August PineStraw 2023

Talent, Technology & Teamwork!

Moore County’s Most Trusted Real Estate Team!

PINEHURST • $450,000

75 PINEWILD DRIVE

Attractive 3 BR / 3 BA brick, golf front home located in the 2nd tee of the Azalea course in Pinewild CC. Unique floorplan with nice views!

FOXFIRE • $339,000

8 WILDWOOD LANE

Well maintained 3 BR / 2 BA home situated on generously wooded lot in quiet cul-de-sac. Open, split-plan with spacious living area and wood burning fireplace.

PINEHURST • $475,000

845 ST. ANDREWS DRIVE

Charming 3 BR / 2 BA golf front home on the 15th tee of Pinehurst #5. Open floorplan with a nice lower-level flex space. A truly special home with amazing golf views!

PINEHURST • $390,000

1 VAN BUREN LANE

Great 4 BR / 2 BA brick home in quiet cul-de-sac in Village Acres. Floorplan is bright with hardwood flooring throughout the main level. Nice upper level bonus room could also be a 4th bedroom.

PINEHURST • $325,000

5 PINE TREE ROAD, UNIT 208

Nice 2 BR / 2 BA golf front condo overlooking 1st fairway of Pinehurst #5. Perfect for an investment property or a golf getaway!

PINEHURST • $150,000

14 HALKIRK DRIVE

Great golf front lot located on the Practice Course in desirable Pinewild CC.

SEVEN LAKES SOUTH • $275,000

209 W. DEVONSHIRE AVENUE

Large 3 BR / 3 BA golf front home! Nicely situated on a corner lot overlooking a pond on the 8th green of the Seven Lakes golf course, this is the place to be!

PINEHURST • $275,000

45 BECKETT RIDGE

Gorgeous golf front lot in Fairwoods on 7. Great opportunity to own property in this desirable gated community.

PINEHURST • $450,000

3 DEERWOOD LANE

Wonderful 3 BR / 2 BA brick home on large corner lot in #6. This single level home is bright and open with lots of curb appeal.

Luxury Properties

Moore County’s Most Trusted Real Estate Team!

SEVEN LAKES WEST • $995,000 142 SWARINGEN DRIVE

Amazing 3 BR / 2.5 BA WATERFRONT home on picturesque Lake Auman. Home has spacious living area with lots of natural light and was custom-built by Yates Hussey.

PINEHURST • $647,000 25 THUNDERBIRD LANE

Beautiful 4 BR / 3 BA Craftsman-style home with nice features and loads of curb appeal! Home is immaculate and has transferrable Pinehurst CC membership.

SEVEN LAKES WEST • $589,900 137 SWARINGEN DRIVE

Delightful 4 BR / 3.5 BA two-story home with lots of curb appeal. Master suite on the main level is secluded and spacious and the upper level boasts 3 bedrooms, a family room and bonus room!

PINEHURST • $550,000 219 JUNIPER CREEK BOULEVARD

Beautiful 5 BR / 3 BA golf front home situated off the 4th tee of the #6 course. Spacious layout with elegant finishes throughout.

SOUTHERN PINES • $578,000 1659 E. INDIANA AVENUE

Wonderful 4 BR / 3 BA home in James Creek. Home has an incredibly open and light design with upper level bonus room and flexible finished basement space.

SEVEN LAKES WEST • $995,000 111 WERTZ DRIVE

Well-appointed 3 BR / 3.5 BA WATERFRONT home on Lake Auman. Home has an open design with beautiful lake views from almost every room in the house.

PINEHURST • $534,900 105 WHISTLING STRAIGHT ROAD

Attractive 3 BR / 2 BA end unit townhome has been beautifully updated with nice finishes and touches throughout. Enjoy a truly maintenance free lock and leave lifestyle!

PINEHURST • $903,000 30 WALNUT CREEK ROAD

Lovely custom-built 4 BR / 3 BA brick and stucco home in Fairwoods on 7. Interior is bright and open with spacious rooms. Transferrable Pinehurst CC membership available.

PINEHURST • $565,000 185 THORNE ROAD

Attractive 4 BR / 3.5 BA home just minutes from the heart of the Village of Pinehurst. Layout is an incredibly open design with nice upgrades and features throughout.

LINDA PURL

The Office • Matlock • Happy Days

the YEAR of MAGICAL THINKING

by

Joan Didion

READY FOR HIRE.READY TO RETIRE.

FirstCarolinaCare members come from all over North Carolina and all walks of life. But they have one thing in common: They’re part of our community. And here, our community always comes first. That means having access to trusted providers, personalized help and a service team that resolves 97% of issues on the first call. From the mountains to the coast, we’ve got you covered.

