarolinaCare?

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Plans Made for You Plenty of affordable employer group and Medicare plans to choose from.

Exceptional, Local Customer Service We understand your needs because we live and work right here with you.

(855) 265-2623 | FirstCarolinaCare.com/info

Always a Step Ahead

August 2022 Thinking about selling your home?

Contact us for a no-hassle, no-cost market analysis of your home's current value.

Serving Moore County and Surrounding Areas!

910.684.8674 | 120 N ASHE ST | SOUTHERN PINES, NC 28387

www.maisonteam.com Let Maison Realty Group help with listing your home for sale this August. Every home we list is going under contract very quickly! Going with our firm for your real estate needs you will get 100% of our marketing and 24/7 assistance in selling through the closing process and after.

Let us do your HOME work!

Buy, Sell or Rent through us - we do it all!

910.684.8674 | 120 N ASHE ST | SOUTHERN PINES, NC 28387

August ���� FEATURES 65 Summer Reading Issue 2022 66 68 74 78

Romantic Fever Fiction By Lee Smith Kephart Fiction By Ron Rash The First Funeral Fiction By Clyde Edgerton Postcards from the Sky By Bill Case Soaring above Pinehurst in 1911

84 The Tiger Sisters Fiction By Ashley Walshe 86 Dome, Sweet Dome By Deborah Salomon Paying it forward in Pinebluff

93 August Almanac

By Ashley Walshe

Cover photograph by Tim Sayer

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DEPARTMENTS 21 28 31 33 36 38 43 44 47 50 53 55 56 61 108 115 119 120

Simple Life By Jim Dodson PinePitch Tea Leaf Astrologer By Zora Stellanova The Omnivorous Reader By Anne Blythe Bookshelf The Creators of N.C. By Wiley Cash Hometown By Bill Fields Focus on Food By Rose Shewey In the Spirit By Tony Cross Art of the State By Liza Roberts Out of the Blue By Deborah Salomon Birdwatch By Susan Campbell The Naturalist By Todd Pusser Golftown Journal By Lee Pace Arts & Entertainment Calendar SandhillSeen Pine Needler By Mart Dickerson Southwords By Patricia M. Walker

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

20% Off

Sleep & Loungewear the month of August

HUGE Skin Trunk Show

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at Village District, 400 Daniels Street, Raleigh, NC 919.467.1781

at Sawgrass Village, 310 Front Street Suite 815 Ponte Vedra Beach, FL 32082 904.834.7280

www.OpulenceOfSouthernPines.com Serving the Carolinas & More for Over 20 Years – Financing Available

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SOUTHERN PINES SHOWROOM 150 COMMERCE AVE, 910.246.2233

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HAS DONATED OVER 300 MATTRESSES TO DATE

BECAUSE NO ONE DESERVES TO SLEEP ON THE FLOOR

PINEHURST TOYOTA ADVANTAGE PLAN At Pinehurst Toyota, we’re more than just a dealership. We’re a family. Every time you step onto our lot, our goal is to make sure you are 100% satisfied with your visit, whether you’re looking to purchase a new ride, secure financing for that vehicle, have your current auto serviced, or buy genuine Toyota parts. You can count on our staff to make you the number-one priority.

Interested in joining the family? Check out our Advantage Plan that is guaranteed with every purchase.

LIFETIME LIMITED POWERTRAIN WARRANTY! UNLIMITED TIME…UNLIMITED MILES! NO ADDITIONAL COST! Lifetime limited non-factory warranty on all new Toyotas. Good at participating dealerships nationwide.

No additional charge. See dealer for details.

2 YEARS NO COST MAINTENANCE! * The first 2 years/25,000 miles are covered under the Toyota Care program.

5 YEARS ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE! * You get 5 years of Roadside Assistance, regardless of miles!

COMPLIMENTARY LOANERS!

We value your time. That’s why with any major service at Pinehurst Toyota, you will receive the use of a complimentary loaner.

OUR BEST PRICE DIFFERENCE!**

If within 3 days of purchasing your new vehicle from us, you find a lower price on the exact same vehicle on our lot, we will refund you 100% of the difference!

COURTESY CAR WASH WITH EVERY SERVICE!

You will receive a complimentary car wash anytime your vehicle is in for service, maintenance, or repairs!

100% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION GUARANTEE!***

If within 72 hours of purchasing your new or pre-owned vehicle you are not completely satisfied, bring it back and exchange it for another vehicle at Pinehurst Toyota! *2 years No Cost Maintenance and 5 years Roadside Assistance provided by ToyotaCare. **Must present written offer or ad on exact same vehicle from our dealership. ***Mileage driven must not exceed 200 miles.

Browse Inventory / Get Pre-Approved / Complete Paperwork CURBSIDE PICK-UP & DELIVERY OF YOUR NEW CAR!

THANKS TO YOUR SUPPORT, WE HAVE WON THE BEST OF THE PINES 2021 FOR THE #1 DEALERSHIP SERVICE DEPARTMENT. SCHEDULE YOUR APPOINTMENT TODAY TO EXPERIENCE #1 SERVICE

All-New 2022 Toyota Tundra

910-684-4028 |

10760 HWY 15-501, SOUTHERN PINES, NC 28388 PINEHURSTTOYOTA.COM

NEW BILLBOARD? Anyone know this guy?

First winner gets a rock!

THE ONLY LIMITATION IS YOUR IMAGINATION

Talent, Technology & Teamwork!

Moore County’s Most Trusted Real Estate Team!

Top 1% of Real Estate agents Nationwide!

#1 Selling Team In Moore County For Over 20 Years!

Mark Gentry Realtor Partner

Lari Dirkmart Realtor Partner

Steve Veit Realtor Partner

Martha Gentry Team Leader

Ginger Gentry Realtor Partner

“Great things in business are never done by one person.

They are done by a team of great people.”

— Steve Jobs

Hailey Gentry Team Coordinator

David Sinclair Marketing Coordinator

Lin Bourgon Closing Coordinator

Teresa Miracle Listing Coordinator

1

Deborah Cook Realtor Partner

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Victor Uy Field Coordinator Judi Jimenez Weekend Coordinator

Moore County’s Most Trusted Real Estate Team for over 20 years!

IN MOORE COUNTY REAL ESTATE FOR OVER 20 YEARS!

www.ThEGENTRYTEAM.COM

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

M A G A Z I N E Volume 18, No. 8 David Woronoff, Publisher david@thepilot.com

Give Your COVID-19 Vaccination Protection a Boost Booster shots are now available for everyone 5+ and vaccinated

COVID-19 vaccines continue to work very well at preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death. A booster shot is an extra dose that helps keep up your protection.

When to get your booster

Get your 1st booster as soon as you’re eligible: • 5 months after your 2nd dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine.

• 2 months after your single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

You can get a 2nd booster 4 months after your 1st, if you’re: • •

50+ and got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

18+ and got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Find free vaccines near you

Visit vaccines.gov Text your ZIP code to 438829 Call 1-800-232-0233 Scan the QR code

Andie Stuart Rose, Creative Director andiesouthernpines@gmail.com Jim Moriarty, Editor jjmpinestraw@gmail.com Miranda Glyder, Graphic Designer miranda@pinestrawmag.com Alyssa Kennedy, Digital Art Director alyssamagazines@gmail.com Emilee Phillips, Digital Content emilee@pinestrawmag.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jim Dodson, Deborah Salomon, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS John Gessner, Laura L. Gingerich, Tim Sayer CONTRIBUTORS Jenna Biter, Harry Blair, Tom Bryant, Susan Campbell, Bill Case, Mallory Cash, Wiley Cash, Tony Cross, Brianna Rolfe Cunningham, Mart Dickerson, Bill Fields, Meridith Martens, Jason Oliver Nixon, Mary Novitsky, Lee Pace, Todd Pusser, Joyce Reehling, Scott Sheffield, Rose Shewey, Stephen E. Smith, Angie Tally, Kimberly Daniels Taws, Daniel Wallace, Ashley Walshe, Claudia Watson, Amberly Glitz Weber ADVERTISING SALES

Ginny Trigg, Advertising Director 910.693.2481 • ginny@thepilot.com Jennie Acklin, 910.693.2515 Samantha Cunningham, 910.693.2505 Jessica Galloway, 910. 693.2498 Terry Hartsell, 910.693.2513 Erika Leap, 910.693.2514 ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Rebah Dolbow • pilotads@thepilot.com ADVERTISING GRAPHIC DESIGN Mechelle Butler, Scott Yancey

PS Henry Hogan, Finance Director 910.693.2497 Darlene Stark, Circulation Director 910.693.2488 SUBSCRIPTIONS 910.693.2488 OWNERS Jack Andrews, Frank Daniels III, Lee Dirks, David Woronoff

Content last reviewed: May 20, 2022

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145 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, Southern Pines, NC 28387 www.pinestrawmag.com ©Copyright 2022. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. PineStraw magazine is published by The Pilot LLC

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Stay Cool this Summer

One of the best-kept secrets for home furnishings and decor, Southern Design Furniture carries multiple name brands such as the beautiful Bassett furniture featured here, as well as an assortment of accessories to add that little something extra to your home.

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Licensed and Insured • Locally Owned and Operated

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D L SO 432 Gretchen Road, West End

75 Station Avenue, Southern Pines

$452,000

3 bed • 2/1 bath Debbie Darby (910) 783-5193 MLS 100330751

Meticulous Town Home in Walker Station that comes with a Transferrable Charter Membership to Pinehust Country Club.

Beautiful Heart Pine Floors, Main Level Living with Open Floor Plan showcases a stunning kitchen and ample living/dining area.

85 Pine Valley, Unit 3, Pinehurst

$285,000

2 bed • 2 bath

Jennifer Nguyen (910) 585-2099 MLS 100333259

July 18th – August 2nd

Pinehurst Living - fully furnished golf front condo - just bring your clubs!

This 2 bedroom, 2 full bath right on the green of Hole 17 of Course 3 and views down the 18th fairway. Walk to the Club and Village. Transferable Charter Pinehurst Country Club Membership.

On Legacy Tin Cup Rental Program.

$429,000

4 bed • 3 bath

Jennifer Nguyen (910) 585-2099 MLS 100336290

Welcome home to 4 bedroom, 3 full bath plus bonus room in the desirable Gretchen Pines Community. Beautiful floors flow throughout living spaces and into open kitchen with granite countertops, new stainless appliances, island, and pantry. Upgrades continue to covered patio, fully fenced back yard, extra concrete parking in driveway, upstairs laundry room, and drop zone entrance from 2 car garage. Home is less than 6 months old.

56R Lakewood Drive, Southern Pines

$79,000

4 bed • 2/1 bath Debbie Darby (910) 783-5193 MLS 100326444

Join us for our annual backpack drive in partnership with North Carolina Guardian ad Litem.

Last year, 1,358 children across North Carolina had the supplies they needed on the first day of school as a result of the dedication and generosity of the BHHS Carolinas team and our community.

Please bring in a backpack full of supplies to any of our office locations or make a donation online by scanning the QR code.

Pinehurst Buildable Lot in Desirable Unit 1 Located on Pinehurst Course #5 on 1/2 Acre Tract off St. Andrews Drive. Short Ride to the Club or to the Charming Village of Pinehurst. Charter Transferrable Membership to Pinehurst CC available to Buyer. City Water & City Sewer available to this lot. Perfect Opportunity to build your custom home.

BACKpa ck S 2 CHOOL

DRIVE

Pinehurst • 42 Chinquapin Road, Pinehurst, NC 28374 • 910 -295 - 5504 | Southern Pines • 167 Beverly Lane, Southern Pines, NC 28387 • 910-692-2635 ©2022 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC

Retire Your Perception of a

Senior Living Community.

QUAIL HAVEN VILLAGE OFFERS - A picturesque location conveniently close to the Village of Pinehurst - Newly renovated garden apartment homes - Our INSPIRE wellness program that helps promote an active lifestyle

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- Preferable Rental model that requires no large, up front fee - Continuing care on-site to provide peace of mind Call 910.537.6812 to schedule a visit and discover all that Quail Haven Village has to offer.

155 BLAKE BLVD., PINEHURST, NC 28374 A Life Plan Community offered by Liberty Senior Living

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QUAILHAVENVILLAGE.COM

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© 2022 Quail Haven Village

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 | 1 - 5 PM The Fair Barn 200 Beulah Hill Road North, Pinehurst, NC 28374

Please join us at the 2nd Annual Gathering for the Pines for an afternoon of wine tasting with Napa Valley wineries paired with small bites from local chefs.

Meet artist Thomas Arvid, who will be painting and displaying his art. Silent and live auction will help us raise money for local military charities and Moore County Fire Departments. Get your tickets in advance at friendsofpsc.org or follow the QR code.

Scan to Purchase Event Tickets BENEFITING Moore County Chiefs Association

HOSTED BY

THANK YOU TO OUR PRESENTING SPONSORS

SIMPLE LIFE

Summer Twilight The brief, magical time between day and night

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago as

ILLUSTRATION BY GERRY O'NEILL

a beautiful summer evening settled around us, my wife and I were sitting with our friends, Joe and Liz, on the new deck facing over our backyard shade garden, enjoying cool drinks and the season’s first sliced peaches.

The fireflies had just come out. And birds were piping serene farewell notes to the long, hot day.

“I love summer twilight,” Joe was moved to say. “Everything in nature pauses and takes a breath.” He went on to remember how, growing up in a big family of nine children, “my mother would shoo us all outdoors after supper to play in the twilight until it was dark. It was a magical time between day and night.

A glimpse of heaven.”

“We played Kick the Can and Red Light, Green Light,” Liz remembered. “The fading light made it so much fun.”

“And flashlight tag,” chimed Wendy, my wife, sipping her white wine and joining the memories. “We didn’t have to come in until the first stars appeared and my mother called us to come in for a bath and bed.”

In a world that increasingly seems so different from the quieter, simpler one we grew up in, we all agreed, something about twilight seems about as timeless as moments get in this harried and overscheduled life we all live.

In truth, our ancient ancestors held much the same view of the changing light that occurs when the sun sinks just below the horizon, or rises to it just before dawn, softly stage-lighting the world with a diffusion of light and dust, heralding either the prospect of rest or awakening.

Like most rare things, the beauty seems to be in its brevity.

Back when I was a small boy in a large world, summer twilight was especially meaningful to me. During my father’s newspaper

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

career, we lived in a succession of small towns across the sleepy, deep South where we rarely stayed in one place long enough for me to make friends or playmates. Because it was a time before mass air conditioning, I lived out of doors with adventure books and toy soldiers for companions, building forts and conducting Punic wars in the cool dirt I shared with our dog beneath the porch. The heat and brightness of midday made my eyes water and my head hurt.

In the rural South Carolina town where I attended first grade, a formidable Black woman named Miss Jesse restored my mother, a former Maryland beauty queen, to health following a pair of lateterm miscarriages, and taught her how to properly cook collards and grits. Come midday, while my mother rested, Miss Jesse would haul me out from under the porch and make me put on sandals to accompany her to the Piggly Wiggly or to run other errands around town in her baby blue Dodge Dart.

Beneath a stunning dome of heat that lay over the town like a death ray from a martian spaceship, it was Miss Jesse who explained to me that daytime was when the world did its business and, therefore, shoes and good manners were necessary in public. Removing my sandals to feel the cool tile floors of the Piggly Wiggly beneath my bare feet — the only air conditioned place in town save for the newspaper office — was a tactical error I made only once, as Miss Jesse had complete authority over my person.

Yet it was also she who had me stand on her feet, dancing my skinny butt around the kitchen as she and my mother cooked supper to gospel music playing from the transistor radio propped in the kitchen window. Miss Jesse also informed me that both a good rain and twilight were two of the Almighty’s holiest moments, the former refreshing the earth, the latter replenishing the soul.

I often heard her singing a gospel tune I’ve since spent many years unsuccessfully trying to find, a single line of which embedded itself in my brain: “In the shadows of the evening trees, my lord and savior stands and waits for me.”

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SIMPLE LIFE

Miss Jesse was with us for only a single summer and autumn.

She passed away shortly before we moved home to North Carolina. But I have her to thank for restoring my mom’s health and giving me a love of collards, a good rain and summer twilight.

The suggestion of that old hymn she loved speaks to another perspective on twilight.

Some poets and philosophers have used it as a metaphor, indicating the fading of the life force. Others view it as the end of life, a dying of the light that symbolizes the coming of permanent night, a prelude to death.

On the other hand, as I read in a science magazine not long ago, all living things would fade and die from too much light or darkness were it not for twilight, that in-between time of day when we see best.

For that reason, metaphorically speaking, it’s worth remembering that twilight also comes before the dawn breaks, marking the beginning of the day, the renewal of activity, a resumption of life’s purposes.

Tellingly, birds sing beautifully at both ends of the day — a robust greeting to the returning light of dawn and a solemn adieu as twilight slips into dusk.

As a lifelong fan of the twilight that exists fleetingly at both ends of the day — someone who is fast approaching his own socalled twilight of life — I take comfort in the words attributed to Saint John of the Cross who wrote, “In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human success, but rather on how much we have loved.”

I also love what actress Marlene Dietrich famously said about the summer twilight — namely that it should be prescribed by doctors. It certainly heals something in me at day’s end.

A friend I mentioned this to not long ago sent me a short poem by a gifted Black poet named Joshua Henry Jones Jr., a son of South Carolina who passed away about the time Miss Jesse was teaching me to “feet dance” in my mama’s kitchen.

It’s called “In Summer Twilight” and nicely sums up my crepuscular passion.

Just a dash of lambent carmine Shading into sky of gold; Just a twitter of a song-bird Ere the wings its head enfold; Just a rustling sigh of parting From the moon-kissed hill to breeze; And a cheerful gentle, nodding Adieu waving from the trees; Just a friendly sunbeam’s flutter Wishing all a night’s repose, Ere the stars swing back the curtain Bringing twilight’s dewy close.

Now, if I could only find that sweet gospel hymn that still plays in my head. PS Jim Dodson can be reached at jwdauthor@gmail.com.

If you want to KNOW Pinehurst, CT RA T N CO ER D UN

Y UR X LU

29 DEVON DR – PINEWILD

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills 5 bedroom, 4.5 bath. Hardwood floors. Updated throughout. Custom wine cellar. Lush gardens. 1 mile to village center.

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CALL LIN FOR A COMPLIMENTARY MARKET ANALYSIS OF YOUR HOME

910-528-6427 Lin Hutaff’s PineHurst reaLty GrouP

25 Chinquapin Rd. Pinehurst, NC 28374 linhutaff@pinehurst.net

You need to KNOW Lin. T AC TR N CO R DE UN

1 CANDLEWOOD LANE – FOXFIRE Gorgeous! Custom home built on 10 acres. Choice of porches, and decks. Beautifully landscaped, dog run with “doggy door” to basement area. $995,000.

LD O S

138 STEEPLECHASE DR • LONGLEAF CC Stately Golf front home. Large family rm and walls of glass for long golf course views. $530,000

255 MAGNOLIA RD – OLD TOWN 1920 Cottage in the heart of the Historic Village of Pinehurst! Beautifully updated with two large ensuite bedrooms.

Pella architectural windows, Roof 2014-2015. $595,000

490 CENTRAL DR – PINE NEEDLES GOLF COURSE Over one acre on PINE NEEDLES Golf course, site of 2022 LPGA Women’s OPEN. 4-5 bedrooms, living rm, fam rm, Office, utility rm. Private. $525,000

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3 QUAIL LAKE RD W – PINEHURST Golf front home on Pinehurst No 3. Lots of upgrades.

Club membership available for transfer. $476,000

789 DAPHNE DRIVE – WOODLAKE CC All brick, single level, specially designed home with open concept and walls of windows for lots of natural light. 3BD, 2 ½ BA. $450,000

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pinessothebysrealty.com | 177 W. Pennsylvania Ave. Southern Pines, NC 28387

EP SPECI LE

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STOP SLEEP APNEA & SNORING WITHOUT CPAP!

For people losing shut-eye to snoring and sleep apnea, studies show an oral appliance that is custom fit by a dentist may be all they need.

Oral appliances are mouth guard-like devices. Patients like oral appliance therapy because it is comfortable, easy to wear, quiet, portable and cared for easily.

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The oral appliance may be covered by your medical insurance company.

910.295.4343 www.pinehurstdentist.com 15 Aviemore Drive • Pinehurst, NC

Step back in time with two favorite throwback films in the Sunrise Theater’s Summer Film Series. Check out Legally Blonde at 7 p.m. on Thursday Aug. 4, or catch The Muppet Movie at 7 p.m. on Aug. 11. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Tickets are $10.

Info: www.sunrisetheater.com.

PHOTOGRAPH BY TED FITZGERALD

PinePitch

Elle and Kermit

Acting and Air-Conditioning — What’s Not to Like?

The Judson Theatre Company continues its summer theater festival with two Sandhills area premieres. Catch one or both to beat the August heat. Opening Aug. 5 at 8 p.m. and running through Aug. 14 is the comedy fantasia Buyer & Cellar about a struggling actor working in the basement mall of Barbra Streisand’s home. And, from Aug. 19 – 28, get ready for Tick, tick, BOOM! a three-person musical by the author of Rent about an aspiring composer worried he made the wrong career choice. Performances begin at 8 p.m. for both shows in the black box McPherson Theater at Bradshaw Performing Arts Center, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Even Better than Scooby-Doo Don’t miss the first in Weymouth’s new Saturday morning family series featuring Mitch Capel as “Gran’daddy Junebug” on Aug. 6 at10 a.m. Capel is a master storyteller, recording artist, published author and poet. He has been featured at numerous schools, libraries, museums and festivals since 1985, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee; The Smithsonian’s 2009 Folklife Festival on the National Mall; and the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama.

Free admission but registration is required. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

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Live After Five Bounce!, a high energy wedding and party band from the Triangle area, will be playing all your favorite dance songs from the last 40 years. Local favorite Whiskey Pines will open from 5:15 p.m. to 5:50 p.m., so grab your lawn chair and don’t be late. Dance the night away till 9 p.m. at Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. Picnic baskets are allowed and food trucks are standing by, but no outside alcohol. Not to fear, you can still purchase beer, wine and soft drinks as you slide into your blue suede shoes. Info: www.vopnc.org.

Where’s John Travolta When You Need Him? Break out the headbands and shimmy into your bell-bottoms, then head to downtown Aberdeen for an evening of Snap and Hustle with “the greatest disco revival show in the world.” For one night only catch Boogie Knights at a pop-up disco from 8 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. at The Neon Rooster, 114 Knight St., Aberdeen. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Blood, Guts and Books Finish your summer reading quest with the author of Ship of Blood: Mutiny and Slaughter Aboard the Harry A. Berwind, and the Quest for Justice on Wednesday, Aug. 24, at 5:30 p.m. A native son of Sanford, author-in-residence Charles Oldham will share his love for all things Tar Heel history from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Free admission, registration required. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

Calling All Amateur Pitmasters For three days dip yourself into all things barbecue at the Pinehurst Barbecue Festival, a celebration of taste and tradition. With four signature events sprinkled across the weekend like a dry rub, you can revel in bourbon pairings, grilling classes and music from tribute band Chicago Rewired. From September 2 - 4, there’s something for the whole family at the village of Pinehurst. 6 Chinquapin Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Have a Brighter By and By Enjoy your Sunday with one of Weymouth’s popular “Come Sunday” Jazz brunches on Aug. 28 from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Bring your own blanket, chairs and a picnic. There will be a cash bar with mimosas, beer, wine and non-alcoholic choices. The event features internationally renowned jazz artists each performing their own rendition of Duke Ellington’s classic, Come Sunday. Cost is $25 for members and $35 for non-members. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

PHOTOGRAPH BY TED FITZGERALD

Triplets by Cindy Edgar

The Artist Sees What Others Only Glimpse Get a view through the artists’ eyes at two exhibits this month. The Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen, will host an opening reception on Friday, Aug. 5, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. for its exhibit “Small Gems of Art,” which will run through Aug. 26. Info: (910) 944-3979.