Many members. One community.

FirstCarolinaCare.com/together

SOUND DECISIONS

Whatever your musical jam, Weymouth Center’s got you covered. Join us for any one concert or subscribe and buy a full series and save. Play it your way. Whatever you choose is a sound decision!

Come Sunday Jazz • 11:30-2

August 27

The Matt White Quartet

“Rhythmically brash” music rooted in the jazz tradition

September 24

Mint Julep Jazz Band - A vintage sound that’s always fresh

October 29

Lucy Yeghiazaryan“Straight-ahead” jazz vocals

MAGAZINE

Volume 19, No. 8

David Woronoff, Publisher david@thepilot.com

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, Stephen E. Smith

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

John Gessner, Laura L. Gingerich, Diane McKay, Tim Sayer

CONTRIBUTORS

April 7

Kenni HolmenNew Age Soprano & Tenor Sax

April 28

Brooke Alford and Ensemble: Jazz violin... with a feel good groove

Individual concerts start at: $27.50

Series of 6 starts at $145

• Subscribe & Save $20

Chamber Sessions • 2 pm

September 10

Friends of Weymouth Ensemble - premiering “Casualty,” a poem by James Boyd set to music by Dr. Paul Murphy.

December 10

Nicholas Susi - “an innovative musician with a gift for keyboard brilliance.”

May 19

THRIO - Original music and arrangements of American standards

• Student Tickets Available

Live from the Great Room • 7 pm

October 22

Eric Vloeimans & Will Holshouser: trumpet and accordion bringing together jazz, classical and folk music.

Jenna Biter, Anne Blythe, Keith Borshak, Tom Bryant, Susan Campbell, Bill Case, Wiley Cash Tony Cross, Brianna Rolfe Cunningham, Mart Dickerson, Bill Fields, Meridith Martens, Mary Novitsky, Lee Pace, Todd Pusser, Joyce Reehling, Scott Sheffield, Rose Shewey, 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

Samantha Cunningham, 910.693.2505

Kathy Desmond, 910.693.2515

Jessica Galloway, 910. 693.2498

Terry Hartsell, 910.693.2513 Erika Leap, 910.693.2514

ADVERTISING GRAPHIC DESIGN Mechelle Butler, Scott Yancey

ADVERTISING COORDINATOR

Rebah Dolbow • pilotads@thepilot.com

January 21

Boston Public Quartet - Created to normalize the amplification of historically excluded voices.

February 4

Nick DiEugenio - Violinist “programs that live on the edge of both ‘modern’ and ‘baroque.’”

Individual concerts start at: $30

Series of 4 starts at $100

• Subscribe & Save $20

Student Tickets Available

Tickets: weymouthcenter.org

555 E. Connecticut Avenue, Southern Pines, NC A 501 (c)(3) organization

December 17

Larry & Joe: Venezuelan and Appalachian folk music - harp, banjo, cuatro, fiddle, upright bass, guitar, maracas, singing.

Individual concerts start at: $30

Series of 2 starts at $50

Subscribe & Save $10

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 In memoriam Frank Daniels Jr. 145 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, Southern Pines, NC 28387 www.pinestrawmag.com

Photograph by Matthew Gibson

TRAIL REACH FOR THE

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Let There Be Darkness

In defense of the dark side

By Jim DoDson

During a business trip to a remote part of New Zealand last winter, I was reminded of the staggering beauty of the night. Stepping out of my bungalow just after midnight, the stars of the Southern Hemisphere took my breath away. There were untold millions of them arching overhead, blazing like white diamonds on black velvet.

Because it was summer down under, there were also vivid sounds of calling night birds and insects murmuring in the fields and forests around me. I sat down on a wooden rocking chair and just listened for the better part of an hour, a perfect bedtime lullaby that reminded me of my daily wake-up routine back home in North Carolina.

Well before sunrise most days, I take my coffee outside to sit beneath a grove of old trees and wait for the first songbird to herald the breaking day. Save for an occasional passing train or distant siren that briefly mars the silence, it’s the stillest part of any day, the perfect moment to think, meditate, pray or just be.

I’ve captured the first birdsong many times on my handy Cornell Lab Merlin Bird app. In my neck of the suburban woods, it’s usually a Carolina wren or eastern towhee that breaks the serenity of pre-dawn. Sometimes it’s the northern cardinal or melodious song sparrow who takes lead solo. Every now and then, a great horned owl or brown thrasher cues the chorus. Whichever one starts, as sure as night is dark, a chorus of a dozen or more birds soon joins the songfest, including gray catbirds, mourning doves and American crows.