Also on Aug. 5, the Arts Council of Moore County will present the 42nd annual “Fine Arts Festival” opening and awards ceremony at the Campbell House Galleries, 482 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The show will remain open until Aug. 26. Info: (910) 692-2787 or www.mooreart.org.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Rock On First Friday is back from its July hiatus with Dangermuffin, a Carolina-based band that weaves lyrical themes of sea, sun and spiritual connection with Americana, island-influence, folk and jam. Enjoy food trucks, some Southern Pines Brewery brews, and listen to great music while supporting the local theater on Aug. 5 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. No dogs, outside alcohol or rolling coolers. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.sunrisetheater.com.

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IN PERSON AND VIRTUAL AUGUST/SEPTEMBER AUTHOR EVENTS CHECK THE STORE WEBSITE AND TICKETMESANDHILLS.COM FOR MORE EVENT INFORMATION

PATTI MEREDITH

South Of Heaven August 25th at 5pm at The Country Bookshop SOUTH OF HEAVEN, set in Carthage, North Carolina, in 1998 tells the story of two estranged sisters forced back under the same roof.

Fern McQueen has found peace in middle age despite worries over her troubled son and a beloved aunt whose mind is slipping away. But when Fern’s past is resurrected, her peace is shattered. Meanwhile, her sister Leona’s life in Raleigh begins to unravel when her doctor husband is accused of Medicaid fraud. To avoid humiliation and snubs from an unforgiving social set, Leona loads up her Lexus and heads for home—a place she vowed to leave forever.

LOUISE TREGER

SUNYI DEAN Virtual Book Launch for The Book Eaters August 2nd at 6pm Virtual Event

TAYLOR JENKINS REID

Carrie Soto is Back September 21th at 6pm at The Sunrise Theatre

Madwoman September 6th at 4pm at The Country Bookshop Based on a true story, a spellbinding historical novel about the world’s first female investigative journalist, Nellie Bly. In 1887, young Nellie Bly sets out for New York and a career in journalism, determined to make her way as a serious reporter, whatever that may take. But life in the city is tougher than she imagined. Down to her last dime and desperate to prove her worth, she comes up with a dangerous plan: to fake insanity and have herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. There, she will work undercover to expose the asylum’s wretched conditions.

MARCIE COHEN FARIS Edible North Carolina September 25th at 2pm at The Country Bookshop

We are a great stop for hand picked summer care packages for kids and adults alike!

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140 NW Broad Street • Southern Pines, NC • 910.692.3211 • www.thecountrybookshop.biz Text us for special orders. - 910.690.4454

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

TEA LEAF ASTROLOGER

A West Coast Lifestyle Boutique

Leo

(July 23 – August 22) Here’s what the other signs struggle to understand about Leos: You’re not seeking the spotlight; you are the spotlight. Nothing delights you more than basking the ones you love most in your incomparable generosity and warmth. Unless it’s your birth month.

They should know that one day is not enough to celebrate the vastness of your glory; it’s your turn to be pampered and spoiled. That said, if they happen to blow it — very likely — try channeling your wrath into something productive. Like making better friends.

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you: Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

Digest this: It’s not your problem to fix.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Take your vitamins.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Just walk away.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

The miracle isn’t always obvious.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

One word: moderation.

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Try giving a tinker’s damn.

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

Watch your step.

Aries (March 21 – April 19)

Dust off your dancing shoes.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

It’s all the same coin.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

You’re fooling no one.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

The drawing board is your friend. PS Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Village of Pinehurst • 910.295.3905 105 Cherokee Rd, Pinehurst, NC 28374 PineStraw

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45 Chestertown • Pinehurst, NC • $3,150,000 A grand, stately home designed for entertaining with expansive golf course views, and luxury finishing’s throughout. This stunning custom-built home is designed for entertaining, with expansive golf course views, and luxury finishing’s throughout. This is a home that perfectly complements today’s modern lifestyle and is located in the prestigious gated community of Forest Creek Golf Club.

10 Whistling Straight • Pinehurst, NC • $589,900 This ‘’jewelry box’’ checks all of the boxes: Location, custom finishes, privacy, end unit, natural light, turn key, optional rental income, end unit. Mature landscaping, exceptional upgrades. This unit has tunnel skylights that lends to natural light at all hours. Awning on back patio lends to more privacy and shade when necessary. Exceptional care and upkeep in this unit.

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Kathy Peele, Realtor 312.623.7523 kpeele@colonypartners.com Colony Partners Realty 200 Meyer Farm Drive Pinehurst, NC 28374

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

THE OMNIVOROUS READER

Hanging Judge A Carolina courtroom whodunit

By A nne Blythe

If you spend much time in courthouses

in North Carolina, you begin to see the complex fabric of their communities.

It might be one thread, one story, one case at a time but, eventually, the many threads are stitched together into a complex tapestry. Katherine Burnette, a district court judge from Oxford who rose to the bench as a former federal and state prosecutor, pulls back the curtain on small-town North Carolina and its dramas in her debut novel, Judge’s Waltz.

It may be fiction, but the storyline created by the attorneyturned-writer — while seemingly over the top at the start — is rooted in insider knowledge from someone who has been in and out of North Carolina courthouses for much of her career.

“Barely audible above the hum of the ancient air conditioner came the creak, creak, creak of the thick rope affixed to the brass chandelier,” writes Burnette in the opening of her mystery.

“Swaying ten feet above the intricately carved, pre-Civil War bench, the Honorable Patrick Ryan O’Shea had adjourned to a higher court.”

We quickly find out that O’Shea was not universally revered, nor was he a jurist with great legal acumen. His knack was kissing up to a certain professor in his third year of law school and following suit with a wide swath of politicians who helped him get coveted judicial seats.

“Not noted for his weighty opinions from the bench, O’Shea had come to be noted for the weighty politicians who stood behind him and his bid for a higher court,” Burnette writes.

“Apparently, these politicians had garnered their strength and their favors to foist O’Shea upon the unsuspecting Fourth Circuit court.”

O’Shea never got there. His last dance, so to speak, was hanging in a federal courtroom in the Eastern District of North The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Carolina in nothing more than his black robe. “The only thing that O’Shea could do — was doing — was a slow discordant waltz at the end of a long rope,” Burnette says in her prologue.

The pages of the novel are sprinkled with humor and wit as we meet Buck Davis, the folksy lawyer from Oxford who is tapped by the chief judge in the Eastern District to sort through O’Shea’s cases as Katie O’Connor, an FBI agent Davis remembers fondly from high school, leads the investigation into the judge’s death.

Burnette deftly describes the country roads between Granville County and Raleigh, where the judge’s chambers were. She takes readers into drugstores, restaurants, courthouses and other places that will seem familiar to anyone who has experienced the slower hum of Granville County or the bustling halls of power in the capital city.

You can almost smell the drugstore coffee brewing and taste the Southern food being dished up as the suspense builds over how and why Judge O’Shea found himself suspended from that ceiling. “Today’s courtroom deals were made in the few minutes it took to eat a sausage biscuit,” Burnette writes.

The cast of characters includes Jeb, Buck’s brother, who battles demons from opioid addiction; Walter A. Johnson, the Granville County detective who went to high school with Jeb; and Mary

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OMNIVOROUS READER

Frances Margaret O’Shea, the widow of the lifeless judge, who does not seem to grieve her loss at all.

Even the relatively minor characters who come and go throughout the mystery are memorable, like the waitress, Wanda, who saunters up to Buck and Katie in the Oak Room with a pencil behind her ear and her weight balanced “on one polyester-clad hip.” The Oxford restaurant is where Buck and Katie often end up as they develop not only their case but also a budding romance.

Wanda gives the couple a dose of reality about the menu choices. There is no wine list, Wanda informs Katie. The choice is strictly by color, red or white. And don’t ask for an exotic imported beer, either.

Buck settles for a Miller High Life.

Burnette writes, “Wanda scribbled something on her pad and strolled away.

‘One red, one champagne,’ she hollered to the bartender, confusing Katie. “‘I didn’t know they served champagne,’ Katie told Buck. ‘No,’ Buck explains. ‘She means the Miller. You know champagne of beers.’”

The mystery of what happened to Judge O’Shea twists and turns as Burnette teases her readers with different scenarios.

Was it suicide?

Was it murder?

At whose hand?

And why?

Katie, Johnson and Buck — with a big assist from Jeb — help pull together the many threads as Burnette takes her readers on a journey to the surprise ending of a novel not only worth picking up but difficult to put down.

The verdict is in. It’s a whodunit and a page-turner that belongs on a summer reading list. PS Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades. She has covered city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make W interesting O N D E R Fplace.

UL 100 this state such an

Come Sunday Jazz Series August 28 • 11:30 - 2 pm

Outdoors on the our beautiful grounds.

Bring your own blanket, chairs, and a picnic, cash bar with mimosas, beer, wine, and non-alcoholic beverages available.

Members: $25 / Non-Members $35 Kids 12 and under are free Sponsored by FirstHealth Concierge Medicine

Musicians’ Song Circle August 30 • 6 - 9 pm

Bring your own instrument and beverage or just come to enjoy the music!

Arts & Humanities Lecture August 14 • 2 pm “James Boyd” Hear about Boyd’s — the author of “Drums” and Weymouth founder — view on democracy and the writer’s obligation to speak out in times of civic crisis.

Speaker: Dotty Starling, Weymouth Archivist.

Light Reception to follow.

Members: $20 Non-Members: $25

Free Admission / Registration Required

James Boyd Book Club August 16 • 2 pm Selection for August: Walk to Yesterday: A Memoir in Poems

by Iris Llewellyn Angle.

Free Admission / Registration Required

Writers-in-Residence Reading August 24 • 5:30 pm Charles Oldham will read from his new book Ship of Blood.

Free Admission / Registration Required

New! Family Series Saturday, August 6 • 10 am

“Storytelling with Gran’daddy Junebug” Mitch Capel / “Gran’daddy Junebug” is a master storyteller, recording artist, published author and poet.

Free Admission / Registration Required

For tickets and more information, visit weymouthcenter.org

Thank you to our sponsors: Richard J. Reynolds III and Marie M. Reynolds Foundation; Gerald Claude Kirby Trust; NC CARES for Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council; Arts Council of Moore County; Moore County Community Foundation; The Palmer Foundation; Marion Stedman Covington Foundation; The Cannon Foundation; Donald and Elizabeth Cooke Foundation; The Pilot

We’re celebrating 100 years of our historic Boyd House with 100 events in 2022 555 E. Connecticut Ave. Southern Pines, NC A 501 (c)(3) organization

WONDERFUL 100

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BOOKSHELF

August Books

FICTION The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean Out on the Yorkshire moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon, like all other book eater women, is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger — not for books, but for human minds.

Delphi, by Clare Pollard An unnamed classics professor looks for guidance in the prophecies of the ancient world when she finds herself confronting chilling questions about control and surrender as COVID-19 descends. Navigating the tightening grip of lockdown, a marriage in crisis, and a 10-year-old son who seems increasingly unreachable, the narrator focuses on different types of prophecy to make sense of her increasingly surreal world. The result is an audacious, ominous novel that embodies the profound tensions of our era.

The Last White Man, by Mohsin Hamid One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed.

Overnight, Anders’ skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that

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must be resisted to a bitter end. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: an opportunity to see ourselves, face-to-face, anew.

Carrie Soto Is Back, by Taylor Jenkins Reid Carrie Soto retired from professional tennis at the age of 31 with an impressive record, including the most grand slam titles of all time. Now, six years later, a younger set of players is on the court, and one of them, Nicki Chan, is about to break her record — but not if Carrie can help it. At 37 years old, she makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if the sports media says that they never liked “the Battle-Axe” anyway.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, by Sidik Fofana Set in a Harlem housing project, a tight-knit cast of characters grapples with their personal obstacles, ambitions and triumphs while anticipating a looming rent hike that could jeopardize their futures and change life as they know it. The shared stakes in the face of gentrification bind the stories together, delivering an immersive, novel-like reading experience.

Love on the Brain, by Ali Hazelwood Like an avenging, purple-haired Jedi bringing balance to the universe, Bee Königswasser lives by a simple code: What would Marie Curie do? If NASA offered her the lead on a neuro-engineering project — a literal dream come true after years scraping by on the crumbs of academia — Marie would accept without hesitation. But the mother of modern physics never had to colead with Levi Ward. Now, her equipment is missing, the staff is ignoring her, and Bee finds her floundering career in somewhat of a pickle.

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BOOKSHELF

CHILDREN’S BOOKS The Queen of Kindergarten, by Derrick Barnes The queen of kindergarten has new braids, a sparkly tiara and a chariot (well, a pickup truck) to take her to school on the first day. She is caring and kind and brightens every room she enters. The first day will be a breeze! This wonderful little book should be required reading for every new kindergartner. (Ages 4-6.)

Who’s in the Picture?, by Susie Brooks Art museums don’t have to be stodgy — you can simply look for dogs or horses or your favorite foods in the paintings! Take a closer look at over 20 famous paintings by

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Frida Kahlo, Henri Rousseau, Winslow Homer and many more in this playful search-and-find book. A fabulous way for kids (and adults) to experience art for fun. (Ages 4 and up.)

The Perfect Rock,

by Sarah Noble Cute and clever and oh, so charming, the three otter siblings each set out to find the perfect rock — a rock to carry in the pouch underneath an arm, to be the tool that they will keep for life. But when all three siblings choose the same rock, they learn a solid lesson about what is truly important. (Ages 3-6.)

Pop Out Around the World: Read, Build and Play from New York to Beijing Bring the world to

your kid’s playroom with this fun, interactive book featuring six world cities with pop-out buildable pieces representing each. Create a hot dog cart in New York; Big Ben in London; The Great Wall in Beijing; the Opera House in Sydney; and much more. Perfect for home-school families and armchair travelers alike. (Ages 4-7.)

Invisible, by Christina Diaz Gonzalez Community service gains a whole new meaning for five middle school students in this must-have dual language graphic novel. Edgar awardwinning author Christina Diaz Gonzalez even adds a signature mystery twist to the story that is sure to resonate with anyone who ever felt lost in the wild world of middle school. (Ages 9-13.) PS Compiled by Angie Tally and Kimberly Daniels Taws.

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T H E C R E AT O R S O F N. C .

The Family You Find The world of Sarah Addison Allen

By Wiley Cash Photographs by M allory Cash

In Sarah Addison Allen’s new nov-

el, Other Birds, an 18-year-old woman named Zoey Hennessey returns to her long-dead mother’s condominium on fictional Mallow Island off the coast of South Carolina to reconnect with her mother’s spirit by tapping into the spirit of the place. Upon her arrival, Zoey finds a historic building that houses a collection of mysterious misfits, all of them bearing their own personal stories driven by pain and longing. Although Zoey is heartbroken to learn that virtually nothing of her mother remains in the condo, she is pleased to make a home among the Dellawisp’s eccentric tenants.

Not only is the Dellawisp haunted by the lives of the people who currently live there, it’s also haunted by the lives of the people who lived there once upon a time, for the living are not alone in the old, rambling complex. Spirits hover on the margins of people’s lives just like the tiny turquoise birds that have overtaken the Dellawisp’s courtyard. While navigating the past and present of these myriad lives, Zoey reclaims her own life, and she learns that family is something you can create when you need it most.

On a Saturday morning in mid-June, I meet Allen in the lobby of Asheville’s historic Grove Park Inn. While tourists and

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bellhops bustle all around us — the din of voices and laughter carrying along the great lobby’s stone floors — Sarah and I make our way to the verandah that overlooks the golf course. In the distance, the city of Asheville sits like a pink jewel among the swells of misty blue mountains. If the setting sounds magical it’s because it is. It’s also because my head is still buzzing with the possibility of magic after finishing Other Birds. All of Sarah’s previous novels contain magical elements, beginning with her 2007 debut novel, Garden Spells, which tells the story of the Waverley family, whose garden bears prophetic fruit and edible flowers with special powers. The novel was an instant New York Times bestseller. Since then, Sarah has published five novels that have gone on to sell millions of copies.

While Other Birds is certainly as magical as Sarah’s previous novels, it seems much more personal. When I ask her if this is true, she doesn’t hesitate. “Without a doubt,” she says. Just as several characters in Other Birds must confront tragedy and grief, Sarah has had to do the same in her own life.

“I started the book, and then my mom had a catastrophic brain injury,” she says. “For four years I watched her die. It was horrible. And then 10 days before my mom passed away, my sister died. I’d put this book on hold while caring for my mom and going through that grieving process.”

When Sarah returned to work on her novel, she found that not only had her sense of the novel changed, her sense of herself had changed as well. “I came at it from the point of view of learning a lot about life that I didn’t really want to learn,” she says. “I learned a lot about grief, and I learned a lot about what to let go of and how we hang on.”

Sarah explains to me that if this book feels different it’s be-

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cause she’s different. While Other Birds is just as hopeful as her previous books, it confronts the reality of grief with a stark realism shrouded in elements of magic once ghosts begin to join the chorus of characters.

“My grief came out in those ghost stories,” Sarah says. “Even though the characters don’t know the ghosts of their mothers are there, they’re still there. I like that sort of wishful thinking in terms of losing my mom. Maybe I haven’t really let her go, or maybe she hasn’t really let me go. In some way she’s still here.”

Sarah grows quiet, and I imagine memories of her mother playing through her mind, and I wonder how those memories found their way to the page.

“My mom was my best friend,” she finally says. “The characters in the book deal with the losses of the people who are supposed to care for them. But in the end they learn how to let go and move on and find family among themselves.”

Grief is not something new to Sarah’s life. Ten years ago she was diagnosed with stage four cancer, but after losing her mother and sister, her own medical journey was put into perspective. “It’s the

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T H E C R E AT O R S O F N. C .

difference between the fear of leaving and the fear of being left,” she says.

Sarah’s readers certainly marked her absence during the seven years between the publication of her last novel, First Frost, and her new novel. Once the publication date of Other Birds was announced, online book chatter erupted in celebration. In her own quiet way, Sarah celebrated her return to the page as well. She tells me that getting back to work on Other Birds after losing her mother and sister was a return to something that felt normal.

“Getting back into the swing of things felt good,” she says.

Meeting with Sarah in one of Asheville’s most iconic locations feels right because she’s a writer whose identity is inextricably tied to western North Carolina. “My heart is here in Asheville,” she says.

“The farther I get away from Asheville, it feels like a rubber band being stretched taut. I need to snap back. I need to come home.

“My sense of belonging is something I want to give to my characters,” she says. “They’re all in search of a place to belong. A lot of times that’s a physical place, but a lot of times it’s an emotional

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T H E C R E AT O R S O F N. C .

place, and sometimes it’s the people you surround yourself with.”

I understand the point she’s making, both because Asheville feels like home to me, but also because my own writing relies heavily on my characters having a sense of belonging to a particular place. But I also understand Sarah’s ties to Asheville because we are alumni of the University of North Carolina Asheville, where we both majored in literature just a few years apart from one another, studying under the same professors and encountering many of the same books that left lasting impressions on us both, books like North Carolina native Fred Chappell’s novel I Am One of You Forever.

Sarah sees that novel as one of the first books that introduced her to magical realism while showing her that western North Carolina could be a setting for her own work. She says that reading Chappell’s novel at UNC Asheville was like “cracking open a geode and seeing the sparkle inside.” She still remembers how Chappell’s use of folklore and ballads in the novel resonated with her as a native of western North Carolina. “That was my territory,” she says. “That was something that hit close to home.”

I was so affected by Chappell’s novel that I borrowed the name of the main character from I Am One of You Forever for my debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home. Chappell named his young protagonist Jess Kirkman; I named mine Jess Hall.

When Sarah’s debut Garden Spells was published in 2007 I

was entering my final year of graduate school in Louisiana, and the fact that an alumnus of UNC Asheville had hit the publishing big time was both emboldening and daunting for someone like me, who desperately wanted to join her. But in talking with Sarah I learn that her 13-year path to publishing Garden Spells after graduating college was long and hard. According to her, during those years she had written dozens of full-length manuscripts and been rejected by scores of literary agents.

“I was writing as close to full time as I could get,” she says.

“I was doing part-time and seasonal jobs. By the time I wrote Garden Spells I was just about ready to give up. I’d gone back to school, and I hated it, and I thought, ‘Let me give it one more go.’ And I wrote Garden Spells, and suddenly, there it was. I sent off 12 or 15 queries to agents, and only one of them wanted to see the novel. That’s the agent I have today.”

Both Sarah’s new novel, Other Birds, and her path to publication prove one thing: If you look, there is a family waiting for you.

“Your tribe is out there,” she says. “Your people are out there.

Just keep looking.” PS Wiley Cash is the Alumni Author-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, is available wherever books are sold.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

HOMETOWN

Blast from the Past Keeping it cool when the heat is on

By Bill Fields

When I spent my last night in my child-

PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL FIELDS

hood home — grown, gray and practically groaning from the aches of helping empty its considerable contents over several days — I went to bed upstairs comforted by a familiar sound I knew soon would be only a memory.

It was a hot summer evening, and the noise came from a window air conditioner that had been in the family for nearly 45 years, since I was a teenager. In old age the unit still cooled, even when set to the lowest of its three speeds, a limit mandated by my mother that I usually obeyed even after she was no longer living in the house.

Cranking up the temperature control to 6 or 7 (on a 1 to 10 dial) ensured a chilly output. The aging wonder wasn’t quiet by any means, and when it went through its cooling cycle it was as if the appliance was having a coughing fit before easing back into its customary sound.

Back in 1974 — I recall it arrived on East New Jersey Avenue in the days not long before Richard Nixon departed the White House — and in the following decade before central air was installed, the Sears purchase was situated in the living room and was powerful enough to cool most of the first floor.

That truly was a miracle summer of 20th century innovation.

We had acquired cable television not long before, which meant the Atlanta Braves were on almost every night. The local access channel showed an endless loop of National Golf Foundation instructional films. And we could watch the Wilmington, Raleigh or Greensboro stations without having to adjust a finicky antenna.

During several months a year, though, the addition of AC seemed a bigger deal than acquiring cable TV, even to a very

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sports-minded boy. Shade trees, cold showers or electric fans could only do so much when the temperature soared in August.

I camped out on the carpet not far from the brand-new air conditioner for a couple of nights. Whether asleep or awake, it felt like our family had hit the jackpot because we now had the comfort of a motel room or restaurant at home when it was sweltering. After 18 holes in the heat or a steamy hour mowing the grass, nothing felt better than standing in front of the window unit for a quick, cold blast. Even my father, who liked to park himself shirtless on the back porch with a cold beer on toasty evenings pre-AC, got very used to the manufactured cooling.

A few years later, when I went off to college and a room without air conditioning — my dormitory’s location trumped its creature comforts by a long shot at the start of one semester and the end of the next if it was hot — I missed our AC dearly. My first summer in New York City, a decade later, out of stubbornness and thrift, I didn’t purchase a small window unit during a persistent heat wave and struggled to sleep despite a fan positioned as close to my bed as I could get it.

On trips home, I never had to worry about being too hot. The old reliable window unit was relocated upstairs after the house was equipped with central air. But the new system never seemed adequate for the second floor, making the original AC an important feature on my visits.

As the years went by, I kept expecting the window unit to fail each time I returned during hot weather, but it never did.

Perhaps Mom’s speed restrictions had extended its life, or maybe they don’t make ’em like they used to. Like a baseball player closer to the end than the beginning who can still paint the black, it happily and capably pitched a few innings each summer in the week or so I would be in town. That last night home, I woke up with a blanket up to my chin. PS Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

FOCUS ON FOOD

Chocolate Ice Pops?

Black Forest cake anything!

Story and Photograph by Rose Shewey

Oh, how much I wanted to

taste my mom’s homemade Black Forest layer cake when I was a child. “Why not?” I would ask indignantly, my arms crossed over my fuzzy polyester sweater.

(It was the 1980s after all.)

“Because,” my mom would respond with a heavy sigh and the patience of a Catalan pack mule, “it has alcohol in it and you wouldn’t like it.”

The temptation was real. The silky, hand whipped cream; the spongy, rich chocolate layers; and the luscious, lip-staining sour cherries spiked with fragrant cherry brandy, “Kirschwasser.” Any time Black Forest cake made an appearance on the buffet, I would ask for a slice, but my mom’s response was typically a resounding “no,” and I’d be rushed off to the kid’s table with a piece of marble cake.

To be clear, most European parents aren’t terribly worried about their children ingesting a little bit of alcohol — to the contrary, the stereotype holds true. My mom simply assumed that my palate wasn’t refined enough to appreciate such grown-up treats. So, why let a precious slice of cake go to waste on immature taste buds?

To this day, I adore Black Forest cake. Aside from the fact that this dessert is the epitome of divine yet sinfully decadent pleasures, I am hopelessly nostalgic. “Schwarzälder Kirschtorte” was, and is, a festive staple in my German homeland during times of celebration.

As baroque in nature as Black Forest cake may be, at its core it is a simple, yet epic, combination of flavors. You don’t have to make the prototypical layer cake to enjoy it — you can make Black Forest cake anything. The essential components of chocolate, cream and boozy cherries are incredibly versatile. My go-to quick fix over the years

has been creamy Black Forest chocolate ice pops.

With only five ingredients, this frozen treat tops any other ice cream-type dessert and adds a touch of glamour to the otherwise rather ordinary lineup of frozen pops.

By the way, my mom was wrong. When I finally laid my tiny, greedy hands on my first slice of Black Forest cake, it was love at first bite, and I scarfed it all down. Well, I ate all the parts that didn’t taste like cherry brandy. So what if I just licked the cream off the top? My mom was still wrong.

Black Forest Chocolate Ice Pops (Makes 6)

You’ll need six ice pop molds and sticks for this recipe.

Ingredients 1 1/2 cups yogurt, coconut cream or heavy cream 2 1/2 tablespoon raw honey (or more, to taste) 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 1/4 cup cacao powder 3/4 cup cherries, fresh or frozen, pitted 2 teaspoon Kirschwasser (optional) In a bowl, combine yogurt (or cream), honey and vanilla extract and whisk until smooth. Divide into two equal parts; set aside one part and stir cacao powder into the other part. In a food processor, blend cherries to your desired texture; anywhere from coarse to puréed will work (or skip this step and continue with whole or halved cherries). Add Kirschwasser if desired. Add a couple of tablespoons of yogurt mixture to each mold, then add a couple of tablespoons chocolate mix and about one tablespoon of cherries; continue layering until the molds are full. Add sticks, then freeze.

German native Rose Shewey is a food stylist and food photographer. To see more of her work visit her website, suessholz.com.

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IN THE SPIRIT

Mai Tai Just another reason to drink rum

By Tony Cross

I’ve got way too many bottles of rum in my

PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CROSS

closet. Yes, my liquor “cabinet” is a closet — judge if you must. All that rum got me thinking about the drinks I’ll be whipping up this summer, and that got me thinking about the classic Mai Tai. (A mind is a terrible thing to waste.)

Jeff “Beachbum” Berry explains in his book Beachbum Berry Remixed — A Gallery of Tiki Drinks how the origin of the Mai Tai cocktail has been debated over time: “The Mai Tai war has raged for over half a century, and it ain’t over yet,” Berry writes.

“Bandleader Harry Owens claimed he introduced the Mai Tai to the world in 1954. Trader Vic claimed he invented the Mai Tai in 1944, and in 1970 won a court case to prove it. That verdict aside, Donn Beach’s widow, Phoebe Beach, insists that Donn invented the Mai Tai in 1933.”

Berry goes on to explain the battle that Victor Bergeron (Trader Vic) pursued and won in court. He also explains Phoebe Beach’s claims, but ultimately settles on Trader Vic being the first to put it on his menu. Berry says that although Donn Beach may have created it, there’s no proof of the Mai Tai popping up on any menu in the 1930s.

So, what’s in a Mai Tai, anyway? There are several recipes below, but the main ingredients are the same: Jamaican and Martinique rums, lime juice (and wedge), orange curaçao, mint and orgeat. The last ingredient, orgeat (pronounced “or-zha”), is a syrup made from almonds. It’s great in a ton of tiki drinks and is also a key ingredient in the classic Japanese Cocktail.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Mai Tai

(Trader Vic recipe) 1 ounce fresh lime juice 1/2 ounce orange curaçao 1/4 ounce orgeat 1/4 ounce sugar syrup 1 ounce dark Jamaican rum 1 ounce amber Martinique rum Shake well with plenty of crushed ice. Pour unstrained into a double old-fashioned glass. Sink your spent lime shell into the drink. Garnish with a mint sprig.

Mai Tai

(From Shannon Mustipher’s book Tiki — Modern Tropical Cocktails) 2 ounces aged rum 1/2 ounce rhum agricole blanc 100 proof 1/2 ounce orange curaçao 1/2 ounce orgeat 1/2 ounce lime juice, lime shell reserved Combine all ingredients in a shaker with cubed ice. Shake and dump into a double rocks glass. Garnish with a mint sprig and the reserved lime shell.

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IN THE SPIRIT

Mai Tai

(From Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails) 1 lime wedge 1 ounce El Dorado 15-year rum 1 ounce Appleton Estate V/X rum 1/4 ounce La Favorite Rhum Agricole Blanc 1/2 ounce Rhum Clément Créole Shrubb 3/4 ounce orgeat 1 dash Angostura bitters Squeeze a lime wedge into a shaker and drop it in. Add the remaining ingredients and short shake with 3 ice cubes. Strain into a snifter filled with crushed ice. Garnish with the mint bouquet and serve with a straw.

There will always be variations on the classics. In the Trader Vic recipe, there’s only 1/4 ounce of orgeat (adding another 1/4 of simple syrup), yet the Death & Co Mai Tai uses 3/4 of an ounce. The use of different rums (even though they are still from Jamaica and Martinique) make for subtle changes on the palate as well.

Last, but not least, the orgeat. Here is Death & Co’s recipe, but feel free to look online or at other great cocktail books and try another. With D&C, your finished product will keep for one month refrigerated.

Orgeat 12 ounces toasted almond milk (see below) 16 ounces superfine sugar 2 1/2 teaspoons Pierre Ferrand Ambre Cognac (substitute if necessary) 2 1/2 teaspoons Lazzarone Amaretto (substitute if necessary) 1/4 teaspoon rose water In a saucepan, combine the almond milk and sugar. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally and without bringing to a boil, until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat and stir in the Cognac, amaretto, and rose water. Store in the refrigerator.

Toasted Almond Milk 1 cup blanched sliced almonds 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons warm water In a large, dry saucepan, toast the almonds over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until golden brown. Transfer to a blender and add the water. Pulse until the almonds are finely chopped, then blend for 2 minutes. Strain through a cheesecloth-lined sieve (a nut milk bag will do the job and save you a lot of mess). PS Tony Cross is a bartender (well, ex-bartender) who runs cocktail catering company Reverie Cocktails in Southern Pines.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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A R T O F T H E S TAT E

Fire Dance

Into Being Painter Herb Jackson creates meticulous, vibrant abstracts

By Liza Roberts

“I don’t want you to know how I work

unless I tell you, because I want it to seem spontaneous,” says Herb Jackson. He’s in his Davidson studio, surrounded by the unmistakable works that have made his name; the vibrant, abstract paintings that convey energy and light and appear to have been made with swift, gestural strokes.

But in reality, he notes, holding two fingers up in a narrow pinch, “I’m working about that much at a time.”

“The tricky thing is to make it not look like that,” Jackson says. “It’s a little archaeological. There’s a lot of drawing that goes on. I can work for hours on an area, and the next day completely cover it.” These palette-knifed layers accumulate, day by day,

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sometimes into the triple digits; many he scrapes away or sands with pumice. “If it’s not up to what I want it to be, then I just keep working,” he says. Light and shape and color and texture shift and morph, disappear and re-emerge. About two-thirds of the way through, a painting “will begin to assert itself,” and when they’re finished, “they tell me,” he explains.

Art has been communicating with Jackson since he was a child. He won his first art award when he was still a teenager as part of a juried exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art; his work has now been collected by more than 100 museums, including London’s British Museum, has been shown in more than 150 solo exhibitions around the world and has won him North Carolina’s highest civilian honor. After college at Davidson College and an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jackson returned to this college town to teach, eventually serving as chair of the art department at Davidson College for 16 years.

Along the way, Jackson created a prolific and ongoing series he calls Veronica’s Veils, all of the same size (60 by 48 inches) and

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

A R T O F T H E S TAT E

format. The name refers to the historic Christian relic thought to have received an image of the face of Jesus when Saint Veronica used it to wipe his face at the sixth Station of the Cross. Jackson says these works “have nothing to do with Jesus, but have a lot to do with Veronica and her luck, being at the right place at the right time.”

When one of his paintings “comes into being,” Jackson says, “that’s basically my Veronica moment.”

That moment coheres not any particular concept, but the confluence of everything he’s ever experienced, “which is much bigger than any one idea.” All of that can take some wrangling. “Occasionally, they’ll go beyond what I expected as far as challenging me, and I’ll put them up there and stare at them for several days, to just be absolutely sure,” he explains. “Because once I decide you’re finished, then I don’t go back in.” To do so, he says, would violate a painting’s integrity. “There are paintings from 18 years ago where I spot something I would have done differently — but I was a different artist then.”

For the last 50 years, Jackson has had two or three solo exhibitions of his paintings a year, but has recently decided to curtail those to focus on what matters most: painting for its own sake. “Committing to exhibitions became confining,” he says. “I just want to make my work.”

The Raleigh native has been drawing every day since

Deep Dive he was a young child and selling paintings since he was 12, time enough to be many different artists.

He’s still amazed by the experience and the process: “Where a painting comes from and how it comes together for me is still mystical, and has been for 60 years.” He credits his subconscious, but assumes some of his inspiration must come from art and travel and nature, from exploring the woods and creek and digging in the earth near his childhood home near the old Lassiter Mill. Some also must come, he says, from the pre-Renaissance and Byzantine paintings of the Kress Collection, which formed the foundational basis of the North Carolina Museum of Art in its original downtown home — works he regularly took the bus to go see.

“Those paintings were so formative for me. If there hadn’t been the North Carolina Museum of Art, I don’t know what would have happened to me.” PS This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, to be published by UNC Press this fall.

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OUT OF THE BLUE

Frozen in Time The hottest month of all

By Deborah Salomon

ILLUSTRATION BY MIRANDA GLYDER

August means hot. Serious hot.

Not that hot means much. We’re such weather wimps — dash from AC car to AC house, or store, or office. As the joke goes, were there still phone booths, they would be air-conditioned. A system failure rates emergency status, right up there with a blocked toilet or a computer meltdown.

Meltdown, a good August word when applied to an orange Popsicle that tints the tongue and stains the T-shirt.

In August, you can do without lights but not that icy AC blast.

Global warming will only exacerbate this annual woe.

I am the wimp described above. ’Twas not always so. I remember when the very heat we flee heightened our senses, prescribed our activities.

I spent every childhood summer in Greensboro, with my grandparents, in the house shaded by pin oaks, where my mother was born.

Talk about hot.

This isn’t the first time, or the second or third I’ve dredged up those summers not out of laziness but regret, since icons have drifted away like August afternoon clouds, once their rain has caused steam to rise from the asphalt.

In the North, at least, summer started with spring and the wearing of “spring coats.” Lordy, I haven’t heard that word pairing in years. By late spring, kids were allowed to shed undershirts . . . ah, the freedom, the unbinding. The last day of school meant a trip to the shoe store for sturdy leather sandals or breathable canvas “sneakers.” Both would be in tatters by Labor Day. Where have all the children’s shoe stores gone?

How delicious, the wiggling of bare toes, unknown to kids shod year-round in “running shoes.”

Polio overshadowed those summers. No large gatherings, no swimming pools or amusement parks. Splash pads had not been invented but oh, what we could accomplish with a garden hose The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

and a variable nozzle. Squeals of horror followed a strong, pulsating stream. “Mmmm . . . ” after a total-body misting. I remember feeling the heat rising up and escaping from my skin, whether bare or covered with shorts and a T-shirt.

Nobody bothered with bathing suits.

Then, somebody told us that holding an ice cube in back of a bended knee would cool the whole body. What giggles, as the melt trickled down our legs. Another granny advised soaking feet in cold water worked the same magic. I can still see the oval tin wash basin we used for soaking.

But nothing — and I mean nothing — cooled better than a nickel Coca-Cola from the big red cooler (with built-in bottle opener) at the corner store.

My mother didn’t allow soft drinks.

Granddaddy slipped me nickels when she wasn’t looking.

Those power-guzzling coolers, now prized retro décor, fetch big bucks at antique stores.

Supper on hot nights would be cold: cold fried chicken, potato salad, huge tomatoes from the garden, sprinkled with salt. Maybe biscuits left over from breakfast. I don’t remember the house being unbearable at night, perhaps because of oscillating fans, more likely because children sleep better, especially happy children exhausted from squealing through the sprinkler, catching fireflies in Mason jars, guzzling Kool-Aid, wiggling toes around leather sandal straps, reading comic books on the porch swing, playing stick-ball, dressing paper dolls.

AC? Only at the movie theater where the blast merited a sweater.

We survived August, then returned to the North, where autumn appeared in chilly early mornings and earlier sunsets, when children bought notebooks and pencil-sharpeners, rulers, protractors, lunch boxes, knee socks and saddle shoes for school.

Before cellphones and laptops and face masks and lockdowns.

Before schools became dangerous. PS Deborah Salomon is a writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

B I R D WA T C H

Nighthawks But not the Edward Hopper kind

By Susan Campbell

The common nighthawk is nei-

ther “common” nor a “hawk.” Found in the Sandhills and Piedmont of North Carolina, these large birds feed exclusively on insects and actually do so at night. They use their large mouths to catch prey. Beetles and other insects are instantaneously intercepted and ingested by way of the birds’ oversized mouths. Nighthawks are unique in that they literally fly into large insects. Because their weak feet are designed purely for perching, they do not grab at them as true hawks do.

These medium-sized birds are active mainly at dawn and dusk when beetles and other big insects are also most active.

Due to their terrific night vision, nighthawks hunt effectively in darkness, though they may even feed during the day, especially when they have young to provide for. In early summer, cicadas, grasshoppers, larger wasps and true bugs are abundant and, given their aerodynamic prowess, nighthawks are very successful predators at any hour.

As one of many survival tactics, common nighthawks spend the day perched horizontally on a pine branch. Invisibility is the goal during daylight hours. Although their vision is not compromised, they have a better advantage when light intensity is low. The mottled black, gray and white feathering is very hard to see regardless of the time of day, but their characteristic low “peee-nt” call and erratic moth-like flight is distinctive.

Common nighthawks’ nests are well camouflaged. Females simply scrape a spot to create a nesting area. Their speckled eggs blend in well with the mineral soil and miscellaneous debris typical of native arid terrain. Females are known to perform a feeble “broken wing” display if they are disturbed. This act is the only defense they have to draw potential predators away from the eggs or young.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

More likely, common nighthawks’ presence will be given away by males “booming” in the early morning over high quality open habitat. In the Sandhills those would include the Moore County Airport and the drop zones on Fort Bragg. The unique noise they produce comes from air passing over the wing feathers of breeding males — not vocalizations — as they move through the air.

Amazingly, nighthawks are one of a handful of bird species that will also nest on flat rooftops. As large fields become scarce, common nighthawks are more prone to using large artificial spaces. These birds can easily support a family on the associated abundant flying insects found in open foraging habitat such as agricultural fields or some athletic venues, so it’s not unusual to see or hear nighthawks at summer baseball games or early fall football games throughout the region. They are capitalizing on the abundant prey associated with the evening floodlights at stadiums and other outdoor sites.

The species is found in many open areas in the eastern United States in summer, and so it is no surprise that common nighthawks begin to move south in late summer in large flocks.

They migrate long distances to winter destinations in Central America and northern South America. Large numbers can be seen feeding in the evening in August and early September, so there’s plenty of time left to spot a nighthawk before cooler weather sets in. PS Susan Campbell would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photographs at susan@ncaves.com.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

NAT U R A L I S T

The Lords of the Rings Innovation among dolphins in a salt marsh

Story and Photographs by Todd Pusser

Tucked back in a western Flori-

da salt marsh, far from the open ocean, a trio of bottlenose dolphins swim slowly through shallow waters searching for fish among a labyrinth of small, muddy islands covered in needlerush and a bright blue sky. Herons and pelicans, sensing an opportunity, patiently follow along, hopping from one mud bank to another as the dolphins continue their hunt through waters stained the color of a vanilla latte.

All of a sudden, one dolphin raises its tail high out of the water and brings it down forcibly, creating a massive splash and an audible “thwack” that can be heard throughout the expansive marsh. The predators have found their prey.

In water just a few feet deep, the dolphin starts to swim rapidly in a circle, vigorously pumping its tail up and down, stirring up the muddy bottom, creating a perfectly oval mud ring. The other dolphins swim over and the trio lift their heads out of the water along the edge of the mud ring, open their mouths, and wait.

A school of mullet, trapped inside the rapidly closing mud ring, starts to panic. Not wanting to swim through a wall of mud, the fish opt instead to leap out of the water, over the edge of the mud ring — right into the mouths of the waiting dolphins.

It’s all over in the blink of an eye. Each dolphin, having successfully caught a fish, lowers their head back into the murky water and continues hunting the narrow channels of the salt marsh. Before the morning is over, they will repeat this behavior dozens of times until fully satiated.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Bottlenose dolphins are renowned for their intelligence and adaptability. After humans and a few primates, they have the largest brain-to-body ratio of any living animal. Incredibly social, they have perfected innovative hunting techniques to maximize efficiency in capturing prey, no matter the environment.

In the Bahamas, bottlenose dolphins swim along shallow waters, using echolocation to scan sandy bottoms for buried flounder and razorfish. When prey is located, a dolphin will stick its head into the loose sand and push water out of its mouth to flush the fish from hiding. In tidal marshes along the South Carolina coast, bottlenose dolphins intentionally throw their bodies completely out of the water up onto mud flats, chasing fish they have trapped against the shoreline. In the deep waters surrounding Cocos Island, bottlenose dolphins work as a team to corral schools of baitfish into tight balls against the ocean’s surface, which prevents their prey from escaping. Off North Carolina, bottlenose dolphins have learned to follow shrimp boats, who regularly toss their unwanted bycatch overboard, providing easy meals for the hungry predators.

All of these distinctive feeding strategies reveal rich, sophisticated cultures, shaped by a level of intelligence and creativity not often seen in the animal kingdom, and are passed down from generation to generation.

The bottlenose dolphins that use the mud ring feeding technique do so only along the shores of Florida and nowhere else in the world. The behavior, first described from the shallow waters of the Everglades and the Florida Keys, has since been observed at various spots along the state’s west coast up into the Panhandle.

I first witnessed mud ring feeding back in the early 1990s when I traveled down to Florida to complete my open water scuba certification with a class from the University of North Carolina. Since that time,

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NAT U R A L I S T

whenever I travel to the coastal waters of the Sunshine State, I keep a sharp eye out for these cunning predators.

The last time I was fortunate enough to observe mud ring feeding, it involved a group of four dolphins, one of which was a small calf. I was first alerted to their presence by a pair of brown pelicans rapidly diving headfirst into the water along the edge of an immense marsh. The ungainly birds would surface, take wing, fly a few yards, and then dive again into the murky water. It took a minute or two before I saw the telltale grey, shark-like fins of the dolphins out in front of the pelicans.

Knowing immediately what the dolphins were up to, I grabbed my binoculars and settled into the seat on my aluminum jonboat to enjoy the show. Right on cue, the lead dolphin smacked its tail onto the surface of the water and began to swim in a tight circle, stirring up the mud in the process.

The pelicans, seeing the dolphin complete the circle, swoop in just as the other dolphins swim over and lift their heads from the water. Dozens of mullet suddenly burst forth from the surface of the water inside the mud ring, like an erupting volcano. A-freefor-all ensues, as both mammals and birds lunge from side to side trying to catch the leaping fish.

The dolphin calf, too young for solid food just yet, does not lift its head out of the water. It simply stays close to Mom, intently watching her every move. There is no doubt that this is an impor-

tant teachable moment for the youngster. I can’t help but marvel at how their complex social lives so closely mirror our own.

The dolphins regroup and swim around a sharp bend in the marsh, quietly disappearing into the murky green waters, searching for the next school of fish. PS Naturalist and photographer Todd Pusser grew up in Eagle Springs.

He works to document the extraordinary diversity of life both near and far. His images can be found at www.ToddPusser.com.

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G O L F T OW N J O U R NA L

All in Good Time The pause at the top

Ingrid Lindblad at the 2022 U.S. Women's Open

By Lee Pace “Beware the fury of a patient man.” — John Dryden

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF HAYNES/ USGA

Over a lifetime I have collected baseball

cards, vintage postcards, spy novels, golf headcovers, Matchbox cars and bottles of hot sauce. Now I’m into collecting Instagram posts, most notably those portending to help with the golf swing and within that subculture those addressing the transition at the top of the backswing.

There’s a post with a collage of Fred Couples swings, one per annum over three decades in rapid fire, his buttery move sending balls flying the nation over. Couples has talked over his illustrious career of “gathering” and “buying time” at the top. “One drill I have done is take a 9-iron, hold it at the top for a split second and then go ahead and hit it,” Couples says. “I think slow and lazy swing.”

In another post, Michael Mitnick, an Ohio college student and aspiring club professional, executes this very drill, what he

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

calls “The Pause Drill.” He addresses a ball, takes the club back, holds it at the top about a one-Mississippi breath, then delivers his blow and launches the ball high into the sky. “Having a deliberate pause will help you not rush your swing and develop a fluid tempo,” he offers.

And one I really like is a snippet of Justin Thomas hitting a half-wedge over a bunker and stopping it inches from the cup.

“The patience in transition is enviable,” PGA Tour golfer Parker McLachlin says in his Instagram feed, adding a pair of salivating emojis. “There’s not a rush to hit the ball.”

Indeed, in this world rife with kryptonite-laced golf balls and nuclear-tipped driver heads, where college players get home in two with a driver and a 6-iron, where swing speeds are measured on Ferrari dashboards, there remains one corner of the world for calm and quiet.

The top of the backswing.

That’s right. After all, if you’re going one way and then want to go in reverse 180 degrees, you have to stop. It’s science. So what’s your hurry?

The great Bobby Jones once remarked, “No one ever swung a golf club too slowly.” Another talented golfer by the name of Julius Boros, who as a young man married into the Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club ownership family, was nicknamed “Old Man River” for his sweet tempo and even wrote a book titled Swing Easy, Hit Hard.

Renowned instructor Bob Toski tells his students to use the “Coca-Cola Swing,” employing a “pause that refreshes” at the top of the backswing.

“There should be no flash of speed at the top of your swing,” Toski told Golf Digest years ago. “The club should be quiet and not bouncing. This gives you a chance to move the lower body down into the swing. You want to feel that you push the club back and pull it through. Think push, pause, pull.’”

Englishman Justin Rose has fought the tendency to get tense PineStraw

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at the top and to rush his transition, so he thinks of “collecting” himself at the top and simply letting his arms “fall from the top, rather than jerking the club down,” he says.

“The transition in the full swing is what separates the good player from the bad player,” says David Orr, the Pine Needles-based instructor who has Rose among his clients.

The famous “secret” espoused by Hall of Famer Ben Hogan has been parsed to a fare-thee-well by golfers, instructors, commentators and biographers. One theory is that the secret was a cupping motion of the left wrist at the top. Another school of thought has that Hogan’s key to the golf kingdom was the way he braced his right knee to initiate the swing, followed by his inward push toward the ball of his knee on the downswing.