I never tire of this avian awakening, finding a sense of true gratitude for my tiny spot on Earth as a new day begins.

And yet, I worry.

Last year, a report from National Audubon on the state of birds reported that the U.S. and Canada have lost 3 billion birds over the past half-century. The same report notes that half of America’s bird populations are in decline, prompting more than one expert to warn that we are already in the early throes of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

Global warming, loss of natural habitat, various forms of pollution and the fact that the night is no longer as dark as it used to be are cited as primary contributing factors to the decline of thousands of species of birds, insects, reptiles and mammals, roughly half of which hunt, mate, feed and travel by night. Disappearing forests accelerate this decline.

Historian Jill Lapore echoes similar concerns in a recent New Yorker essay titled “What We Owe Our Trees:”

“Even if you haven’t been to the woods lately, you probably know that the forest is disappearing. In the past 10,000 years, the Earth has lost about a third of its forests, which wouldn’t be so worrying if it weren’t for the fact that almost all that loss has happened in the past 300 years or so. As much forest has been lost in the past hundred years as in the 9,000 before. With the forest go the worlds within those woods, each habitat and dwelling place, a universe within each rotting log, a galaxy within a pinecone. And, unlike earlier losses of forests, owing to ice and fire, volcanoes, comets, and earthquakes — actuarially acts of God — nearly all the destruction in the past three centuries has been done deliberately, by people actuarially at fault: cutting down trees to harvest wood, plant crops and

graze animals.”

So what is an ordinary, suburban nature-lover and bird nut to do? That depends, I suppose, partly, at least, how you grew up.

I sometimes joke that I grew up in darkness.

I had the privilege to grow up in a succession of sleepy Southern towns, following my dad’s itinerant newspaper career. From the coast of Mississippi to the Carolinas, Yeats’ proverbial “The Stolen Child,” with an imagination fired by nature, I explored woods and creeks, bringing home frogs and injured birds. The rule was, I had to be home by “full” darkness. Many an evening, I lingered in the twilight just to watch the fireflies come out and listen for the sounds of crickets, bullfrogs and night birds. In those days, the streetlights in these quiet rural towns were few.

I’m not speaking, mind you, of the metaphorical darkness showcased by everything from the Bible’s rich imagery of light and darkness (good and evil) to modern cable TV’s endless news loops of crime and disaster. There’s a perfectly good reason why depression is rightly called a “dark night of the soul.” Anyone who has experienced it might be forgiven for believing that the world is coming apart at the seams.

Thirty years ago, in an effort to give our children the benefits of a quieter, natural world, my wife and I built our house on a coastal Maine hilltop surrounded by a dense forest of beech and hemlock, where the nights were deep and woods teemed with animal life.

The first thing I did when we moved back to my hometown neighborhood seven years ago was plant 20 trees around the property. Today in summer, our house sits in a grove of beauti-

ful trees. The neighborhood is called Starmount Forest, after all, and most residents appreciate the giant oaks, maples and poplar trees that still arch like druid elders throughout. Living up to the name, these trees provide home to a rich variety of birds and insects. They also give us welcome shade in summer and showcase the stars on winter nights.

Turning down the lights at night strikes me as one small but sensible act of kindness to nature, encouraging the living world around us to rest, so moths and other nighttime creatures can pollinate plants, fertilizing the start of the world’s food chain.

In her lovely spiritual memoir Learning to Walk in the Dark, theologian Barbara Brown Taylor points out that most of the monsters we fear in the dark are simply phantoms we create in our anxious, sleep-deprived minds.

“I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light,” she writes. “Things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”

I was reminded of this fact one morning at summer’s beginning while awaiting my woodland wake-up call. Savoring the pre-dawn stillness beneath the trees, I suddenly realized that the fireflies had returned, magical messengers of hope that would be nowhere without the night.

As August passes over us and the days grow shorter, the darkness grows.

I say, bring it on, dear neighbors, and sleep well. PS

‘HOMEWOOD’’ is a sophisticated Colonial Revival style 7300 square foot outstanding Estate on 7.5 acres with magnificent private gardens. The main mansion was built in 1930 without regard to cost as a showplace for the Sandhills area. Gracious 6 bedrooms, 5 ½ baths, expansive deck overlooking pool and gardens.