A friend and fellow competitor from the mid-20th century pro tour, Tommy Bolt, says Hogan’s secret was actually a 3703 Bragg Blvd. | Fayetteville, NC | 910-868-8319 trigger he found at the top of his backswing. Bolt went through a period in the late 1950s of hitting everything with a pronounced right-to-left pattern, and Hogan, who battled an incessant VOTED THE WORLD’S hook himself for many years, told him, S’DLROW EHT DETOV “Tommy, you’re not going to last long MOST COMFORTABLE RECLINER RENILCER ELBATROFMOC TSOM fighting that hook.”

Hogan invited Bolt to visit him at his home in Fort Worth and promised to VOTED THE WORLD’S help Bolt work the hook out of his game.

MOST COMFORTABLE RECLINER First Hogan weakened Bolt’s grip to take the left side out of play. The second VOTED THE WORLD’S MOST instruction Hogan gave him was to feel COMFORTABLE RECLINER both hands secure on the club at the top of the swing. .evA160-L tsruhPinehurst eniP L-0160-L 61Ave.Pinehurst Ave. lanigirO sllihdnaS ehT The Sandhills Original “It will put your club in great position Southern Pines, NC CN ,seniP nrehtuoSouthern S Pines, NC CIDEP-RUPMET at the top of the swing,” Hogan said. “It TEMPUR-PEDIC ten.comfortstudio.net oidutstrofmoc comfortstudio.net The Sandhills Original moorwohS will shorten your swing and allow you to Showroom 426910-692-9624 9-296-019 910-692-9624 TEMPUR-PEDIC Showroom have an accelerated motion coming into 160-L Pinehurst Ave. The Sandhills Original the ball.”

Southern Pines, NCCan Be. Discover How Comfortable Life . e B n a C e f i L e l b a t r o f m o C e v o c s i D TEMPUR-PEDIC ®. woH r After several days of hitting balls and Nothing helps you relax and unwind like the unmatchedcomfortstudio.net comfort of Stressless You can feel the difference inCan our innova-Be. Discover How Comfortable Life .® TM s s e l s s e r t S f o t r o f m o c d e h c t a m n u e h t e k i l d n i w n u d n a x a l e r u o y s p l e h g n i h t o N playing the course at Shady Oaks Country Showroom tive comfort technologies, including BalanceAdapt , which allows your body to automatically and effortlessly adjust to Nothing helps you relax and unwindthelike thecomfort unmatched comfort of Stressless®.

910-692-9624 MT move. Do your body your every a favor.

Sit in a Stressless and let it discover ultimate that it has been missing. , tpadAecnalaB gnidulcni ,seigolonhcet t rofmoc evitavonni ruo ni ecneref fid eht leef nac uoY Club, Bolt felt he had made progress and

GOT ”KCAB RUOY T“WE’VE OG EV’EW “ YOUR BACK” “WE’VE GOT YOUR BACK”

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The American Chiropractic Association and nowLife endorses the “Stressless” seatingtosolution from ENDORSED BY which allows your body to automatically effortlessly adjust your every yourwhat do I owe you?” Bolt asked.

Discover How Comfortable Can Be. .gnissim neeb sah ti taht tEkornes, rofmothe c elargest tamitfurniture lu eht manufacturer revocsid tini Scandinavia. tel dna ssThis elspremium sertS alinenioftreclining iS .rovsofas af a ydmove. ob Do “Ben, ®. that it has been missing. body a favor.

Sit in a Stressless and let it discover the ultimate comfort Nothing helps you relaxandand like and thequality unmatched of Stressless “Nothing,” Hogan said. “Well, you chairsunwind provides comfort through its comfort adaptive features, including a unique “Plus” TM system thatcomfort ensures correct support for bothincluding the head and lower back. owe me one thing. If someone asks you You can feel the difference in our innovative technologies, BalanceAdapt , TNEMEVORPMI EMOH S’EWOL DNA S’ YBRA NEEWTEB EUNEVA TSRUHENIP NO DETACOL what we worked on, you can tell them I which allows your body to automatically and effortlessly adjust to your every move.

Do your LOCATED ON PINEHURST BETWEENAVENUE ARBY’S BETWEEN AND LOWE’S HOMEAND IMPROVEMENT LOCATEDAVENUE ON PINEHURST ARBY’S LOWE’S HOME IMPROVEMENT body a favor. Sit in a Stressless and let it discover the ultimate comfort that it has been missing.

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PineStrawLOCATED ON PINEHURST AVENUE BETWEEN ARBY’S AND LOWE’S HOME IMPROVEMENT

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

G O L F T OW N J O U R NA L

weakened your grip. But as a favor, don’t tell them about keeping both your hands on the club at the top. Tommy, that’s the ‘secret.’ That stays between us.”

Bolt’s face would brighten as he told the story many years later.

“So when they talk about Ben Hogan’s secret,” Bolt said, “I’m the only one who knows what that secret is. At the top of the swing, you make sure you feel both hands secure on that golf club.”

I was reminded of the value of this pause that refreshes during the recent U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles.

Golfers on the women’s circuit wield silk and syrup as their stocks in trade. Watch Michelle Wie West. She’ll take three beats to the top of her backswing, then one beat to impact. Three-to-one, over and over and over again. Woe to the golfer, particularly the Type-A male, who can’t benefit from a half hour watching these symphonic swings on the practice range.

“Men walk fast, eat fast, drive fast, think fast,” says Ed Ibarguen, a longtime teaching pro at Duke University Golf Club in Durham. “They have very active minds.

In the golf swing, that often translates to active hands. They can certainly benefit by watching the elite female player.”

All of these collected perspectives on the transition from backswing to downswing came to mind recently after I’d turned a 1-over through eight holes start into hash with a succession of pull-hooks I instinctively knew had occurred because I didn’t finish my backswing and was rushing to hit the confounded ball.

I took a deep breath hitting three from the fairway on the 15th hole after jacking my tee shot into a lake.

Exaggerate your pause at the top on your practice swing. Feel your hands on the club at the top. Push, pause, pull. Collect yourself at the top.

I played the last three holes even par and took my dear sweet time along the way. PS

www.beefeatersofsouthernpines.com

Lee Pace has written “Golftown Journal” since 2008. Contact him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him on Instagram at @leepaceunc.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

W

illiam Faulkner invented Yoknapatawpha County as a place for his imagination to live, and every Southern writer knew where it was, even if it wasn’t on any map. Ernest Hemingway loaded his readers onto a double-decker bus and transported them to a fiesta in Pamplona, Spain, with its wine skins and dusty plaza de toros. Allan Gurganus created the fictional small town of Falls, North Carolina. In the hands

of a fine craftsman, a sense of place in a piece of fiction can be so compelling it almost becomes its own character in the narrative. In our Summer Reading Issue three of North Carolina’s greatest writers deliver on this promise, taking us to West Virginia coal country, the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, and the bottom of a freshly dug grave. Our guides for these adventures are Lee Smith, Ron Rash and Clyde Edgerton.

— Jim Moriarty

Lee Smith is the

author of 14 novels, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Saving Grace and Guests on Earth, as well as four collections of short stories. Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, she has received an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature. Her latest book, Silver Alert, will be available in the spring of 2023.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Ron Rash is

the author of seven novels, seven collections of short stories and four volumes of poetry. He has been honored with The Sherwood Anderson Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction for his collection Chemistry and Other Stories, and for his New York Times bestselling novel Serena. His other novels include Saints at the River, Above the Waterfall and The Risen.

He is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, where he teaches poetry and fiction writing.

Clyde Edgerton

is the author of 10 novels and two books of non-fiction.

His novels include Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller and Lunch at the Piccadilly. Both Walking Across Egypt and Killer Diller were adapted for the screen. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has also received the North Carolina Award for Literature. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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Romantic Fever Fiction by Lee Smith • Illustrations by Matthew Shipley

T

he house I grew up in was one of a row of houses strung along a narrow river bottom like a string of beads. We were not allowed to play in the river because they washed coal in it, upstream. Its water ran deep and black between the mountains, which rose like walls on either side of us, rocky and thick with trees.

My mother came from the flat exotic eastern shore of Virginia, and swore that the mountains gave her migraine headaches.

Mama was always lying down on the sofa, all dressed up. But there was no question that she loved my father, a mountain man she had chosen over the well-bred Arthur Banks of Richmond, “a fellow who went to the University of Virginia and never got over

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it,” according to Daddy. Mama suffered from ideas of aristocracy herself. Every night she would fix a nice supper for Daddy and me, then bathe and put on a fresh dress and high heels and her bright red lipstick, named “Fire and Ice,” and then sit in anxious dismay while the hour grew later and later, until Daddy finally left his dime-store and came home.

By that time the food had dried out to something crunchy and unrecognizable, so Mama would cry when she opened the oven door, but then Daddy would eat it all anyway, swearing it was the most delicious food he’d ever put in his mouth, staring hard at Mama all the while. Frequently my parents would then leave the table abruptly, feigning huge yawns and leaving me to turn

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

out all the lights. I’d stomp around the house and do this resentfully, both horrified and thrilled at the thought of them upstairs behind their closed door.

I myself was in love with my best friend’s father, three houses down the road. Mr. Owens had huge dark soulful eyes, thick black hair, a mustache that dropped down on either side of his mouth, and the prettiest singing voice available. Every night after supper, he’d sit out in his garden by the river and play his guitar and sing for us and every other kid in the neighborhood, who’d gather around to listen.

Mr. Owens played songs like “Wayfaring Stranger” and “The Alabama Waltz.” He died the year we were thirteen, from an illness described as “romantic fever.” Though later I would learn that the first word was actually “rheumatic,” in my own mind it remained “romantic fever,” an illness I associated with those long summer evenings when my beloved Mr. Owens played the old sad songs while lightning bugs rose like stars from the misty weeds along the black river and right down the road — three houses away — my own parents were kissing like crazy as night came on.

II The link between love and death intensified when my MYF group (that’s Methodist Youth Fellowship) went to Myrtle Beach, where we encountered many exotic things such as pizza pie and Northern boys smoking cigarettes on the boardwalk. Our youth leader, who was majoring in drama at a church school, threw our cigarettes into the surf and led us back up onto the sandy porch of Mrs. Fickling’s Boardinghouse for an emergency lecture on Petting.

“A nice girl,” she said dramatically, “does not Pet. It is cruel to the boy to allow him to Pet, because he has no control over himself. He is just a boy. It is all up to the girl. If she allows the boy to Pet her, then he will become excited, and if he cannot find relief, then the poison will all back up into his organs causing pain — and sometimes — death!” She spat out the words.

We drew back in horror and fascination.

startled him. “I’d love to!” Wayne was a big, slow-talking boy with long black hair that fell down into his handsome, sullen face. He wore a ring of keys on his belt and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt. He did not play sports. I admired his style as much as I admired his family — or lack of family, I should say, for he lived with his uncle in a trailer out near the county line.

Wayne smoked, drank, and played in a band with grown-up men.

He was always on the Absentee Hot List, and soon he’d be gone for good, headed off to Nashville with a shoebox full of songs.

We jolted up the rutted road through dense black woods. My mother would have died if she’d known where I was. But she didn’t. Nobody did.

I was determined to Pet with Wayne even if it killed him.

Finally we emerged onto a kind of dark, windy plateau, an abandoned strip mine set on top of the mountain. He drove right up to the edge, a sheer drop. I caught my breath. On the mountainside below us were a hundred coke ovens sending their fiery blasts like giant candles straight up into the sky. It was like the pit of hell itself, but beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. For some reason I started crying.

“Aw,” he said. He screwed the top off a mason jar and gave me a drink, which burned all the way down. “You know what?” He pulled me over toward him. He smelled like smoke, like alcohol, like the woods.

“What?” I said into the sleeve of his blue jean jacket “They was a boy killed in one of them ovens last month — fell in, or throwed himself in, nobody ever did know which.”

“Was there?” I scooted closer.

“Yep, it was a boy from over on Paw Paw, had a wife and two little babies. Gone in the twinkling of a eye, just like it says in the Bible.” He snapped his fingers. “Right down there,” he said into my hair.

“That’s awful.” I shuddered, turning up my face for his kiss, while below us the coke ovens burned like a hundred red fountains of death and I felt the fiery hand clutch my vitals for good.

Finally, I thought.

Romantic fever. PS

III Of course it wasn’t long before I found myself in the place where I’d been headed all along: the front seat of a rusty old pickup, heading up a mountain on a dark gravel road with a wild older boy — let’s call him Wayne — whom I scarcely knew but had secretly adored for months. This was not the nice boy I’d been dating, the football star/student government leader who’d carried my books around from class to class all year and held my hand in study hall. My friends were all jealous of me for attracting such a nice boyfriend; even my mother approved. But, though he dutifully pressed his body against mine at dances in the gym whenever they played “The Twelfth of Never,” our song, it just wasn’t happening. That fiery hand did not clasp my vitals as it did in Jane Eyre whenever she encountered Mr. Rochester.

So I had seized my chance when Wayne asked me if I’d like to ride around sometime. “You bet!” I’d said so fast it The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Kephart Fiction by Ron R ash

Illustrations by Lyudmila Tomova

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 25, 1904

Horace Kephart Is Held for Observation FORMER LIBRARIAN ARRESTED AS HE WAS WALKING TOWARD EADS BRIDGE

H

orace Kephart, aged 42 years, residing at 1821 Kennett place, who was succeeded on February 1 last as librarian of the Mercantile library by William L. R. Gifford, after he had held the position for fourteen years, was arrested at 2 o'clock yesterday afternoon and placed in the observation ward at the city hospital, pending an investigation into his mental condition.

His arrest was brought about by his peculiar actions in Marre's saloon, 518 Washington avenue. After buying a glass of beer there yesterday, it is said, he engaged the bartender, Edward Wasen, in conversation, during the course of which he placed in Wasen's hands a lengthy letter, written in pencil on rough wrapping paper, in which he expressed an intention of committing suicide. Police Officer Mannion was at once notified. After following Kephart a block or so along Washington avenue toward Eads bridge the officer stopped him and called an ambulance.

Kephart is a well-known magazine writer. He is a graduate of both Yale and Cornell universities.

I

n his insanity, he’d believed two of his closest friends were diabolical enemies. They had hired cutthroats from docks and dim alleys to come in the night and murder him. He heard them pry at his window sill, test the doorknob as they searched for a way inside. He stayed up until dawn, talking aloud, sometimes shouting so they knew he wasn’t sleeping. Only a policeman's intervention prevented his ending the torment himself. An overwrought brain. That had been a doctor’s diagnosis. When he had finally been allowed to leave the hospital, all the promise he’d shown in college and graduate school, his time at the Yale library before coming to Saint Louis, were meaningless. He was forty-two years old, his life reduced to prurient fodder for newspapers.

❧ He had first visited wild places as a teenager, camping and hiking in the Adirondacks of upper New York state. When he’d taken a head librarian position in Saint Louis, there had been camping trips to nearby forests. He’d become proficient enough in woodcraft to write articles for outdoor magazines. He’d needed these respites from the library work, the rush and clamor of city life, a marriage that had begun to fall apart. But mere respites had finally not been enough.

To find himself, he had to go where he could not be found.

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Later, when he led the fight to create the Smoky Mountains National Park, he’d write, I wanted to save these mountains because they saved me. But that would be later. When they let him out of the hospital, he sought the solitude of forests. He’d studied a topographical map of the eastern United States, searching for the blank spaces and contour lines that revealed the least inhabited region, the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina and east Tennessee. He went by train to Dillsboro, North Carolina.

Then onward, first by roads, then by trails, and finally following only a narrowing stream into deeper woods. All that he’d brought with him was his tent and an ox sled of supplies. He made a campsite beside the creek, pitched his tent.

For three months, he stayed there. Next to his campsite the stream slowed and deepened. He had never seen water so pure and clear. He’d read that in India those with afflicted minds were set beside rivers so that the sound of the water’s passage could restore their sanity. He fell asleep and waked to the rhythms of the water. The insomnia that had tormented him for years lessened.

All the wilderness asked of him was to listen.

And to see. When he gazed into the pools, he could make out the individual pebbles in the sandy beds. When the midday sun shone on the water, flakes of mica made the white sand spark.

The clarity of the water entered his mind. The hallucinations ceased; the melancholy began to lift. One early afternoon he saw The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

his own face in the water. Not a reflection but instead a merging, becoming one with the stream, the forests, the mountains.

Sometimes he would see speckled trout. They were the most beautiful of fish — their flanks spotted green, red, and gold, their orange fins wavering. They were small, fragile, unable to live anywhere except the purest water. He wondered what it felt like to live inside such weightlessness.

Days passed, then weeks. He grew stronger, both in body and mind. As he explored and observed, the woods became so familiar he no longer needed a compass. Instead of a watch, sunlight and shadows showed him when he needed to turn around, make his way back to his campsite before darkness fell. Unlike in the world he’d fled, seconds and minutes no longer mattered. Wasn’t the awareness of time so much a part of what he’d fled, the way it so often directed his mind to obsess on past regrets or future fears? Wasn’t the numbness he’d sought with alcohol an attempt to escape such awareness? In the daylight, he could believe he was shedding the past as a snake sheds its skin.

But some nights the old torments came. The sound of the water was not enough. The cold light of the moon, the hoot of an owl, became ominous. On such nights, he felt a deep loneliness; he could not completely rid himself of such a deep-rooted human need. Daylight would come and despair, like the dew, evaporated, but he found himself seeking the companionship of others. He

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

came to know some of the scattered families who also lived in these mountains. He occasionally made his way to the village, even had visitors at his campsite. But only occasionally.

As the days passed, senses he had not known within himself awakened. One afternoon he was walking through the woods when a fallen tree lay in his path. He was about to step over it, had raised his foot to do so, when some atavistic impulse made him stop. For a few moments he’d simply stood there, unsure what had happened. What had halted him was nothing seen or heard. For a few moments longer he listened, heard nothing, saw nothing. He walked around, not over, the fallen tree to see what lay where his foot would have stepped. He saw it then, the coiled, satin-black body, the arrow-shaped head, the blunted tail that rattled once, stilled. The snake uncoiled itself and vanished into the underbrush.

Another afternoon while he passed beneath a rocky cliff, he felt he was being watched. As with the rattlesnake, he paused, saw and heard nothing. He’d walked on, but the sense of being observed would not leave him. Twice more he stopped and looked behind him. The third time he looked up, not back, and saw the mountain lion on a ledge. The cat swished its black-tipped tail three times, then turned away. How much had we lost, he’d wondered after such moments — not just knowledge but an expansiveness of being? What more might we discover within ourselves if

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fully attentive to the world?

After three months, colder weather came. He moved into an abandoned cabin even deeper into the wilderness. The cabin would be his home for three years. He left for days at a time, made the long journey down Hazel Creek to the nearby village. He wrote and published articles about the wilderness that surrounded him. Other times he shared his cabin with visitors. He had never thought of himself as a hermit, but most days and nights he was alone. The hallucinations did not return, but there were still periods of melancholy, and not always at night.

One autumn morning a soft rain fell; fog wreathed the trees.

He had not been here long enough to find, as he later would, solace in such weather. The grayness had turned his mind inward, resurfacing the vexations he had come here to escape. Despite the weather, he left his cabin to walk along the stream, hoping movement might help ease his mind. Then the rain lessened, stopped.

The fog unknit itself and the strands drifted away. He was passing through a stand of poplar trees when, like a lamp wick being turned up, the yellow leaves brightened and the world shimmered in a golden light. The air was charged, and he felt his heart lift, a sensation beyond words, awe the only word proximate. But that morning it had seemed any attempt to define the sensation with language was such a puny, human thing. Though he would eventually write a whole book about these mountains, describe the plant and animal life in detail, extol the landscape’s pristine beauty, there were moments like this that he would never put on paper.

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His detractors, then and now, called him a romantic, which was true. He had read Petrarch, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, learned from and been inspired by them. But he did not believe himself a sentimentalist. A part of what had brought him here was to abide in a world without sham. Arrogance and bluster did not impress nature. It did not suffer fools. A heedless step above a waterfall would send the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, to their deaths. No bribe or petition would make it otherwise. Wilderness could not be corrupted by humans, but humans often destroyed what they could not corrupt.

One summer afternoon he followed the stream beside the cabin to its source, then went farther up the mountain until nothing rose above him but the sky. He looked out at the surrounding mountains and valleys, the virid green of the nearer ridges, the hazy blue of the farther mountains. But he also saw something else, smoke rising from a lumber camp. He knew what would come next, the sound of axes and saws, then the clamor of a train engine bringing more men and axes and saws — a wilderness chained to flat cars and hauled away. Whole mountains scalped, the stumps of felled trees like gravestones. Streams fouled, dead fish clotting the shallows.

He had already witnessed such devastation in the nearby Black Mountains, nothing left but a wasteland of stumps and silt. It would soon happen here too if not stopped, was happening.

When logging began on Hazel Creek, he was forced to abandon the cabin and move to a boardinghouse on the wilderness’s east-

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

ern flank. So he joined others who understood what was being lost. Following the example of John Muir, who’d garnered nationwide support to establish Yosemite National Park, the coalition sought allies both in and outside the Smokies.

For a quarter-century, he and his compatriots fought against the timber companies to create the Smoky Mountains National Park. Though he continued to disappear into the woods, sometimes camping for weeks, most of his energy was focused on helping save the East’s last great forest.

He wrote letters and articles, made trips to Washington. What he and others could not accomplish with words, his friend George Masa did with photographs depicting both the forests that had been destroyed and the ones that might soon be. Wilderness advocates across the nation joined the fight. Newspapers in North Carolina and Tennessee furthered the cause.

But the timber companies had their advocates too. The attacks against the park’s best-known supporters became personal. He found himself denounced publicly as a Bolshevik, an opium addict, a drunk, a man who’d been deserted by his own wife and family. Because of his Japanese ancestry, Masa was denounced as a foreigner. Attempts were made to deport him. The timber companies tried to bribe and threaten politicians who supported the park, and sometimes they succeeded. There were death threats too. Public meetings brimmed with potential violence. Again and again, it appeared the timber companies had won. By 1920, he wrote a friend that there was no hope. At such times the melancholy deepened. He feared the insanity might return.

But each time all had appeared lost, crucial support came.

Children gave pennies at school. John D. Rockefeller donated five-million dollars. George Masa’s photographs convinced Grace Coolidge, the First Lady, to join the cause. The governors of Tennessee and North Carolina advocated for the park in their states and in Washington. Newspaper editors in Knoxville and Asheville wrote more editorials. Public opinion became solidly pro-park, even after the stock market crashed, plunging the country into depression.

Now it is April 2, 1931. Two months ago, he went to Washington with Governor Horton and Governor Gardner to hand over to the Secretary of the Interior the deeds to the purchased land. It was only 150,000 acres, three-hundred thousand short of officially being a national park, but enough to satisfy the National Park Service. It will happen, he believes, though it may take another year or two to complete the final deeds and sales.

❧ A light knock at his door breaks his reverie.

Mr. Kephart, his landlady says. Your friend is waiting in the parlor.

Tell Mr. Tarleton I’ll join him shortly, he replies.

Earlier today Tarleton congratulated him, believing the park now an inevitability. But the envelope in his hand, which came in the afternoon mail, makes clear not everyone agrees. Kephart, Go back to St. Louis and your asylum or you will be killed, the enclosed note threatens. A newspaper clipping accompanies the note, dated March 25, 1904. Horace Kephart Is Held for Observation, The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

the headline proclaims. The timber companies and their minions have not yet given up. He places the clipping and the note back in the envelope. In Saint Louis, a diseased mind had convinced him of all sorts of plots to take his life; now sanity argues not to dismiss this threat. But advocating for the park has brought death threats before, to him and others.

In September he will be sixty-nine. He never imagined that he might live this long. Yet his wrinkles and gray hair confirm it.

He feels the rheumatism in his knees and back, no doubt in part from decades of hiking and camping. Though still able to hike farther than many men half his age, he knows these ailments may soon force him to spend less time in the forests than he’d wish.

But if the time comes when he is confined in this room, he will be able to look out his window and see the mountains, one of which has been named Mount Kephart.

He thinks of the cabin on Hazel Creek. Once the park is complete, neither he nor anyone will live there again. It pleases him to imagine the wilderness slowly reclaiming the cabin. There will come a time when the land itself will have forgotten the cabin’s once-presence. By then the scars left by the timber companies will have healed. Even the railroad tracks will rust away. The envelope with the newspaper clipping and threat is still in his hand. He tears it in half, drops it into the trash can.

I wanted to save these mountains because they saved me, he’d written. It was a grandiose statement. They had indeed saved him, but others had paid a cost, most of all his wife. As for his children, they are all but strangers. Altruism is invariably a means to conceal one’s personal failures. The spouse of a timber baron had told him that three years ago at a public meeting. The statement haunts him. And for all of his words about the healing aspects of nature, his desire for liquor has never been quelled. There continue to be times he drinks himself into unconsciousness.

Perhaps tonight as well. He takes out his pocket watch, checks it. It is almost time to meet his friend Tarleton. They have hired a driver to take them to a bootlegger. They will drink tonight. If, as is his wont, he will be no good in the morning, he will lie in bed most of the day to recover. But even so, by this weekend he will be revived enough to join George Masa for a hike. He has a surprise for George. Last spring as he was hiking alone, he discovered a patch of Oconee Bells. They are found nowhere else in the world except here and a few neighboring counties. Even here they are extremely rare. In all of his years wandering these mountains, he had never come upon them until last spring. Now it is their bloom time once more, the white flowers rising from the dark-green glabrous leaves. This late in life, what wonder to have finally seen them.

He rises from the chair, fetches the key he will lock his door with, and will never need again. PS

❧ Coda: Horace Kephart and his friend Fiswoode Tarleton died in a car wreck on the night of April 2, 1931. The driver survived but gave contradictory answers as to what happened. Kephart’s body was discovered forty feet from the car, the cause of death a broken neck. On September 2, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated The Great Smoky Mountains National Park “for the permanent enjoyment of the people.”

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The First

Funeral Fiction by Clyde Edgerton

Illustrations by David Stanley

A

1977, Hurt, Tennessee

great big lady goes under the funeral tent in her high heels and sings “How Great Thou Art.” She just belts it out. She’s wearing glasses with thick, black rims. And she’s got on a brown hat with a black feather. It’s Mrs. Britt’s funeral and Mrs. Britt is a hundred years old. Or was a hundred years old.

This is my first funeral in the Funeral Militia, and I don’t want to do anything wrong.

Jimbo Summerlin is the captain and he graduated from high school last year and everybody else in the Funeral Militia is about the same age as him. I’m in the fourth grade. There are seven of us here today. The Quaker’s Son is the head of the Funeral Militia and he works at the nuclear bomb place and had to be there today.

He’s the oldest one and his granddaddy was a famous Quaker.

The big lady is singing the song in a real big way.

If we join the Funeral Militia though we sign a contract about never joining the Army. Mama signed mine. This all started ten years ago, right after some people came home from Vietnam.

Jimbo calls cadence when the Funeral Militia marches. Hup, two, three, four. I want to be the caller when I get big enough.

A yellow lightning bolt is on the left sleeve of my uniform, like the others. There’s a plow on the right side. Then it says Funeral Militia in a curve on my front pocket. The uniform is dark blue and the writing and stuff is yellow.

We stand outside the tent while the funeral goes on underneath it — with the family sitting down. We are at Quaker Field. A lot of people stand around outside the tent listening to the song.

The seats under the tent are filled up.

The sun is hot, and you can smell the cut grass from where Dennis Warton just finished mowing around the Quaker House and on out here. I will do a drum roll while Lonnie plays the Red River Valley on the trumpet at the very end of everything.

Lonnie plays a trumpet instead of a bugle. Jimbo does the foldup-and-present the flag part when it’s a man who has served in the armed forces.

The preacher is talking. Preacher Knight. He is almost all the way bald-headed and has this big Adam’s apple and is a little bit skinny. The whole funeral was at the Methodist church where we sat in the balcony, but they brought Mrs. Britt here to get buried.

The pall bears loaded her into the back end of the hearse while we stood at attention right there close by. A lot of people get buried out here.

A man from Knoxville came to a funeral one time and said the Funeral Militia is against the law.

We stand in two rows just outside the tent. Today, it’s three in the front row and four in the second row. I get to stand at the end of the second row. The reason Jimbo is in the Funeral Militia is because his uncle got killed in World War Two and some other people got killed and the Quaker’s Son started the Funeral Militia like it had been started a long time ago but died out with Hitler and them. Everybody has to look straight ahead while we stand here, and I think about how Jimbo can run really fast and he throws a baseball side-armed when he pitches. Sometimes he

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

chews tobacco. He’s kind of a buddy with the Quaker’s Son. I hold my drumsticks in my left hand whether I’m at attention or at ease, and my right thumb has to hold tight against the seam on my pants when I’m at attention. My hands go behind me when it’s “at ease.” I have to keep my drum quiet by not hitting it or scraping against it and all that.

The singer lady is real big and like I said has got this brown hat that has a black feather up out of it. She is wearing a tan dress that kind of holds up her front end. She finishes the song. She sang a little bit like a opera singer. She is wearing high heel shoes that I wonder if they are going to stick in the ground. Mama has some shoes that are a little bit high.

This is the biggest funeral I’ve ever seen at Quaker Field.

Mr. Knight is reading a scripture.

When it’s over, Lonnie plays Red River Valley while I do the drum part. It’s not hard.

It’s the next day now and I can tell you what happened right after the funeral finished and we did Red River Valley. The opera lady walked right straight into this open grave that was not Mrs. Britt’s grave. That grave was covered up with a great big green rug that looked like grass. Somebody had covered up the open part of the grave instead of the dirt that came out of the grave. They was supposed to just cover up the dirt and put planks over the grave. It was a big mistake. It might have been Dennis or Tiny, or the Mustees.

I had just looked at her when she was kind of walking out from under the tent — because you kind of wanted to look at her with her big padded shoulders, and then I looked at something else, and was waiting for “attention,” and somebody hollered, and when I looked back I noticed that she had just disappeared from the earth.

Everybody started over toward the open grave, except not the people who were already down where the cars were parked. That’s where Mama was. I slid my drum strap off, put the drum down easy, and ran over to the grave where I got up right to the edge of it. The lady was down in there pretty covered up by the rug.

I had thought about how big she was when she was singing “How Great Thou Art.” She had these shoulder pads under her dress on her shoulders like Mama does when she dresses up.

She had a big, you know, chest, too. The dress was tan, which I think I said.

Then she got part of the rug all moved back and she’s laying on her back looking up. Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes popped in my head. Her head was kind of rolling back and I figured she’d had the breath knocked out of her because she was looking like that, that look, and her hat was still on and it must have been pinned on or something. It is a brown hat with a black feather, if I didn’t say that. But her glasses were gone with the wind.

Everybody got quiet and I looked around. Preacher Knight was standing there, and Jimbo was kind of kneeling down across the grave from me. I was wondering about what he was thinking, about what he was going to do.

Preacher Knight said to me, “Son, don’t get too close to the edge.” He said it like he might be a little bit mad, so I backed up.

Jimbo didn’t say anything to me, though. He didn’t even look

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at me. He started talking to the lady. “Are you okay?” he says.

And she breathes kind of deep and says, “Hell, no. I’m not okay. Jesus God.” With her talking like that, I looked up at Preacher Knight.

He said to her, “Can you stand up?”

“I wouldn’t be on my ass if I could stand up,” she says. She’s from Nashville, and that’s probably why she talks like that.

The preacher just said, “Well . . . “ Some other people were coming back up from down where the cars were parked. But I didn’t see Mama. All the Funeral Militia were standing around and I wondered what Jimbo was going to do.

The preacher says, “That was a wonderful rendition of ‘How Great Thou Art.’” Floyd says, kind of quiet, “I’ll say how great thou art.”

More people were standing around now, and some more people were coming up.

Mr. Knight says, “Somebody needs to get down in there and get her out.”

I thought about me. I wondered if Jimbo thought about me or about hisself or somebody else.

Lonnie says, “There ain’t no room down there, man.” Lonnie is the biggest one in the Funeral Militia.

“We need a ladder,” said Kenny.

I thought about me going down in there, but I didn’t know if I wanted to or not. I might do something wrong. And I didn’t know the lady. Then I thought about Jimbo maybe choosing me to go down in there and help her out.

“Just pull her up with the tractor bucket,” said Lonnie.

“What?” said Jimbo.

“We can get one of those kids’ swings,” said Lonnie, “from behind the Quaker House and hang it on the bucket with some S hooks. She sits in it and we pull her up.”

“Go get the tractor,” said Jimbo. “The keys is in it.” He was getting to be in charge. I figured he would.

I looked at the preacher and wondered what he would say.

Jimbo said to Carl, “Go get a swing down off that swing set.”

Lonnie was walking on toward the tractor. It sits under a shed in the edge of the woods.

Preacher Knight said, “Can’t we just get a ladder?”

“We’re going to rig up a swing,” says Jimbo. “That way she don’t have to climb out.”

“Wouldn’t a ladder be simpler?” says Preacher Knight.

“I’d be nervous on a ladder,” says the lady up to the preacher. “I might be hurt.”

Everybody was quiet and we heard the tractor crank up down at the edge of the woods.

She was still on her back. I looked around. Some people still didn’t know about what happened because they weren’t coming over.

“This will be easy, ma’am,” said Jimbo. I was across the grave, watching him talk down to her. “We got a tractor coming with a bucket on the front, with hydraulics, and we are going to hang a swing set on it.”

“A bucket?” she says.

“Yes ma’am. Kind of like a big shovel. Like a bulldozer blade,

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sort of. We are going to hook a swing to it. So you can just sit in it and get lifted right up and out.”

Floyd quiet-like started singing, “Love lifted me.” Him and Lonnie get goofy sometimes.

Now the crowd is a little bigger and pretty close up to the grave.

“I think we better get somebody down in there and help you stand up. Is that okay?” said Jimbo. But he didn’t look across at me.

“It’s too bad she didn’t land sitting up,” said Lonnie.

“What?” said the lady.

“I was just talking to Floyd,” Lonnie says.

Then Mrs. Knight, the preacher’s wife, walks up from down where the family cars were — where Mama still was. “What happened?” she says. Then she sees and says, “Oh, my goodness.”

“She fell in the grave,” says Jimbo.

“Oh my goodness,” says Mrs. Knight again, and then she says down into the grave, “Are you okay, Myrtle?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I can get up. Is that you, Pauline?” says the lady. “I can’t half see. My glasses fell off. I hope to hell they’re not broke.”

“These boys will get you out,” says Mrs. Knight. “Lord knows they do everything else around here. Where is the Quaker’s Son?” Lonnie said, “He’s at Oak Ridge today.”

“They’re getting a tractor,” said Mr. Knight. “The boys are getting a tractor.”

“A tractor?” says Mrs. Knight.

Jimbo says, “We’re going to drop down a swing, number one.

She sits, number two. We lift her right out. Bingo.”

“Oh,” says Mrs. Knight. “The song was beautiful, Myrtle.”

“Well, thank you. Then I busted my ass.”

I looked up at Mr. Knight. I wondered why she kept saying bad words. I wondered who put the rug over the grave.

Mr. Knight said, “Maybe you could just turn over on your stomach and then get up on your knees and hands?”

Floyd said, “That’s easy for you to say.”

The tractor was coming up with the front-end bucket that you can lift up high. Then in the next minute or two they got it all rigged up so the bucket was up high and the swing was hanging from it.

“How about letting the boy down to help her get set, get that carpet off her?” said Mr. Knight.

Jimbo looked at me, and then at Mr. Knight. And I wondered what he was going to say. But he didn’t say anything. He was going to pick somebody else, I figured.

Then he looked straight at me and here’s what he said, “Go ahead, Gary.” Gary is my cousin’s name. He didn’t know who I was. He said, “Try to get that grass rug — carpet — off her first.”

“Okay,” I said. I wished he’d called me my name, Ozzie. I thought about what if I messed up. “Can I ride the swing down?”

I said.

“Good idea,” said Kenny. “Get on there.”

I got in the seat and they let me down and I got off right beside her so I wasn’t standing on her, but I was on the grass rug, and I could smell the inside of the earth and it smelled like fishing worms down in there and mixed in was her perfume. They pulled the swing back up.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The top of the ground was up above my head. I started pulling back on the rug to get it from around her waist and around her feet, but I had to kind of go slow and keep my balance because the grave was so narrow.

“What’s your name, son?” she said.

“Ozzie,” I said. I looked at her and she had makeup on her eyes. I looked up for Jimbo, but he was over at the tractor, I guess.

I could hear the tractor motor.

She was helping me kind of get the rug-carpet thing from around her and kind of working herself out of it, and she was on her side, starting to turn over. She stopped moving and looked at me and said, “Ozzie, where did you get that uniform?”

“I’m in the Funeral Militia,” I said.

“What is that?”

“We do military funerals but they ain’t military funerals. They are CC’s. Commemorative Ceremonies, but they are kind of like military funerals, except that’s not what they are.”

She got all the way out from under the rug thing, and while she was getting out, she said, “Did you know Mrs. Britt?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“She was my aunt. She was my daddy’s sister. She was one hundred years old.” Then she looked at her feet. “Can you pull off my damn shoes?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Thank you, Ozzie. I hope I don’t last a hundred years,” she says. She was working herself up to a sit-up position. “Do you think you can find my glasses?” she said. “I think they might be under me. I hope they’re not broke. Hell, I could just go ahead and get buried now.” She was looking at me and smiled and I liked her even after she said those words.

I looked around, and there were her glasses in the corner nearest by. “Here they are,” I said. I got over to them and picked them up and handed them to her and all the while I was smelling the damp dirt and the perfume.

“Who the hell would dig a grave and then cover it up with a carpet?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jimbo said down to her, “If you can sit in the swing, we’ll lift you right out.”

She reached out toward me and I grabbed her hand.

“Grab my elbow,” she said, and I did. She almost pulled me right down on top of her, but she got up to sitting, and then worked her way up to standing. She brushed off the bottom part of her dress.

Somebody up top said, “Can she maybe sing a song from down there?”

Somebody else said, “Sentimental Journey.”

“Ha, ha,” she said, but she wadn’t laughing. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve got some pain in my shoulder,” and she gets in the swing, and is just sitting there. “Mercy, Lord,” she says. The swing starts up and it gets her feet almost up to my knees and one of them S hooks starts slipping up at the top of the bucket thing, sliding down the edge of it, and the swing goes crooked and she’s got one foot on the ground and one in the air and she starts turning in a little circle, holding on to the chains with that one foot

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

on the ground. “Shit,” she says. “What the hell?” She looks up at the tractor.

“My fault, my fault,” yells Kenny. He was driving the tractor.

He let the swing down and she slipped out of the swing and stood up there beside me up close, and I smelled the perfume and she turned toward me and I was sort of looking right at her chest, and I remember dancing with Mama at the Ruritan club one time.

Carl told us the S hook was fixed.

“I don’t think she’s going to get out for awhile,” said Lonnie.

They tried again and lifted her up slow with everybody quiet, and you could hear the seat make a tiny cracking sound, and I heard some crows, until she was up there clear of the grave. Then Kenny turned it and swung her slow over the ground and she did a odd thing right then. I could see her top half over the edge of the grave from where I was — she started swinging like you do in a swing, and then she started singing, “Gonna take a sentimental journey. Sentimental journey home.”

I kind of liked her, except she said those ugly words.

They dropped the swing back down and I got in and rode up and out. We didn’t march I formation back to the Quaker House because it was like a whole different day once we got her out. What happened was they got the rug out and we all started walking back to the Quaker House and just when we started, Jimbo walked over to me and didn’t say anything. He turned me around and put his hands under my armpits and lifted me up till I was on his shoulders and he walked me like that all the way to the Quaker House. I held onto his head under his chin. I felt like it was okay that he got my name wrong. I would ask Mama to tell him who I was. It was the end of my first day in the Funeral Militia.

It’s tonight, and all that happened yesterday, and tonight I take Addie out to pee. It’s kind of warm and cloudy. Addie is our dog that stays in the house. I sit on the steps and wonder about what would happen if Addie fell into an open grave. I wonder how many dogs have ever fell into open graves. I get to thinking about all the stars that I can’t see because of the low clouds that are covering up everything. PS PineStraw

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Postcards from the sky Soaring above Pinehurst in 1911

T

By Bill Case Photographs by Ellsworth Eddy from the Tufts A rchives

he Sandhills was abuzz with excitement after the Pinehurst Outlook reported on March 11, 1911, that within the week, an airplane would be aloft over the town. “Pinehurst,” declared the paper, “is soon to enjoy the novel sight of seeing man vie with the buzzard in its majestic journey through the clouds.”

The community had been chosen by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company (now Curtiss-Wright Corporation) to host a “school of aviation instruction” from March 18 to April 5. The acknowledged goal of the school was promotion of the company’s two-winged biplane, designed by aviation pioneer and company owner Glenn Curtiss.

In addition to providing lessons to would-be pilots, curious onlookers were going to be offered “the delights of a ‘fly’” in the biplane with the “daring aviator” in charge of the school, 24-yearold Lincoln Beachey. Though he had flown planes for just over a year, Beachey’s breathtaking aerial exploits were already gaining him cult-like status among flight enthusiasts.

The native San Franciscan broke into the flight game in September 1905 when Capt. Thomas Baldwin hired the mechanically inclined, but aeronau-

tically inexperienced, teenager to fly a dirigible at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon. Beachey, piloting from a flimsy wooden undercarriage beneath the balloon, skillfully maneuvered the craft while thousands below marveled at the spectacle. According to Frank Marrero’s biography Lincoln Beachey — The Man Who Owned the Sky, Lincoln received “high-profile press coverage by landing, message in hand, on top of ‘The Oregonian’ newspaper company and City Hall, thus initiating air mail.”

Beachey revelled in this first taste of public acclaim.

In pursuit of further headlines, he, along with brother Hillery, conjured up an outlandish scheme. On June 14, 1906, Lincoln ascended in a dirigible from a Washington, D.C., park, the first flight of any kind to occur in the nation’s capital. Gobsmacked by the sight of the airship as it floated high above the Mall and the Washington Monument, citizens were in an uproar. Then Beachey turned the lumbering airship in the direction of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As he descended to the White House lawn, presidential guards sprinted toward the dirigible with mean intentions.

But Beachey was in luck.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s wife also saw him arriving and chose to intervene. She restrained the guards and greeted the daring pilot.

Lincoln Beachey, left, and Charles “Chick”Evans in Pinehurst

“Congratulations, young man!” exclaimed Edith Roosevelt.

“This is certainly the most novel call ever made on the White House.”

Beachey next paid a visit to a joint session of Congress, landing on the steps of the Capitol, then spending the following hour discussing the future of air travel with fascinated lawmakers. He would become an outspoken advocate for governmental investment in aviation.

Beachey’s airship histrionics brought him considerably more than his requisite 15 minutes of fame, but dirigibles became old news when public attention turned to winged aircraft and the daredevils who piloted them. Not wanting to be left behind, Beachey knocked on the door of the Wright Brothers, imploring them to train him to fly in their behalf. Orville and Wilbur, however, wanted Beachey to pay them $500 for the opportunity — a sum that was out of the question for the penurious Beachey. Hat in hand, he accepted a less desirable position as a mechanic with Glenn Curtiss’ outfit. Eventually, he cajoled Curtiss into letting him practice flying a biplane during off hours.

By his own admission, Beachey was inept at first. Though one might not think of flying as a skill best learned by trial and error, according to Marrero’s book, Beachey spent considerable time repairing gears damaged by hard landings. Months passed before his aerial proficiency improved.

When Curtiss’ top pilot, Charlie Hamilton, was seriously injured during a December 1910 flying exposition in Los Angeles, Curtiss reluctantly tapped Beachey to finish out the meet.

Blustery conditions made flying difficult for the nervous Beachey, though he relaxed after discovering the plane’s natural stability tended to even out the rough ride.

That sense of stability didn’t last long. After climbing to 3,000 feet, the plane’s engine stalled out and an eerie silence ensued.

In the early days of flight, this scenario rarely ended well for the pilot. Beachey began plummeting toward the Earth, his craft spiraling out of control. The natural, though often futile, reaction for pilots faced with this predicament was to try to wrestle the plane up and out of the spin, causing the plane to spin even faster. Beachey sensed he could avoid a crash by nosing the plane completely into the dive. This counterintuitive move provided sufficient power for Beachey to regain control. He landed with the exultant roars of the crowd ringing in his ears.

Afterward, Curtiss said to him, “Linc, that was as fine a demonstration of flying as I’ve ever seen. Thank God, you’re alive.”

The flight was something of an epiphany for the young pilot, too. “Mr. Curtiss,” he said, “in the silence I could finally feel the whole machine for the first time. I think I know how to fly now.”

On the heels of this sensational debut, Beachey entered a January 1911 air exhibition held in his hometown of San Francisco. The show featured competitions in racing, take-offs, altitude, landing and showmanship. Lincoln blew away all challengers, winning several contests including “shortest take-off,” for which he earned $1,000.

As he was emerging as an aviation rock star, more than 17 million people would witness his flying feats in over 100 cities during 1911. His derring-do, newfound fame and money brought him attention from admiring females. Though Beachey had married North Carolinian May (Minnie) Wyatt during his dirigible days, those vows didn’t seem to deter the flyer from accepting the company of other young women during his wanderings around the country. To persuade the objects of his affection to join him in a

fling, he would offer them diamond engagement rings, which he purchased by the dozen. He made a practice of keeping one at the ready in his vest pocket and is said to have had fiancées awaiting nuptials in cities across the U.S. The dalliances, however, did not distract Beachey from formulating new and more dangerous aerial maneuvers. Now widely referred to as the “Birdman,” or “The Man who Owns the Sky,” he practiced longer and steeper dives, producing breathtaking close calls. Beachey claimed he was no daredevil and that his extraordinary stunts simply underscored the fact that the normal flying of an airplane was a safe activity. His feats, however, had the opposite effect on public perception, since an alarming number of less-skilled aviators perished in attempts to emulate his maneuvers. The frequency of horrific accidents led to ghoulish betting activity at airshows regarding the likelihood of a fatality.

Notwithstanding this gladiators’ arena-like gruesomeness, aerial shows were beginning to emerge as a bona-fide American sport. The article in The Outlook trumpeting Beachey’s arrival said as much. “Several pupils and a big gallery of ‘fans’ come with Mr. Beachey to enjoy the sport, (for that is what it is rapidly developing into).” The paper offered the view that “as an entertainment novelty, the school promises to be the biggest feature in the history of the Village.” The Outlook even predicted that golf would, for the moment, be “back grounded by interest in the ‘Bird Man.’” In 1911, no airfields existed in the Sandhills, so the Curtiss representatives needed to locate a Pinehurst property with dimensions sufficient to accommodate the taking off and landing of the biplane. They selected a large field on high ground west of the Aberdeen, Carolina and Western railroad track in the vicinity of what is now Linden Road.

Beachey and wife Minnie arrived in Pinehurst on March 18 and bunked at the Berkshire Hotel. The following morning, he made his way to the makeshift airfield and personally took charge of assembling the biplane. By noon, he had the engine whirring with (as The Outlook described it) a “resonant roar.” In short order, Beachey was soaring over Pinehurst, accompanied by the biplane’s mechanic.

Next, he treated R.B. Middleton to his maiden airplane ride.

Middleton, a race car driver from New York, aspired to be an ace aviator under Beachey’s tutelage. Another noteworthy passenger was Commander (later vice-admiral) Shichigoro Saito of the Royal Japanese Navy. According to The Outlook, Saito “left bubbling over with enthusiasm, convinced of (an airplane’s) practicability for Army and Navy uses.”

Minnie also hitched a flight with her husband, though her presence in Pinehurst may not have entirely inhibited Lincoln’s roving eye. The Outlook reported that Miss E. Marie Sinclair, “an accomplished and daring sportswoman,” was “favored with a long and high flight.”