$2,795,000

Charming, Historic, one-of-a-kind Estate on over two acres just one and one half miles from the historic Village of Pinehurst. Located off Donald Ross Drive, the “Parson’s Estate’’ is a rambling, all brick home set amidst beautiful gardens and waterfalls overlooking a tranquil pond. The expansive patio across the back overlooks terraced stacked stone gardens leading to the Pond and total

Location, Location, Location. This LOT is the crown jewel. Surrounded by an oasis of Golf and steps from the newly renovated Pinehurst National Clubhouse. Walk to the 1st tee, walk to the 10th tee, walk to lunch, walk to dinner and walk to all club activities. MOVE-IN-READY. Seller has invested over $700,000 in renovations sparing nothing in either materials or quality of design.

If you want to KNOW Pinehurst,

310 CREST ROAD KNOLLWOOD HEIGHTS

135 SAINT MELLIONS PINEHURST NO 9

$1,795,000

4 AUGUSTA WAY PINEHURST

privacy. $1,895,000

HISTORIC HISTORIC PINEHURST NO9

Pinehurst Perfection

220

Located on an island of Golf surrounded by Holes 7 and 8 on the Arnold Palmer designed Mid-South Club Course. The sweeping views of fairway, green and pond are breathtaking. A large and dramatic Carolina room with six sides and a 24 ft vaulted ceiling is the focal point of the home. Over 5400 square feet of living space. Handsome brick balcony. $1,375,000

110

WATERFRONT in beautiful McClendon Hills, an equestrian community surrounded by riding trails and rolling hills. Stunning home with nearly 5000 square feet of living space. Large gourmet kitchen with beamed ceiling, 5 burner gas cook-top, double convection ovens, Bosch appliances, island/bar with prep sink, and wood custom cabinetry. Home theatre and Fitness rm. Dock with fun Gazebo.

$1,199,000

40

Gorgeous home in desirable Pinewild Country Club, a gated community. Stunning entrance with 11 1/2 ft ceilings and a wall of windows overlooking the golf course. Handsome office off main living area. Located on the Par 5 eleventh hole of the Holly Course, views of the golf course can be enjoyed from all the main areas plus the brick patio with new awning and the year-round Carolina room.

$965,000

PinePitch

An Inconvenient Truth

Join David Joy as he discusses Those We Thought We Knew, his compelling new novel of a community whose dark underbelly is suddenly revealed, on Friday, Aug. 4, at The Country Bookshop, 140 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Joy’s honors include winning the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award for When These Mountains Burn and the 2018 Southern Book Prize for The Weight of This World. In addition, he was an Edgar Award finalist for best first novel for Where All Light Tends to Go. He’s also the author of Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey. The event is free, but space is limited. Go to ticketmesandhills.com to reserve yours.

If You Can Dodge a Wrench

Create your own underdog story at a fun day of dodgeball and fundraising for the CARE Group programs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 26, at the old Aberdeen Elementary School Gym, 305 Elm St., Aberdeen. The cost is $150 for a team of six plus one substitute player and $5 for a Fan in the Stands pass. Unfortunately Patches O’Hoolihan can’t make it. There will be food trucks, drinks, raffles, contests and prizes. For more information visit www.thecaregroupinc.org/events/dodgeball-tournament.

Pinky Finger Up

Spend the day cruising the Seagrove countryside, sampling teas and pastries, as you discover handmade pottery on Saturday, Aug. 12, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Drink iced tea from Carriage House Tea, sample the pastries from the Table Farmhouse Bakery and Holly Hill Farm, then try homemade treats while stopping at Blue Hen Pottery, Dean & Martin Pottery, Eck McCanless Pottery, From the Ground Up, Red Hare Pottery and Thomas Pottery. It all takes place on N.C. Pottery Highway 705, Seagrove.

First Friday

And when you’re finished listening to David Joy, walk down the block — or up the block, depending on if you’re right side up or upside down — to hear Caitlin Krisko and The Broadcast perform from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., Aug. 4, on the First Bank Stage at Sunrise Square, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. All the usual rules apply. Leave Cujo at home. There will be beer on tap and food trucks to feed your inner Homer Simpson. For information call (910) 420-2549 or go to www.sunrisetheater.com.

Live After Five

The hits keep on happening when Heads Up Penny performs from 5:15 p.m. to 9 p.m. at The Village Arboretum, 375 Magnolia Road, Pinehurst, on Friday, Aug. 11. Bring lawn chairs, blankets and the unbridled will to dance barefoot in the park. There will be children’s activities and food trucks. Beer, wine and additional beverages will be available for purchase. Picnic baskets are A-OK, but outside alcoholic beverages are not permitted. Julia Golden is the opening act. For more information call (910) 295-3642 or go to www.vopnc.org.