Another first-time passenger was acclaimed amateur golfer Chick Evans, in town for the United North and South Amateur, which he won. If Evans wasn’t the best American golfer in the era immediately prior to the emergence of Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones, he was close. He defeated all the top pros in the 1910 Western Open (then considered a major championship), and later won both the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur in 1916.

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Evans would confess to pre-flight jitters. “Before my ascent,” wrote the golfer, “I imagined the most acute feeling on leaving my old friend the Earth, would be fear; the shuddering, awesome, sort of fear which assails a boy when passing a cemetery on a dark night.” But Evans’ anxiety was allayed once above the pinewoods, where “a profound sensation of security came over me, and while the rush of air was tremendous and the revolutions of the high-power motor deafening, I felt as safe as if sitting upon a sheltered balcony.”

Evans’ observations of flight painted a vivid picture. “The world we were leaving became very small — a strange little boy world. The great Carolina Hotel was the Noah’s Ark of my childhood.” To Evans, the people gathered on the ground resembled “a regiment of toy soldiers.” He marveled at the sight of “the golf links, a beautiful stretch of soft green, with strange square inserts to mark the putting greens, and the winding roads, silver ribbons; with the surrounding landscape stretching on and on, like the ocean, to infinity.”

When the Pinehurst resort’s lead photographer, Edmund L. Merrow, got wind of the fact that the Curtiss team was offering rides to intrepid passengers, he inquired whether the team would permit a photographer to snap pictures of Pinehurst from the air.

The taking of photographs from an airplane was a nearly unheard of activity. No passenger, let alone one schlepping a camera, boarded a plane until 1908. The first such picture-taking occurred in 1909 when a passenger on a plane flown in Italy by Wilbur Wright filmed a three-minute motion picture. It appears that the first aerial photos from a plane in American skies occurred above San Diego in January 1911, just two months before the Curtiss biplane’s flights over Pinehurst.

Merrow convinced the Curtiss team to allow someone to tag along as Beachey’s passenger and take aerial pictures, but the 51-year-old elected not to undertake the project himself, delegating it to his 29-year-old assistant, Ellsworth C. Eddy. The two men had been associated since around 1900, when Merrow hired the young Eddy to assist him at his photography shop in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. During the winter months, Merrow would migrate south to Pinehurst, where he photographed dances, sporting activities and various goings-on at the resort. In 1907, he persuaded Eddy to join him in the Sandhills. During the ensuing four years, the two men were a photographic team, rotating between New Hampshire and Pinehurst, depending on the season.

For Eddy, camera work in Pinehurst had been an enjoyable, though not especially profitable, gig. It allowed him an opportunity to hobnob with celebrities like bandleader John Philip Sousa and sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and now Beachey, Saito and Evans. Flying was not something Eddy was eager to experience, but his assignment required it. As he approached the biplane on March 25, 1911, Eddy presumably wondered whether his $17 per week paycheck was worth it. Would he ever see his wife and children again?

Eddy was greeted at the Curtiss tent on March 25 by the confident Beachey, garbed in coat, vest, white shirt and tie with hat turned backward. Eddy’s diary reveals his trepidation. “I was scared at first when the pilot said before he would take me up, I

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Beachey’s makeshift airfield

would have to sign a release absolving him of any liability.”

Despite misgivings, Eddy signed the exculpatory document, and after being outfitted “in a leather jacket, goggles and hat tied on,” he found himself aloft with Beachey over Pinehurst. Buffeted by the wind, his vision impaired by goggles, and struggling to maintain his balance sans seat belt while hoisting the camera, the picture-taking was cumbersome if not downright harrowing. But Eddy managed to snap six pictures of the town and airfield below.

The images clearly depict early Pinehurst, then 16 years in existence, and still in the nascent stages of development. No longer a denuded pine barrens, hundreds of newly planted trees and other ornamental plantings created a boulevard affect along Carolina Vista, Magnolia and Ritter roads. In 1911, the latter road, unlike today, passed directly in front of the Carolina Hotel. The “Music Room,” shown at the right of the hotel, would later be razed and replaced by another structure that currently houses the hotel’s spa. While a substantial number of homes are visible, housing density is low. The tented Curtiss airfield is depicted with onlooking spectators.

His nerve-racking camerawork made young Eddy something of a trailblazer. He may have just missed being the first aerial photographer shooting from an airplane in the United States, but Steve Massengill’s book, Around Southern Pines, A Sandhills Album, confirms Ellsworth’s photos were the first such taken in North Carolina.

From their studio on the corner of Chinquapin and Magnolia roads, Merrow and Eddy immediately converted the unique images into postcards, and by early April they were on the market.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

According to local historian Larry Koster, “Pinehurst postcards were a cheap, easy way for the many tourists to convey both the beauty and attractions of this area to the folks back home.” They also provided wonderful advertising for the resort.

Koster, who authored the 2009 publication The Photographers of Moore County and Their Postcards, has been searching for and collecting vintage Pinehurst postcards for 25 years. He eventually acquired examples of all six postcards depicting the aerial images taken by Eddy and, in recognition of their historical significance, has donated them to the Tufts Archives.

On Thursday, April 7, 1911, Beachey, according to The Outlook, “took the big bird apart, packed it in its snug cage and left for Fayetteville, the first point of many which lie before him.” Waxing eloquently, the article noted that residents would miss the plane’s “weird notes at dawn, twilight or high noon, its presence in the sky, the grotesque, fleeting shadow.”

The writer compared the sight of Beachey’s jaw-dropping flights to “the grandeur of Niagara — the spectrum in the spray and the roar of the waters.” The reference proved a precursor to Beachey’s incredible exhibition at Niagara Falls less than three months later, on June 26, 1911. For the stupendous sum of $4,000, he dove his Curtiss Pusher straight for the center of Horseshoe Falls, his aircraft suddenly vanishing in the mist. Many spectators swooned at what they perceived was the pilot’s certain demise. With spray stinging the Birdman’s face, his plane suddenly shot out “like a cannonball” from the bottom of the mist, after plunging to within inches of the raging river. Having been offered an additional bonus of $1,000 for flying beneath the arch of Honeymoon

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The Carolina Hotel and the Music Room, 1911

Bridge, Beachey promptly tacked on that daunting stunt. One newspaper declared him “the eighth wonder of the world, and his dive into the Falls, the greatest aerial feat of all time.”

In August, Beachey performed more amazing exploits at a Chicago aerial competition. He shattered the world record for altitude, attaining 11,642 feet, but it was his crowd-pleasing stunts that would be remembered best. Eyeing a locomotive headed into the city, he dropped down to brush his wheels atop the train, then passed within spitting distance on both sides of the passenger cars while waving to those inside. Then, Beachey hopped his plane from one car to the next.

In a subsequent flight, dressed as a woman for dramatic effect, he frightened the spectators with a seemingly out of control dive directly at the grandstand. Beachey pulled the plane up just 8 feet from mayhem. He turned and headed toward the central city, where he ducked under power lines, bounced off tops of cars and buildings, then landed to a 10-minute standing ovation after pulling off his wig revealing his true identity. In a rather somber note, two pilots attempting similar dives crashed and died at the meet.

Over the next three years, Beachey’s aerial acrobatics would further cement his fame. Even Orville Wright acknowledged his aerial mastery. “Beachey is more magnificent than I had imagined,” proclaimed Wright. “I have watched him closely with my glasses and have never seen him make an error or falter. An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey is poetry . . . He is the most wonderful flyer of all.” Thomas Edison paid similar tribute.

His numerous affairs ultimately undermined Beachey’s marriage. Minnie divorced him in 1913. In the court proceeding, she claimed her husband had conducted illicit affairs in 32 cities. One headline read, “Aviator’s Conquest Not of Air Alone.” He also received increasing press criticism because so many pilots perished in attempts to duplicate his various stunts. A San Diego Union

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editorial, noting his “wild performances,” opined that “there is serious doubt as to whether Beachey should be allowed to continue.” The barrage took its toll on the flier, who announced on May 13, 1913, “You could not make me enter an aeroplane at the point of a revolver. I am done.” In his statement, Beachey castigated the attendees at his exhibitions, saying they “paid to see me die.”

His retirement, however, was short-lived. Four months later, he was flying in exhibitions again. Instead of throttling back his theatrics, the Birdman presented an array of new tricks in his comeback: flying both upside down and backward, inside and through a San Francisco building. He raced his plane around a track against the country’s top race car driver, Barney Oldfield. At times during a race, Beachey would cause the front wheel of his plane to graze Oldfield’s head.

Then, in November 1913, Beachey debuted a maneuver which would become his signature stunt: the loop-the-loop, in which he would dive, pull back on the controls at 1,000 feet, then climb until the nose of the airplane would fall back beyond the vertical.

Then he would repeat the stunt — again and again. He conceded he was pushing the limits. “I do not intend to let the margin of safety and disaster be any wider than I can help. Beachey never cheats the crowds, that is, excepting those who come to see me die.”

His acrobatics drew the attention of America’s top military brass, who were starting to realize that the maneuvers Beachey had mastered could have application in warfare. In September 1914, the secretaries of the Army and Navy invited him to Washington, D.C., for a demonstration. Beachey was intent on making an impactful splash. At one point, he aimed his biplane toward the Oval Office of the White House, where an aghast President Woodrow Wilson saw him coming. The Birdman pulled up and away at the last instant.

Similar acrobatics were directed at the Capitol Building.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The village of Pinehurst and the road leading to The Holly Inn

Congress was then in session, but promptly adjourned so that the members could view Beachey’s theatrics. If any legislator present harbored doubts regarding the usefulness of airplanes in wartime, Beachey’s performance erased them. When subsequently huddled with assembled Congressmen, he remarked, “If I had had a bomb, you would be dead. You were defenseless. It is time to put a force in the air.”

In March 1915, Beachey came home to San Francisco to perform at the Panama Pacific International Exhibition. As he strolled around the fairgrounds arm-in-arm with his new 23-yearold fiancée Merced Wallace, his star was at its zenith. In the four years since his Pinehurst visit, he had become an aviation legend and an A-list celebrity. To honor their hometown hero, the organizers had proclaimed March 14 “Beachey Day.” There had also been significant changes in the life of Ellsworth Eddy since his flight with the Birdman. He had left Merrow’s employ in the fall of 1911 because his salary was insufficient to support a family. To make ends meet, he worked at the Carolina Hotel for a year, renting out horses to guests. In the spring of 1913, he opened his own photography studio on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southern Pines and became the town’s go-to photographer until he and his wife retired to Florida in 1946. He passed away in 1973, at age 91.

Lincoln Beachey was not destined to approach the photographer’s lifespan. His demise was especially ironic. It came after he said he would give the 50,000 Beachey Day spectators, “a The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

show they’ll never forget.” While flying his new monoplane, Beachey launched into one of his patented dives. The right wing of the plane suddenly failed, breaking under the pressure. Then the left wing followed suit. As the enormous San Francisco crowd watched in horror, he crashed into the bay at 210 miles per hour. Though surviving the initial impact, he was unable to get free from his restraints and drowned. Lincoln Beachey was just 28.

Tributes to the “Man who Owned the Sky” came from all over the country. There were plans for a permanent memorial in San Francisco, and money was contributed for that purpose though the funds were subsequently repurposed toward America’s efforts in World War I. As new aviation heroes like Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh took the national stage, memories of Beachey and his incredible early achievements faded into obscurity. He was elected to the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1966 and the International Acrobatics Hall of Fame in 1990. And a small band of aviation devotees still honor the flyer every March 14 — Beachey Day — by dropping pink roses into San Francisco Bay. In Pinehurst, a town that venerates its storied history, the whirr of his biplane’s engine is a distant memory preserved only in a picture postcard captured by a reluctant cameraman. PS Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at william.case@thompsonhine.com.

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Fiction by Ashley Walshe Photograph by Julianne Ziebell

e

re’s something they don’t warn you about time travel: all the bubbles.

Big deal, you might think. You’re surrounded by floating orbs of ever-changing color and light. Yes, they can be pretty spectacular. But until you’ve lived through this kind of high magic — and a precious few have — you cannot know what a psychedelic trip these iridescent spheres are capable of inducing, especially when you’re off dipping through time and space.

And in the summer of 1892, that is precisely what The Tiger Sisters were doing. Time traveling.

Or preparing for it, rather. Why? Because they’d pretty much mastered everything else.

The Tiger Sisters were perhaps the most legendary circus performers of their day. No, they weren’t slinking around in the cage with the exotic cats. They were acrobats, most famous for their high-wire and flying trapeze performances, although you should have seen them on horseback.

They got their name because of their propensity for wearing matching stripes, which was part of their cutesy act. It worked. Most people had no clue that they were actually in their mid-30s — and spacetime pioneers to boot.

So why were these three brilliant explorers living the carnie life? The money was good, for one thing. They also really loved feeding the elephants. And do you know what kind of physical shape you’ve got to be in to do a forward flip on the back of a galloping horse? The circus arts kept them spry. If they were going to time travel — yes, the culmination of their life’s work — then they were going to need to stay pretty limber.

The Tiger Sisters made a pact on the summer evening of their maiden voyage: Wherever they landed, past or future, as long as it was summer, they would be OK. Because summer, as every seasoned circus artist knows, is the most magical time of the year. And where there is magic, all is well.

What happened next is a mystery to all but three. There were bubbles, sure. So many bubbles.

They could never have prepared for so many.

Some say the sisters never returned — just, poof! — vanished without a trace, erasing themselves from the very fabric of existence. Think about it. Have you ever heard of The Tiger Sisters? Ever seen their likeness on a vintage circus poster? Only the elephants seemed to notice their absence.

Others say they’re still floating around out there in the dreamy light of an endless summer. Still in their matching striped outfits. Showing up in this century and that. Still a bit woozy from the riot of bubbles. PS Ashley Walshe lives in Asheville and is dreaming up her next grand adventure.

Julianne Ziebell is a mother, a military spouse, an anthropologist by training, and a photographer by passion. You can find more of her work at www.julianneziebellphotography.com.

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STORY OF A HOUSE

Dome, Sweet

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Dome

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Paying it forward in Pinebluff

By Deborah Salomon Photographs by John Gessner

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“E

.T. phone home.”

That rings a bell at a triple-dome Pinebluff structure resembling an albino caterpillar/spaceship — a real shocker in the cottage-y enclave adjacent to Pinebluff Lake.

“Oh yes, people stop and knock on the door,” says Candy Ruedeman, who bears no resemblance to an extraterrestrial.

The undulating exterior of the domes is the antithesis of conventional stick construction with its straight lines and 90 degree angles. The shaded interior, resulting from limited windows, feels comforting and safe, enveloping its occupants. Inside, the air feels cool rather than AC-frosty. Each room is equipped with a ductless, wall-mounted AC/heating unit. Concrete blown over a foam core provides insulation. Poured concrete floors refresh bare feet.

Although above ground, construction surpasses FEMA’s guidelines for survivability. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew blew a dock off the nearby lake but swept over the domes without damage.

These monolithic dome homes — the semi-official title — are fire resistant, termite-and-rot-proof, energy efficient and, besides hurricanes, have survived tornadoes and earthquakes. Some are lavish multi-story residences with balconies and turrets.

Others enable year-round swimming pools. A commercial dome housing offices or stores benefits from instant recognition. Ski resort domes, beach domes, mountain domes, office domes, school and studio domes exist. Still, not everybody could live in a house where hanging pictures can be a challenge, where straight-line furnishings don’t fit, where electric outlets can’t be added or moved, and where bumping into a textured concrete wall can skin a knee.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Skip and Candy Ruedeman weren’t “everybody.” He served in Vietnam as an Air Force fighter jet mechanic.

She was a critical care nurse. Both grew up in Kentucky, in ordinary middle-America houses. Their only joint residential adventure: building a log home from a kit.

They were living in Colorado as retirement from the water-conditioning business approached. “We wanted to get back to the green, and be nearer the beach,” Candy says. Golf was a factor, but not primary. Skip had a cousin who lived in Moore County. They came for a look, liked the area but not the resort bustle of Pinehurst and Southern Pines.

“I can make a home anywhere,” Candy continues.

“But we wanted a place where we couldn’t hear the neighbors.” The 1-acre heavily wooded lot in Pinebluff suited their needs.

Skip knew dome homes from helping a friend build one in California. The mechanics fascinated him. Explained simply, a ring foundation reinforced with rebar is laid for each dome. Vertical steel bars embedded in the ring attach at the overhead apex. A special fabric is placed on the base and inflated. Foam is applied to interior surfaces, which are then sprayed with a concrete mix that can be painted.

Because of zoning and planning requirements each window opening required a dormer-like configuration. The Ruedemans topped them with curved “eyebrows.” The division of interior space can be accomplished with straight walls, or curvy, suggesting niches. For their “Pine Dome,” Candy and Skip chose mostly curvy, creating the look of a The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

modern art museum.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Alice whispers from the rabbit hole.

The 1,700-square-foot space was sectioned into a livingkitchen-great room, three bedrooms, two baths and two eating areas, but no formal dining room. Closing off a corner of the kitchen created a pantry. Conventional glass doors open onto a deck overlooking a clearing where Candy feeds the forest creatures. At one end of this three-hump caterpillar stands a conventional shed/workshop for Skip’s tools; at the other, a fenced vegetable garden.

Construction by professionals, with the Ruedemans crewing in, took eight months. Lacking straight lines, the house presented measuring problems for building inspectors. In December 2014, they moved in.

The couple decided to ditch all their furnishings except one bed and start anew at Ikea, supplemented by tables, shelves, and other pieces, including an African violet stand designed and crafted by Skip. Since the master bedroom had no wall space for their dresser, they created a closet around it. A desk belonging to Candy’s dad became a bathroom vanity.

Other décor choices have a single purpose: showcasing mementos accumulated by a close, loving family. One hallway is virtually covered with photos of their two sons and five grandchildren plus framed documents from Skip’s Air Force career. An old printer’s tray holds miniatures.

A photo shows Candy skydiving. In one bedroom Candy hung sections from a quilt made by her grandmother. On

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a kitchen wall, a holder displays painted eggs. A dulcimer made by her father hangs on another.

The top section of a lawyer’s bookcase with glass doors stands opposite the sofa. In it is a collection of dolls and teddy bears, each representing a person or event. “That one is from my first Christmas. This is the first Christmas present Skip gave me,” Candy says. “This is the first time I’ve had them on display.”

Skip loved trains. A toy track and cars are mounted over the deck doors. Candy’s best idea was asking friends and family to paint wooden pulls for the kitchen drawers and cabinets. Each is different, personalizing a galley kitchen separated from the living room by only a counter.

But what must the neighbors think? That a UFO landed on their quiet street? Don Woodfield lives across from Pine Dome. He watched the construction from clearing the land to blowing the concrete. His opinions have been positive from the get-go.

“Never a thought,” Woodfield says. “Just we’ve got new neighbors. Let’s go find out about them.” So over he went, beer and snacks in hand, soon discovering that, like himself, Skip was a Vietnam vet. Later on, they worked together on a Habitat for Humanity home build.

By now, the caterpillar has settled into the landscape. The coffee-colored plush sofa and upholstered headboards don’t seem stranded against curving walls. But this summer something is missing.

Skip passed away last August, suddenly, at 76. Candy is comforted living among his handiwork.

“This house was our legacy. This is what we chose to do, the house Skip wanted to build.”

There have been offers to buy Pine Dome.

But for now Candy, with visits from her children and grandchildren, will stay close to him here, in a house far from ordinary but close to home. PS The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Homestyles

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Downtown Southern Pines SE Broad & NY Ave. So Pines, NC 28388 8am - Noon ~ April 16-October 29 (No Market on Oct. 1st due to Autumnfest) Facility Courtesy of Town of Southern Pines

www.MooreCountyFarmersMarket.com © 2021 Moore County Farmers Market Facebook.com/moorecountyfarmersmarket

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

A L M A N A C

August

By Ashley Walshe

A

ugust is equal parts ecstasy and agony.

At dawn, a shimmer of hummingbirds dips and weaves among cascades of morning glories and a sweeping sea of hibiscus. In one day, the nectar of one thousand flowers will have sweetened their bellies and tongues. In one month, when the blossoms fade, the tiny birds will disappear, taking summer with them.

The honeybees have multiplied. They drift in dizzying circles, supping joe-pye weed and purple coneflower as if the future of the hive depends on it. And it does. The bees know that the season is slipping with each precious sip.

They know not to waste it.

Swallowtails orbit goldenrod and lemon balm, ring around the butterfly bush, float like dreams from blossom to fragrant blossom. Soon they, too, will vanish.

Yet — for now — all is lush and dreamy. All is warm and stickysweet. Never mind that each kiss between bee and flower could be the last. The golden season always dims to black.

And so, you savor the last glorious slice of it. Absorb it with your whole body like the water snake sunning on the rock. Cradle it like a sipping spirit; inhale deeply, drink slowly, let the textures and flavors roll around on your tongue.

Sprawl out across the summer grass. Float from flower to flower. Drink the nectar of one thousand blossoms.

Harvest the fruits of the garden. Sink your teeth into them. At night, dance among the fireflies, here for a glittering moment, and then gone.

The cicadas know. As they scream out in rapturous longing — ecstasy and agony and nothing in-between — you soak up the sweetness of summer as if the future depends on it. As if it will carry you through the darkest days of winter.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Sweet Morning Glory The morning glories have run wild. Twining vines with heart-shaped leaves and fragrant, tubular flowers, these late summer bloomers are hummingbird magnets.

They thrive in full sun and, given a trellis or fence, will climb up to 20 feet.

Among the most common varieties are Heavenly Blue (sky-blue with white-and-yellow throats), Grandpa Ott (a royal purple heirloom from Germany), Fieldgrown (an amalgam of white, pink and purple blossoms) and Crimson Ramblers (a hummingbird favorite).

True to its name, the blossoms open in the morning, each lasting for just one glorious day.

The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled.

— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees Late Summer Harvest The garden gives and gives. August offers eggplant, green beans and peppers. The last of the sweet corn. The earliest apples, pears and figs. And — oh, yes — an endless stream of plump tomatoes.

But what to do with them?

The ’Mater Sammich never fails (make mine with Cherokee Purple, balsamic glaze and pesto mayo — I’m no purist). Cook them down into sauces. Dice them for pico de gallo. Make bruschetta, pasta salad and summer quiche.

Better yet, pluck them straight off the vine, sprinkle with salt and enjoy. PS

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PS PROfiles The People & Businesses That Make The Sandhills A More Vibrant Place To Live And Work!

AUGUST 2022 SPONSORED SECTION

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOLLY NAZARIO

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LAURA BARMORE OWNER

Laura Barmore knows the pleasures of owning a second home – and the pitfalls. Her own experience inspired her to found Carolina Concierge & Co. this year, taking the stress out of second home ownership. A trip to Pinehurst in the late ‘90s and triumphant winning of the Putter Boy on Pinehurst No. 2 cemented her love of all things Moore County. Thus began 20 years of absentee homeownership, remotely managed from a family farm in the Shenandoah Valley. One thing Laura will never forget is a late night arrival to their vacation home, welcomed by two inches of water running over Brazilian cherry floors. She wished she’d had an estate property management company then!

From a 17-year career as a Wall Street Financial Analyst and 19 years as founder-owner of an apparel and home goods business, it was the relocation to their vacation destination as principal place of residence and her husband’s 16-year real estate business in Moore County that led Laura to create Carolina Concierge & Co. Her aim is to ensure that your primary residence, vacation home or investment property is protected and managed by a professional.

Concierge services include overseeing existing maintenance accounts, owner arrival and departure services, cleaning services, package and mail delivery and severe weather threat precaution services and ensuring your property looks its best - not vacant and vulnerable.

With keen attention to detail, Laura provides a bi-weekly property inspection for intrusion or damage. Ultimately, she customizes an oversight management plan based on the individual needs of each client.

Life gets busy for professionals with full lives and other interests. Laura knows that from experience. Her goal is that you can enjoy your vacation home and your Pinehurst experience without any hassles or headaches.

When you’re not here, I Am lbarmore55@gmail.com 540-462-7794 The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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SHEREE LANCASTER

SENIOR FINANCIAL ADVISOR, OWNER As a once-competitive archer, Sheree Lancaster knows the value of keeping to a straight path. She’s famously “robin-hooded” arrows not just once, but twice in her life. When it comes to planning though, this Senior Financial Advisor is the first to urge flexibility.

In 2020, Sheree opened Star of the Pines Wealth Management to help everyone – regardless of their asset level – prepare for, work through and succeed in retirement. After 26 years in the retail banking sector, 17 of which were spent as a financial advisor, Sheree is fully licensed to provide insurance and investment advice across the United States. She also offers specific investment strategies such as college savings and beginner investor-focused objectives, as well as insurance services such as annuities, life insurance and long term care insurance. In a heartfelt effort, Sheree launched a program to offer financial counseling free of charge to newly engaged and newlywed couples.

Locally, Sheree and her team were finalists in the 2021 Best of the Pines contest and she recently received the Member of the Year Award at the Sandhills Wedding and Event Association’s annual event.

On principle, Star of the Pines does not charge for conversations or consultations. They care about our community and those who live in it, and truly want to help everyone achieve financial confidence for life.

When she’s not in the office, Sheree is an outdoor aficionado who loves to hike and camp under the night sky. Those stars may not move, but your financial goalposts might.

If you’re searching for a guiding star, hitch your wagon to Sheree and Star of the Pines Wealth Management.

340 Commerce Ave. Suite 6, Southern Pines, NC 28387 910-725-2075 Facebook: @starofthepineswealthmanagement

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Affiliated with Capital Investment Advisory Services, LLC. Securities offered through Capital Investment Group, Inc., Member FINRA/SIPC 100 E. Six Forks Road, Ste. 200, Raleigh, NC 27609 (919) 831-2370

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SUN MOON KIM MD FSCAI FACC

Reid Heart Center has served the community as a regional pioneer in advanced technology since it was founded in 2011, led by a distinguished group of cardiologists and cardiothoracic surgeons. As the area’s only structural cardiologist, Dr. Sun Moon Kim is a critical member of the team.

Dr. Kim grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Georgia Institute of Technology and St. George’s University of Medicine in the West Indies, and completed his residency and fellowship at the University of Kentucky. After training in numerous specialties and earning five degrees he completed another fellowship in Structural Heart Disease at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The specific field piqued his interest as it would allow him to practice medicine as both a clinician and proceduralist.

Structural cardiology is a relatively new field of heart care that addresses all diseases related to the structures of the heart. Whether you have a minor structural condition that can be alleviated by medication or a serious condition that calls for open-heart surgery, Dr. Kim and his team believe that every patient deserves unique care. They focus on specific evaluations and treatment plans that can offer alternative therapies to heart surgery.

As Reid Heart Center continues to advance in cardiovascular care, Dr. Kim has plans to offer more options pertaining to valvular heart disease, cardiac defects and even pulmonary embolism or lung clots in the future.

He and his wife live in Pinehurst with their two daughters. They are raising them in a bilingual household with an emphasis on heart healthy, international cuisine. The self-professed “foodies” love to support local restaurants.

His first love of medicine originated in a personal credo to bring positive change to others. His values partner with FirstHealth’s motto to put people first.

Whether providing care to his patients or nurturing his family and community, Dr. Kim is all heart.

REID HEART CENTER 120 Page Road N Pinehurst, NC 28374 910-715-1000 www.firsthealth.org/heart

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Photo by: Rachel Garrison

RACHEL FLOOD

LORNA LASSITER JESSICA LOPEZ

RACHEL KERR

DEBBY SPRANKLE

ANNA WILBUR HALLIE MEJAN

SAMANTHA MCBRIDE

OWNER

Debby Sprankle is passionate about healthy, beautiful hair.

Growing up in New York, she began her career with Wella color before training with Redken and ultimately making the switch to Keune. She is Brazilian Blowout and Deva Cut certified (curly haired girls, rejoice!) But she considers Exhale…A Salon’s thirteen years in business as her greatest accomplishment.

She’s also passionate about training, and believes in educating others on hair health as a Keune Hair Cosmetics Educator. In fact, training – of a different kind – is what brought her to the area in the first place. The Sandhills’ year-round training weather brought the Ironman Triathlete to North Carolina in 2008. In an ever-changing sport, she’s recently hired a bodybuilding coach to keep testing her limits.

It’s just as important to evolve in the hair industry.

Whether helping a client choose the right style, mentoring a stylist – or picking up tips for her other passion, pickleball – Debby is always looking to improve. That energy earned her

a spot on The Beauty Underground team in the 2017 North American Hairstylist Awards in Las Vegas, and in NYC for fashion week.

It’s a vitality that shows in her team of seven stylists at Exhale…A Salon, which Debby founded in 2009. They work constantly to promote personal and professional growth, pushing their skills as artists to find the newest techniques, big city trends, and frizz-taming treatments to bring to our beloved town of Southern Pines.

Exhale provides cuts, dimensional hard color, hair extensions, smoothing treatments, blowouts, special occasion hair and more for men, women and children. With a new e-shop on the website, clients can support a local independent business, never run out of products and easily shop from home. At Exhale, they’re more than a group of individuals who do great hair. They’re a team. Together, they will dream big and help one another make those big dreams reality…

Starting with your perfect cut.

REID HEART CENTER 120 Page Road N Pinehurst, NC 28374 910-715-1000 www.firsthealth.org/heart

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125 Murray Hill Rd, Ste F., Southern Pines NC 28387 910-885-4354 www.exhaleasalon.com The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

JEREMY WELMAN OWNER/MANAGING PARTNER

We all have that treasured childhood memory of slipping into the local movie theater on a hot, sunny day, enraptured by the experience and a few hours in another world. For Jeremy Welman, it’s an experience that led him to a career that’s already spanned more than 40 years in the cinema industry. He’s developed concepts like CineBistro and has operated some of the highest volume theaters in the country. Now, Welman will man the helm at the new Carolina Cinemas - Sandhills Ten. In April 2022, Carolina Cinemas was founded mid-air on Welman’s plane ride from Arizona to North Carolina to acquire the theater. The opportunity to purchase the property and assume operations in such a wonderful community was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Welman has wasted no time bringing his big ideas for the theater to the screen. Beyond the massive

renovations, he and his staff of 30 are focused on hospitality with new systems and technology.

Plans to partner with local vendors like James Creek Cider House and staging new indoor/outdoor furniture are coming soon.

This summer saw the premiere of an 8-week children’s camp, with weekly $2 tickets. Welman is working to diversify programming, so there is something for everyone, from family movies and big blockbusters to sporting and music viewing events. He is excited to use this new venture as an opportunity to immerse himself in the community, and it shows in the many changes made since opening the theater.

More than anything, Welman wants this place to go above and beyond “just a theater.” Well, build it, and they will come.

104 Brucewood Rd, Southern Pines, NC 28387 910-695-1100 www.carolinacinemas.com

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NICOLE STEIN ANGELA ROBB CO-OWNERS

The first of its kind in the region, Sandhills Trolley Company is the 2022 brainchild of local entrepreneurs and co-owners Nicole Stein and Angela Robb. You may know Angela as owner of the popular Karma Beauty Bar; what started as a joke around the scarcity of parking near her Southern Pines spa evolved to a new business of five employees, with a trolley style that harkens back to the original Southern Pines-Pinehurst Trolley line of 1896.

Though not native to Southern Pines themselves, Angela and Nicole came to the area following their husbands’ military careers. It’s the deep sense of community that has kept the two friends here. From travels across the globe, they’ve found there’s nothing like Moore County, and their family has rallied with them to bring this new vision to life, from writing scripts to planning routes.

STC will be the leading provider of unique trolley tours, offering a variety of seasonal and tailored tours to pique the interest of the entire Sandhills area. No slow ride with humdrum host here, however. The girls with the trolley have planned unique tours with music, interactive games, performances and comedy, using location-based technology and local actors to enhance the overall experience.

Nicole and Angela wanted to bring something to the region that would not only entertain, but help promote other local businesses and the Moore County community. Get your tickets now; first tours will begin in August with a plan to double the amount of tour-experience offerings in September.

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info@sandhillstrolley.com www.SandhillsTrolley.com PineStraw

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DR. KIM BULLARD CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Dr. Kim Bullard is a lifelong advocate for children of all abilities, with more than 25 years’ experience as both a teacher and administrator in Lee and Moore County Schools. As the new Chief Executive Officer at Sandhills Children’s Center, she is honored to have the opportunity to be a part of this phenomenal organization and to continue giving back to the community.

Kim is eminently qualified for the job, with a Bachelors in Elementary Education, a Masters of School Administration and a Doctorate of Educational Leadership. She has taught kindergarten, fourth grade, and Extended Content, as well as having served as a Principal and Director for Exceptional Children’s Services.

This long journey in education all began at Sandhills Children’s Center. In college, Kim had the opportunity to observe classes at SCC for her degree, an experience which sparked a love for working with children, especially children with disabilities. As she transitioned into public education, this passion followed her. She has seen the importance and need for early intervention and is eager to be a part of the Center’s mission to support such vast needs through services such as physical, speech and occupational therapy.

Founded in 1970 as a day school for children with severe disabilities, SCC has grown to be one of the state’s largest preschool programs for children with disabilities, while offering childcare services for children without disabilities as well.

Photo Contributed

1280 Central Dr, Southern Pines, NC 28387 910-692-3323 www.sandhillschildrenscenter.org The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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DR. JORDAN HUBBARD DENTIST

Dr. Jordan Hubbard grew up working in her father’s dental office, inspired by the intricacies of his work, making smiles whole again and seeing how his patients admired him. She was grateful his work schedule would allow him to attend her important life events, and it was a flexibility she desired for her own family. Slowly the dream took shape – to own her own business, work in medicine, and help others – all at the same time.

After graduating from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Dentistry Jordan relocated to North Carolina. In 2020, she made her dreams a reality and purchased a local practice that had been serving the community for over 35 years. The practice was renamed Hubbard Dental in 2021.

Hubbard Dental is a general dentistry office that can handle anything from extractions to fillings, crowns to orthodontic work, as well as cosmetic options like veneers and whitening. Dr. Hubbard and her nine employees - including Dad as her Associate Dentist pride themselves on treating patients as a whole – not just a mouth!

They’re particularly proud of the practice’s two lasers for managing pain and cleanly executing both hard and soft tissue procedures.

Named one of The Pilot’s 20 Under 40 award winners in 2022, Dr. Hubbard is the Vice President of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Association of Women Dentists, a member of multiple dental study groups, working toward her Fellowship from the Academy of General Dentistry and holds a certificate in forensic odontology. After a lengthy study on frenectomies, she will be rolling out a series for infants, children and adults this fall to treat tongue and lip ties. Since performing the treatment on her youngest child and observing its life-changing effects, she’s eager to help others in the community in this way.

Dr. Hubbard’s family and two young sons, Beckett and Wells, are her whole world. She enjoys cooking, especially with fresh produce from her own vegetable and flower garden. Finding “a little slice of paradise” right here in Pinehurst has continued to motivate her to bring top-notch dental care to this amazing community.

155 Turnberry Way Pinehurst, NC 910-695-3050 HubbardDentalNC.com

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HOLLY BELL GEORGE MANLEY PRINCIPLES/OWNERS Locally owned Bell Manley Properties was founded by Holly Bell and George Manley in 2018, after the two had been working in partnership since 2012. From traditional commercial real estate sales, they have grown to include property management in five counties, a new residential division offering boutique services and a new Raeford office in 2022. They have developed more than a dozen residential subdivisions, and built a Land and Forestry division under the management of registered forester and knowledgeable broker, Matthew Wimberly. When you work with Bell Manley Properties, you are gaining an entire company to solve your particular needs.

Originally from New England, Holly Bell graduated from Yale University with degrees in engineering and art history, and worked on Capitol Hill in DC before moving to Southern Pines. She worked in the golf industry at Pine Needles and Mid-Pines for more than 15 years before transitioning into the real estate business. As a long time resident of the Sandhills area, Holly loves spending time with her children, Pendleton, Charles, and Walker, and enjoys the fabulous local golf opportunities when time permits.

George Manley was born in Mozambique and grew up in South Africa. He ran a bar in Cape Town for many years before discovering a love of real estate. After all his global travels, he thinks Moore County, North Carolina is the best place to live! George earned his American citizenship several years ago. His family menagerie of dogs, cats, a rabbit, crabs and the threat of a Highland cow keeps him busy-- as does his six-year-old daughter, Ella.

Bell Manley takes pride in their hands-on experience, including complex zoning and development issues. Property transactions require a high level of specialized knowledge as well as strong relationships with key players. Holly and George will give you honest and knowledgeable advice with a high level of integrity - no sales pitch, no nonsense.

235 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Southern Pines, NC 28387 910-684-5353 www.bellmanleyrealestate.com The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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IAN DELISLE

FOOD & BEVERAGE DIRECTOR The South doesn’t always get credit where it’s due – for the architecture, the literature or, most importantly the food.

Fortunately, Southern comfort food is seeing a well-deserved comeback. If you’re looking for the type of cuisine Mark Twain once described as “as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin,” head over to YellowBIRD Southern Table and Bar. One visit and you’ll be hankering to return.

In a way, that lure of Southern hospitality is what brought Ian DeLisle home to the “Pines.” Now the Food and Beverage Director for LMG Restaurant Group, Ian grew up and lived in the area for more than 20 years. He still enjoys bumping into folks from his youth walking down Broad Street.

His father was an executive chef for many years with a restaurant in Southern Pines, and Ian grew to love the business. So it’s no surprise he followed in his dad’s footsteps, loving the soul food — and the souls — in restarauntering. Incorporating themselves into that fabric of a small-town life is integral for Yellow Bird and Ian’s other LMG Restaurants.

In his list of life’s accomplishments, Ian sports the selfnominated, self-awarded “Best Beard in Town,” followed closely by the value he brings to the LMG company. A behind the scenes worker who doesn’t often share the limelight, DeLisle isn’t looking for rewards. When you love what you do you’ll never work, and Ian loves creating comfortable places for our community to dine, be it brunch or date night.

The two things DeLisle knows set YellowBIRD and its family of LMG restaurants apart from competitors are hospitality and ingredients. Their main goal is to ensure guests leave happy, having made wonderful memories over meals sourced from the best and freshest ingredients.

Next on the horizon for LMG company: a new restaurant venture in downtown Southern Pines. But this little birdie isn’t saying much about it…yet.

100 Pavilion Way, Suite B Southern Pines 910-725-2123 yellowbirdsoutherntable.com

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KRYSTIE JOHNSTONE HANNA WHISENANT OWNERS

If starting a hometown business with your childhood friend sounds like a dream that Moore County local girls and sisters-in-law Krystie Johnstone (left) and Hanna Whisenant (right) brought to fruition in January 2022. With the founding of Johnstone Whisenant Design Group, the two fulfilled a love for design that had begun as children, rearranging teen bedrooms for fun. As they grew into their own homes, they evolved into the “go-to’s” for interior design advice amongst family and friends, and decided to make it official this year.

The ladies recently learned that life is too short to not do what makes your heart happy. From 2020 to 2021, both Krystie and Hanna’s sons experienced life-threatening illnesses. Though both boys are now happy and healthy, it was nonetheless a reminder of mortality, and by the new year, Krystie and Hanna were ready to make their dreams a reality.

JW Design specializes in all things design, from start

to finish. Whether it’s a simple room refresh or selecting permanent design elements, Krystie and Hanna love helping transformations take place. There is nothing better than a happy and satisfied client, and their design is not complete until then.

Services typically begin with a consultation and discussion with the client, followed by virtual planning and clickable links to visualize the space before the real fun begins! The girls at JW Design want your home to be beautiful, functional, and most importantly, you. They understand the need for certain rooms to cater to all ages, and want interior design to be affordable and attainable for everyone. Virtual design is another option for those who are not local.

For Krystie and Hanna, family is everything, and they think there’s no better place to raise them than right here in Moore County… in a home tailored to you.

Pinehurst, NC www.jwdesignnc.com @jwdesignnc The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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TONI GOODRICH BANKER/MARKET MANAGER

Toni Goodrich was first called into banking in her early 20s, when she was recruited away from an insurance firm and has never looked back. She realized her heart was captivated to serve the customers’ needs and banking was a magnet to do so. Across various industries, she has provided personal service to people up and down the East Coast credits much of her success to following the Golden Rule: “Treat others like you want to be treated.”

“I would never sell a client anything they don’t need. I don’t sell things because they are good for the bank, but because they are good for them,” Toni expresses.

Triad Business Bank narrowly focuses on commercial and private bank loans and deposits. With the support of Stan Bradshaw, a founding board member for the bank and a resident of Pinehurst, this area was a natural choice. They bring big bank expertise, products and veteran bankers with community bank service while, catering to business and business owners’ needs. For these reasons, Toni Goodrich was the obvious choice as the Market Manager, and Bradshaw, a longtime friend, called her out of five years of retirement to do the job.

Originally from New Jersey, where her surviving family, brother Ted Massaro resides, she moved to Pinehurst in ’89 with her late husband, Bill. She was loyal to the same financial institution for 18 years, while being a standard for her clients through five mergers. Coming out of retirement has provided her with a new lease on life and her career. She looks forward to connecting with the community, discussing customers’ financial needs and providing the first-class touch of service that customers have come to expect from Toni and Triad Business Bank.

Triad Business Bank offers commercial, treasury and private banking services, including lending and deposits.

Proudly headquartered in Greensboro, NC, the bank is unique with local decision-making while also having local bankers like Toni who will meet wherever the client chooses, be it in their home, at a favorite restaurant or even on the back nine. Triad is committed to building a legacy bank that serves clients long-term and they welcome the Pinehurst area on their journey.

910-690-1690 www.triadbusinessbank.com tgoodrich@triadbusinessbank.com

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Have some t hing t o celebra t e?

Discover the Event Hall at VFW POST 7318 ~ Southern Pines

The Art of the Perfect Sandhills Wedding Enjoy a flexible space for a crowd of up to 200.

Share your Joy in a venue that can be as elegant, casual or unique as you are.

Dazzle your guests as you toast to your happiness from our full-service bar.

Dance the evening away.

Pick up a copy of the 2022 Bride & Groom at The Pilot’s office or online at pinestrawmag.com

Learn more about Southern Pines best kept secret for an event venue.

Call 910.692.3772 or visit VFWPost7318.com

Joy some Dance t Dazzle Have t hingToas t o celebra t e?

Discover the Event Hall at VFW POST 7318 ~ Southern Pines Enjoy a flexible space for a crowd of up to 200.

Share your Joy in a venue that can be as elegant, casual or unique as you are.

Dazzle your guests as you toast to your happiness from our full-service bar.

Dance the evening away.

Learn more about Southern Pines best kept secret for an event venue.

Birthdays • Retirement • Celebration of Life Call 910.692.3772 or visit VFWPost7318.com

Discover the Event at Joy Dance Toas t Hall Dazzle VFW POST 7318 ~ Southern Pines

200 Beulah Hill Rd. Pinehurst, NC 910.295.0166 www.thefairbarn.org

Custom, all-inclusive packages on a historic 200-year-old farm.

www.rubiconfarmnc.com

By Appointment Only • West End, NC

Whatever you fancy for your special day!

Special Occasions Parties • Weddings Concerts • Lectures

Lessons for group dance Parents dance We make the experience enjoyable & relaxing

Wedding

brickcapitalvideo.com Terry McMillian • 919.356.1624 terry@brickcapitalvideo.com 140 West Main Street, Sanford, NC 27332

Experienced Event Planner & Culinary Team Exceptional Banquet Space for up to 300 guests

The Country Club of Whispering Pines

910.949.3000

ACTIVE DUTY Military Discounts

Don’t let your skin concerns ruin your special day

Photo : Jennifer B. Photography

Services: General Dermatology – Treatment for various skin, hair, and nail conditions

of DR. FRED RIDGE D.D.S. FAMILY & COSMETIC DENTISTRY

115 Turnberry Way Pinehurst, NC 28374 (910) 695-3100 www.pinehurstdentistry.com We’ll Keep Your Smile Healthy for Life

Gift Cards and Gift Wrapping Available Tues - Fri: 12-5PM; Sat: 12-4PM Private appointments always available.

Email info@ knickers-lingerie.com or call 910-725-2346 150 E. New Hampshire Ave Southern Pines, NC 28387

FOOD IS OUR FORTE. HOSPITALITY IS OUR PASSION. Catering to all your wedding needs

LET US CREATE THE Perfect SMILE FOR THE Perfect DAY

DR. JORDAN RIDGE D.D.S.

Learn more about Southern Pines best kept secret for an event venue.

Call 910.692.3772 or visit VFWPost7318.com

LINGERIE SLEEPWEAR LOUNGEWEAR MENSWEAR BRAS BREASTFORMS

make it the perfect

First dance for bride & groom

712 SW Broad St. Southern Pines NC 28387 910-725-1846 • 910-585-2572 carolinadanceworks@gmail.com

Enjoy a flexible space for a crowd of up to 200.

Share your Joy in a venue that can be as elegant, casual or unique as you are. Dazzle your guests as you toast to your happiness from our full-service bar. Dance the evening away.

For All Your Wedding Lingerie Needs!

Events - Weddings Decorative Accessories - Fresh Florals 120 W. Main St., Aberdeen 910-944-1071

Pinehurst Dermatology,

120 Braemer Court, Pinehurst, NC 28374 910-295-5567

111 N. Sycamore St., Aberdeen, NC 910-757-0155 • www.eatatmasons.com 102 West Main Street, Suite 202 Aberdeen, NC • 910.447.2774 genuinehospitalitycatering.com

august 2022

To add an event, email us at pinestraw.calendar@gmail.com

arts & entertainment 8.07

Eve Gaskell will be the instructor. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

BOOK EVENT. 6 - 7 p.m. Oblong Books and The Country Bookshop present Sunyi Dean, author of The Book Eaters, in conversation with Paul Tremblay. This will be a virtual event. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Writing Group Although conscientious effort is made to provide accurate and up-to-date information, all events are subject to change and errors can occur! Please call to verify times, costs, status and location before planning or attending an event.

JOY OF ART STUDIO. Painting, drawing and mixed media. Offering both private and small groups with safe distance. Classes are held at Joy of Art Studio, 139 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Suite B, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 528-7283 or www.joyof-art.com or www.facebook.com/ Joyscreativespace/.

BOOK SALE. Bin sale. Given Book Shop, 95 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-3642.

TECH HELP. Need help with your laptop, tablet or smartphone? SPPL offers one-on-one Tech Help sessions. These sessions focus on topics like downloading e-books, using digital resources, sending emails and more. Visit the circulation or reference desk or the website at www.southernpines.net/601/Technology to request an appointment or call the library for more information. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

Tuesday, August 2 BRAIN FITNESS. 10 - 11 a.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to a new Brain Fitness class.

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Thursday, August 4 SUMMER FILM SERIES. 7 p.m. Legally Blonde will be playing. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Tickets are $10. Info: www.sunrisetheater.com.

Friday, August 5 OPENING RECEPTION. 5 - 7 p.m. The Artists League of the Sandhills will host an opening reception for its exhibit “Small Gems of Art.” The exhibit will be up through Aug. 26. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979.

FIRST FRIDAY. 5 - 8 p.m. First Friday is a family-friendly, free concert series on the Sunrise Theater outdoor stage. Enjoy food trucks, some Southern Pines Brewery brews, and listen to great music while supporting the local theater.

No dogs, outside alcohol or rolling coolers.

Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.sunrisetheater.com.

SUMMER THEATRE FESTIVAL. 8 9:45 p.m. The Judson Theatre Company presents the comedy fantasia Buyer & Cellar. Performances run through Aug. 14.

McPherson Theater at Bradshaw Performing Arts Center, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst.

Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Saturday, August 6 CRAFT DAYS. Children and their families can come by the library for Drop-in Craft Days and work on crafts at their own pace.

Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

STORYTELLING. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Join us for the first in a new Saturday morning family series featuring storyteller, recording artist, author and poet Mitch Capel as “Gran’daddy Junebug.” Free admission but registration is required. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E.

8.13

ART SHOW. 6 - 8 p.m. The Arts Council of Moore County presents the Fine Arts Festival.

The opening and awards ceremony will be Aug. 5 and the exhibit will remain open through Aug. 26. Campbell House Galleries, 482 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2787 or www.mooreart.org.

THEATER PRODUCTION. The Encore Center youth will perform Newsies Jr. There will be a second show on Aug. 6. Info and tickets: www.encorecenter.net.

Yoga in the Park The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

CA L E N DA R Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

Sunday, August 7 WRITING GROUP. 3 p.m. Interested in creating fiction, nonfiction, poetry or comics?

Connect with other writers and artists, chat about your craft and get feedback on your work. All levels are welcome. The session will meet at the library. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: lholden@sppl.net.

Monday, August 8 PHOTO CLUB. 7 p.m. The Sandhills Photography Club monthly meeting is a photo competition. The topic is “Arches.” Theater of the Hannah Marie Bradshaw Activities Center of The O’Neal School, 3300 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.sandhillsphotoclub.org.

Wednesday, August 10 FIRE SAFETY. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. Learn helpful safety tips that could save your life. Class is led by the Southern Pines Fire Department.

Free. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Thursday, August 11 PLAY TIME IN THE PARK. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Kids ages 3 - 12 and their parents can join other friends for giant checkers, giant Jenga, bubbles, fun and more. Free event. Downtown Park, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

SUMMER FILM SERIES. 7 p.m. The Muppet Movie will be playing. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.sunrisetheater.com.

Friday, August 12 LIVE AFTER FIVE. 5:15 - 9 p.m. Dance the night away with a live musical performance

by Bounce! Fun kids’ activities will ensure a

good time for all ages. Food trucks will be onsite. Beer, wine and additional beverages will be available for purchase. Picnic baskets are allowed, no outside alcoholic beverages are permitted. Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.vopnc.org.

Saturday, August 13 YOGA IN THE PARK. 9 - 10 a.m. Bring a mat or just a towel and join the community for mindful movement in a casual environment.

Yoga is led by Rachelle Hartigan in association with Southern Pines Recreation and Parks.

Free event. Downtown Park, 145 S.E. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

COMMUNITY YARD SALE. 9 a.m. - 2 p.m.

Enjoy shopping 30 - 40 individual outdoor booths offering everything from handmade crafts, modern tools and electronics, vintage and antique collectibles and even an assortment of everyday household items or clothes.

A food truck will be on-site. The Bee’s Knees, 125 N.C. Highway 73, West End. LEARN AND PLAY. 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. Come in for a play date with your toddler or preschooler where there will be developmental toys and puzzles as well as early literacy tips on display for parents and caregivers to incorporate into their daily activities. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

POP UP DISCO. 8 - 11:59 p.m. Boogie Knights, the next exceptional pop-up disco from Locals Only, is back, this time at The Neon Rooster, 114 Knight St., Aberdeen. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Sunday, August 14 LECTURE. 2 p.m. Join us as Weymouth archivist and former Friends of Weymouth board member Dotty Starling speaks about James Boyd, his view on democracy and the writer’s obligation to speak out in times of

civic crisis. Light reception to follow. Cost is $20 for members and $25 for non-members.

Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

Tuesday, August 16 BRAIN FITNESS. 10 - 11 a.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to a new Brain Fitness class.

Eve Gaskell will be the instructor. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

BOOK CLUB. 2 p.m. The James Boyd Book Club is here with this month’s book, The Last Tycoon. Free admission, registration required.

Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

TEEN WRITING CLUB. 5 p.m. Are you interested in creative writing and storytelling, connecting with other writers and getting feedback on your work? Join us for the Teen Creative Writing Club. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or email: kbroughey@sppl.net.

Wednesday, August 17 LIBRARY PROGRAM. 3:30 p.m. At The Library After School (ATLAS) is an afterschool program for kindergarten through second graders who enjoy activities, crafts, stories and learning. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines.

Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

Thursday, August 18 READ BETWEEN THE PINES. 5 p.m.

SPPL’s book club for adults meets to discuss this month’s book. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. To join email: mhoward@sppl.net.

Nov. 17-20 only!

Owens Auditorium @BPAC

TICKETS ON SALE NOW at

JudsonTheatre.com

Season Sponsors

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8.20

CA L E N DA R ects and activities. This month’s activity will be making ice cream. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

BIKE TOUR. 3 - 5 p.m. The Weymouth Center hosts “Boyds, Bikes and Brews,” a bike tour of the exterior of seven historic homes associated with the Boyd family. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Craft Days Friday, August 19 SUMMER THEATRE FESTIVAL. 8 - 10 p.m. The Judson Theatre Company presents Tick, tick, BOOM! Performances run through Aug. 28. McPherson Theater at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Wednesday, August 24 MUSIC JAM. 12 - 1 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to grab some “Found Sounds” from around the house and join the jam session. Wooden spoons, coffee cans, chopsticks, boxes of macaroni and cheese, etc. Bring them to the party as we make music and move together to favorite songs and awesome drumbeats. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines.

Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

WRITER IN RESIDENCE. 5:30 p.m. Join us as we welcome Charles Oldham, author of Ship of Blood: Mutiny and Slaughter Aboard the Harry A. Berwind, and the Quest for Justice. Free admission, registration required. Weymouth

8.21

Saturday, August 20 CRAFT DAYS. Children and their families can come by the library for Drop-in Craft Days and work on crafts at their own pace.

Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

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Thursday, August 25 SENIOR TRIP. 8 a.m. - 2 p.m. Adults 55 and older can shop at the Piedmont Triad Farmers Market. Cost is $13 for residents of Southern Pines and $26 for non-residents. Bus will depart the Campbell House Playground parking lot at 8 a.m. Info: (910) 692-7376.

DOUGLASS CENTER BOOK CLUB. 10:30 a.m. Multiple copies of the selected book for the month are available for checkout at the library. Douglass Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or email: mmiller@sppl.net.

Saturday, August 27 LEARN AND PLAY. 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. Come in for a play date with your toddler or preschooler where there will be developmental toys and puzzles as well as early literacy tips on display for parents and caregivers to incorporate into their daily activities. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

Sunday, August 28 JAZZ SERIES. 11:30 a.m. - 2 p.m. Join us outdoors for live jazz. Bring your own blanket, chairs and a picnic. There will be a cash bar.

Each event features internationally renowned jazz artists who perform their own rendition of Duke Ellington’s masterpiece “Come Sunday.”

Cost is $25 for members and $35 for nonmembers. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

Tuesday, August 30 MUSICIANS’ JAM SESSION. 6 - 9 p.m.

Bring your own instrument and beverage or just come and enjoy the music. Attendees must have the COVID vaccination. Free admission.

Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

DANCING. 6 p.m. Carolina Pines Dance Club invites you for a fun evening of social dancing — swing, line, ballroom, shag and Latin. Doors open at 6 p.m. Dance lessons at 6:30 p.m. Dancing until 9:30 p.m. Beginners and experienced dancers, couples and singles all welcome. Cost is $15 per person, cash at door. National Athletic Village, 201 Air Tool Dr., Southern Pines. Info: (724) 816-1170.

Sunday, August 21 STEAM. 2:30 p.m. Elementary-aged children and their caregivers are invited to learn about topics in science, technology, engineering, art and math and to participate in STEAM proj-

Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Bike Tour

Friday, September 2 BBQ FESTIVAL. 7 p.m. The Pinehurst Barbecue Festival is a “Celebration of Taste and Tradition.” The three-day event, hosted in the village of Pinehurst, will offer a unique collection of special events and activities, ven-

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

CA L E N DA R dor displays, food and beverage options, and entertainment for the entire family. Village of Pinehurst, 6 Chinquapin Road, Pinehurst.

Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

WEEKLY EVENTS Mondays WORKOUTS. 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to get their workout on. Open Monday through Friday. Cost for six months: $15/resident; $30/non-resident.

Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

STRENGTH AND BALANCE WORKOUT. 11 - 11:45 a.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to enjoy a brisk workout that focuses on balance and strength. Free of charge. Program

8.30

Musicians’ Jam Session

runs through Sept. 26. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

GAME ON. 1 p.m. For adults 55 and older.

You and your friends are invited to come out and play various games such as cornhole, badminton, table tennis, shuffleboard, trivia games and more. Each week enjoy a different activity to keep you moving and thinking.

Compete with friends and make new ones all for free. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

BRIDGE. 1:30 - 4:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Enjoy games of bridge with friends.

Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

Tuesdays BABY RHYMES. 10:30 a.m. Baby Rhymes is specially designed for the youngest learners (birth-2) and their caregivers. Repetition and comforting movements make this story time perfect for early development and brain growth. There will be a duplicate session at 11 a.m. Dates this month are Aug. 9, 16, 23 and 30. An active library card is required.

Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net GAME DAY. 12 p.m. Enjoy bid whist and other cool games all in the company of great friends. For adults 55 and older. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Tues.

Table Tennis TAI CHI. 1 p.m. Come learn tai chi. There is no age limit and the classes are open to the public. Aberdeen Parks and Recreation Station, 301 Lake Park Crossing, Aberdeen .

Info: (910) 944-7275.

SPARK STORYTIME. 2:30 p.m. This Spark Storytime at Fire Station 82 is for ages birth through 2 and kids will have a chance to see firetrucks. Dates this month are Aug. 9, 16, 23 and 30. Fire Station 82, 500 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net TABLE TENNIS. 7 - 9 p.m. Enjoy playing this exciting game every Tuesday. Cost for six months is $15 for residents of Southern Pines and $30 for non-residents. For adults 55 and older. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

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Tuesdays

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CA L E N DA R CHAIR VOLLEYBALL. 1 - 2 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Get fit while having fun. Free to participate. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines.

Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

Thurs.

BRIDGE. 1:30 - 4:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Enjoy games of bridge with friends.

Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

FARMERS MARKET. 3 - 6 p.m. The Sandhills Farmers Market features some of the many farms, nurseries, bakeries, meat and egg providers, cheesemakers and specialty food producers our area has to offer. Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.vopnc.org.

Mahjong Wednesdays CHAIR YOGA. 10 - 11 a.m. For adults 55 and older. Help offset body aches encountered with desk work. This is an accessible yoga class, done standing or sitting in a chair, for bodies not able to easily get up from, and down to, the floor. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

LEARN AND PLAY. 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. Come in for a play date with your toddler or preschooler where there will be developmental toys and puzzles as well as early literacy tips on display for parents and caregivers to incorporate into their daily activities. Dates this month are Aug. 10, 17, 24 and 31. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

TAI CHI. 6:30 p.m. Come learn tai chi. There is no age limit and the classes are open to the public. Cost is $10 per class. Seven Lakes West Community Center, 556 Longleaf Dr., Seven Lakes. Info: (910) 400-5646.

Thursdays MOORE COUNTY FARMERS MARKET. 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. The year-round market features “producer only” vendors within a 50-mile radius providing fresh, local and seasonal produce, fruits, pasture meats, eggs, potting plants, cut flowers and local honey. Crafts, baked goods, jams and jellies are also available. Market is located at the Armory Sports Complex, 604 W. Morganton Road, Southern Pines.

GIVEN STORY TIME. 10 a.m. Wonderful volunteers share their love of reading. Stop by and join the fun. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: (910) 295-3642.

HATHA YOGA. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Increase your flexibility, balance, stability and muscle tone while learning the basic yoga principles of alignment and breathing.

You may gain strength, improve circulation and reduce chronic pain as we practice gentle yoga postures and mindfulness. Program is every Thursday through Aug. 25. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

CHESS AND MAHJONG. 1 p.m. For adults 55 and older. All levels welcome. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

CABIN TOURS. 1 - 4 p.m. The Moore County Historical Association’s Shaw House grounds, cabins and gift shop are open for tours and visits. The restored tobacco barn features the history of children’s roles in the industry. Docents are ready to host you and

Thurs.

Given Story Time

Shop local & handmade Shop Shoplocal local&&handmade handmade at Downtown Southern at Downtown at Downtown Pines’ Southern Southern Pines’ Pines’ own ownown pottery studio and gallery pottery pottery studio studio andand gallery gallery Mon-Sat 10 to Mon-Sat 5 Mon-Sat 10 10 to 5to 5 www.ravenpotter www.ravenpottery.com www.ravenpottery.com y.com

a Ave • Southern Pines, NC 260260 260 W.W. Pennsylvania Pennsylvania • 336-465-1776 AveAve W • Southern • Southern .

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

CA L E N DA R the cabins are open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Shaw House, 3361 Mt. Carmel Rd., Carthage. Info: (910) 692-2051 or www.moorehistory.com.

$15/resident; $30/non-resident. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

MUSIC AND MOTION. 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Does your toddler like to move and groove? Join us for outdoor “Music and Motion” to get those wiggles out and work on gross and fine motor skills. For ages 3 - 5. Dates this month are Aug. 11, 18 and 25. An active library card is required. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net

RESTORATIVE YOGA. 1 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Practice gentle movements to improve well-being with certified instructor, Jahaira Farias. Practice movements that may help alleviate pain and improve circulation.

Bring your own mat. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

Fridays AEROBIC DANCE. 9 - 10 a.m. For adults 55 and older. Enjoy this low-to-moderate impact class with energizing music for an overall cardio and strength workout. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

BRIDGE. 1:30 - 4:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Enjoy games of bridge with friends.

Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

TAP CLASS. 10 - 11:30 a.m. For adults 55 and older. All levels welcome. Cost per class:

LINE DANCING. 3 - 4 p.m. For adults 55 and older. If you’re interested in learning dance moves and building confidence on the dance floor, this class is for you. Leave your inhibitions at the door and join in. Cost is: $30 for residents and $60 for non-residents for a

monthly membership. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

Saturdays MOORE COUNTY FARMERS MARKET. 8 a.m. – 12 p.m. The market features “producer only” vendors within a 50-mile radius providing fresh, local and seasonal produce, fruits, pasture meats, eggs, potting plants, cut flowers and local honey. Crafts, baked goods, jams and jellies are also available, accompanied by live music. Market is located in downtown Southern Pines at S.E. Broad Street and New York Ave. and runs weekly (with the exception of Autumnfest) until the end of October.

FARMERS MARKET.10 a.m. - 1 p.m. The Sandhills Farmers Market features some of the many farms, nurseries, bakeries, meat and egg providers, cheesemakers and specialty food producers our area has to offer. Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.vopnc.org. PS

PineNeedler Answers from page 119

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Arts & Culture

TEMPLE THEATRE 919.774.4155

910-944-3979

templeshows.org Gallery • Studios • Classes SPONSORED BY

SMALL GEMS OF ART

August 5-August 26, 2022 OPENING RECEPTION Friday, August 5, 2022 5:00-7:00 pm Gallery Hours: Monday-Saturday, Noon to 3:00 PM View hundreds of paintings in our 34 studios.

SEPTEMBER 8-25, 2022

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OIL AND ACRYLIC Introduction to Oils for Beginners - Linda Bruening – Monday and Tuesday, August 8, 9, 9:30-3:30 Next Step-Oil Painting - Linda Bruening –Thursday and Friday, August 11. 12, 9:30-3:30 Fingerpainting Hydrangeas (Acrylic) – Magda Sonderfan - Wednesday, August 17, 1:00-3:00 Beginner’s Acrylic Pouring - Meredith Markfield – Friday, August 19, 11:30-2:30 Intermediate Acrylic Pouring – Swipe and Chain Pull Technique - Meredith Markfield Monday, August 22, 11:30-2:30 OTHER MEDIUMS Inktastic/Intermediate Alcohol Ink - Pam Griner- Wednesday, August 10, 11:30-2:30 Go with the Flow/Beginning Alcohol Ink - Pam Griner - Tuesday, August 16, 11:30-2:30, Supplies included Next Step Cake Decorating/Flowers - Pam Griner - Wednesday, August 24, 12:30-2:30

Ask Us About Becoming a Member • 129 Exchange Street in Aberdeen, NC Visit our website for many more classes. www.artistleague.org • artistleague@windstream.net

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen Juneteenth Celebration Cardinal Park Sunday, June 19, 2022 Photographs by Diane McKay

Ariadne DeGarr, Christmas DeGarr-Miller

Lana Peek, Pat Capel, Angie Peek

Lawrence Caple

Ne'Vaeh McNeill, Ann Louise Daniel

JoAnn & Kingston Williams, Vester Caster

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Addie Crum, Anthony Duncan, Rickey McLeod

The Solomon Family

Mark Barbee, Daniel Greene, Sherman Totten, Damian Brown, Johnny Gilliam

Evon Legrand, Danny Hayes

Myrna Woodard, Sandra Thomas

Ann Rothe, Judy Winston, Carmen Kanne, Zoe (dog)

Rick & Karen Lewis, Carol Sellers

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Live professional theatre! Sandhills area premieres!

James Cella The hilarious hit comedy by Jonathan Tolins (The Good Fight, Schmigadoon!) about a struggling actor who gets the ultimate mall job...and the mall’s in Barbra Streisand’s basement in Malibu! AUGUST 5-14

Michael Santora

Danielle Standifer

Drew H. Wells

Before he wrote Rent, Jonathan Larson wrote this musical about a New York composer named Jon turning 30. And Jon and his girlfriend Susan and his best friend Michael all have something to sing about it! AUGUST 19-28 All shows at

Bradshaw Performing Arts Center • 3395 Airport Rd., Pinehurst

JudsonTheatre.com

Tix/Info/Donate: Live Professional Theatre in the Sandhills since 2012

The 501c3 not-for-profit Professional Theatre Company in Residence at Bradshaw Performing Arts Center

Daniel Haley, Artistic Director • Morgan Sills, Executive Producer

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen Pinehurst 4th of July Festivities Village of Pinehurst Monday, July 4th, 2022 Photographs by Diane McKay

Eli & Jeremy Townsend

Sarah, Lance & Maxwell Rogers, Pants & Samson

Maureen Hunt, Robert Page

Taylor & Chris Badger, Melissa, Stephen & Aurland (baby) Velisek

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Izzy & Anthony Haro

The Winters, Collins & Doring Families

The Patterson & Reading Families

Abigail, Madilyn & William (in back) Stevenson, Preston & Sloane Staford, Tim St. Germain

Katy Wyatt & Petra Vandermeer

The Lambert Family

Steve, Hannah & Ivy Cryan

The Bryant Family

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Pine ServiceS

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Ed Hicks Vintage Watch Collector

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

August Pine Needler ACROSS 1. Automaton 6. Role player 11. Tire meas.

14. Mag attachment?

15. Prepare for winter takeoff 16. “ alive!”

17. Traffic sign (4 wds) 19. French name 20. Intl. cultural org.

21. British beverage stores (2 wds) 23. The “p” in m.p.g.

24. Addis Ababa’s land: Abbr.

26. “Cool!”

27. Flashes 30. Uncles’ wives 33. Channel 36. “The Republic” writer 38. Alps animal 39. Shakespeare, the Bard of 40. Adjust 41. Go backpacking 42. Brood 43. No longer “hot” 44. “ bien!”

45. Cy Young, e.g.

47. As a result of this 49. “Your majesty”

51.

52.

55.

59.

61.

62.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

Directions

Ed.’s request Australian runner Settle snugly Dipped out, as punch Caesar’s lucky craps roll?

Vigilant (3 wds) Small hotel Pretend (hyph) “Tootsie” Oscar actress Chair part Traffic sign Tribal chief

DOWN 1. Jack and Jill the hill 2. Kind of air layer 3. Gnat or mosquito description 4. probandi 5. Toyota model 6. “Much About Nothing” 7. Penny 8. Radial, e.g.

9. Sea 10. View from Jidda 11. Red wine choice (2 wds) 12. Traffic Sign 13. Doctrines 18. Tablet 22. Arrogant 25. Braided bread

27.

28.

29.

31.

32.

Plain Photo finish Navigates Give and French holy women, abbr.

33. Dalai 34. Declare 35. Traffic sign (2wds)

37. Trials 46. Like a basset hound’s ears 48. Snoopy, for one 50. Boredom 52. African antelope 53. Traffic sign 54. Milk dispenser

55.

56.

57.

58.

60.

63.

Wicked Opening time, maybe Pigeon’s home Carbon compound Twofold Finish

Puzzle answers on page 113 Mart Dickerson lives in Southern Pines and welcomes suggestions from her fellow puzzle masters. She can be reached at martaroonie@gmail.com.

Sudoku:

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

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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119

SOUTHWORDS

Ticket to Ride

By Patricia M. Walker

I like to troll thrift stores for books. It’s always

an adventure, and at 50 cents apiece, you can hardly go wrong. If you do, you can simply re-donate. No harm. No foul.

Occasionally you reach for a book that looks interesting and find the joke’s on you, because when you open it, you discover it’s one you donated months ago. Standing there looking at your own name and the little stamp you mark your books with, you feel strangely proprietary and a little ashamed all at the same time. Worse, it’s just possible that the book is looking back at you with an accusatory stare, as if to say, “How could you give me away? Don’t you love me anymore?”

More interesting, however, are the times you find other people’s names and marks. Or an inscription that says: “To Glenn, May this first Christmas as part of our family bring you joy, George and Grace, Christmas, 1993”; or “M. A. Crichton from Mrs. Pyle, Christmas, 1938.”

Then, too, there are the stamps along the deckled edges or on the title pages that say Estes Valley Library — Withdrawn; Vermillion Public Library, Vermillion, South Dakota; Dowse Memorial Library, Sherborn, Massachusetts; Rivoli Township Library, New Windsor, Illinois; Fort Loramie Jr./Sr. High School Media Center; West Slope Community Library, Portland, Oregon; or most exotic of all, U.S. ARMY RVN SPEC SVC LIBRARIES APO 96243. That’s when you know the book has a life of its own, a story to tell. You hold it in your hands, leaf through the pages, trying to imagine exactly how it got here.

What circuitous path did it follow to wind up on this shelf, perhaps thousands of miles from where it started?

Sometimes, there are even clues, relics of another reader’s life, hidden among the pages — a receipt from a bookstore in the Denver airport, a flier for “Buddhism and Meditation” from the Rameshori Buddhist Center in Atlanta, or a small ivory

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card printed in pale blue with a drawing of a young Chinese student at his desk and the words “If found please return to,” but with nothing filled in.

Best of all are the bookmarks — Decitre Librairie Papeterie in Lyon, France; Arcadia Books in Spring Green, Wisconsin; Golden Braid Books in Salt Lake City; Frenchmen Art and Books in New Orleans; Lunenburg Bound Books and Paper in Nova Scotia; Eighth Day Books in Wichita; the iconic City Lights Books in San Francisco; and much closer to home, Blue Ridge Books in Waynesville, North Carolina.

Of course, the stores they represent are indies and not thrift stores, but you love them all the same. You can just visualize the people who work there, how the books are arranged, the comfy sofas and chairs, the jingle of the bell as the regulars come in the door. You wonder if they’re still in business, and if so, whether some day you could — would — pack your bag and go there.

How you would walk in and say hello to the woman or man behind the counter; tell them you’ve come all these miles because of the bookmark you hold in your hand, a bookmark you found in Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos or The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, or The Buffalo Hunters by Mari Sandoz or Blondes, Brunettes and Bullets by Nils T. Granlund; or a thousand possible others.

And you are absolutely certain they will smile and be thrilled that you have come so far to visit their store. Then they will offer you a scone, show you around, pull volumes off shelves for you to admire. And you will buy something, new or used, not only because it’s the polite thing to do, but because you really do want that Penelope Lively or Kent Haruf or Philippe Claudel that’s sitting right there on the shelf. Besides, there’s always room in your luggage. PS Patricia M. Walker is a retired teacher/purchasing manager/financial services administrator who was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She wrote her first novel when she was 9.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

ILLUSTRATION BY MERIDITH MARTENS

Transported by a book

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