Editor’s Note

In celebration of one of life’s perfect pairings — a beach and a book — PineStraw has produced its summer reading issue every August for over a decade. In that span our contributors have included Frances Mayes, Daniel Wallace, Etaf Rum, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, Bland Simpson, David Payne, Lee Zacharias, Celia Rivenbark, Michael Parker, Nan Graham, Terri Kirby Erickson, Shelby Stephenson, Fred Chappell, Anthony S. Abbott, Wiley Cash, Ruth Moose, Sam Barbee, Virginia Holman, and Jill McCorkle, to name a few. This year our page-turners are by Valerie Nieman, Brendan Slocumb and Stephen E. Smith and run the gamut from fantasy to thriller to memoir.

And every August we strive to find a cover that celebrates both reading and readers. This year we’re fortunate to be able to feature the work of California artist Michael Stilkey on our cover. The piece is one of Stilkey’s “book sculptures” entitled Self Portrait as Horse, Part Two. In a style reminiscent of German expressionism, Stilkey uses a mix of paint, lacquer, ink and pencil to capture his melancholic, whimsical characters painted on stacks of books, many of which are destined for the recycling bin. Stilkey told the L.A. Times, “Books are dying. There are so many that go to the garbage. It’s crazy. If I can paint on them, I’m giving them a second chance.” His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and around the world including the United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland, Philippines, Hong Kong and Beijing, China. When the curator of the Rice University Gallery randomly saw his work in a Los Angeles gallery, she flew him to Houston where he created his first large book sculpture. It went viral. “Then I went on a world tour for the next, I don’t know, 15 years,” says Stilkey. “Right place, right idea, right timing. It all aligned.”

In 2018, Stilkey was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland as a cultural leader where he created a book installation entitled Down to Earth consisting of nearly 8,000 books, standing 27 feet tall and 20 feet wide depicting people from diverse walks of life floating on the music of a pianist. In 2019 at the Starfield Library in South Korea he created his largest piece, a three-sided sculpture made of roughly 15,000 discarded books.

If you want to see more of Stilkey’s artwork, visit his website at mikestilkey.com. In the meantime, stick your toes in the sand and enjoy another August reading issue of PineStraw.

— Jim Moriarty

Leo

(July ��– August ��)

No surprise: You’re in the driver’s seat this month, kiddo — just the way you like it. Control is a clever little temptress. With Venus retrograde in Leo until September 3, you can expect more than a few obstacles to arise in relation to an old flame. Navigate wisely, resisting the urge to make any brash or sudden detours. Clarity will return. In the meantime, crack the windows, crank up the tunes and celebrate this wild and precious life with lionhearted exuberance.

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

To thine own self be kind.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

There’s a balm for that.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Don’t let the muck get the best of you.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

Finish what you started.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Lather, rinse and repeat.

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Keep the kindling dry.

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

Big feelings? Release them with paint.

Aries (March 21 – April 19)

Someone needs a time-out.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

The irony won’t be lost on you for long.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Inaction speaks louder than words.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Does “toxic productivity” mean anything to you? 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.

Heavy Mettle

Three mothers of tenacity appear in a debut novel

By A nne Blythe

Mother’s Day has come and gone this year, but Sara Johnson Allen’s Down Here We Come Up offers a unique and complicated tribute to the grit of motherhood, not the roses and candy of a Hallmark holiday. This debut novel from a writer with Raleigh roots shows the depths to which three mothers will go for their children despite the blunders and foibles that accompany the rough-and-tumble lives that bring them all together under one roof in a “creaking, rotting bungalow” outside Wilmington.

In rich, vivid, sparkling prose, Allen’s page-turner explores tough topics: socioeconomic divides; the realities of immigration often skirted in today’s hot-button debate; the shadow economies of the illegal drug trade, and human and weapons trafficking.

Kate Jessup is the protagonist. She’s in her mid-20s, “moviestar beautiful,” and the wistful mother of a daughter whose soft skin she could still smell even after spending only 48 hours with her before handing the newborn over to a Boston couple in a “closed adoption.”

Kate’s a twin who is almost as street smart as her brother, Luke, is book smart. They’re the children of a sassy single mother, Jackie Jessup, who showed her twins how to live by hook or crook as they grew up near Wilmington. They learned early in life that “there was a thing’s market value, the perceived value, the true value, the if-the-buyer-was-drunk value.”

Jackie, readers find out pretty quickly, “could con people into anything because she saw ahead of everyone else by several moves,” Allen writes. “In a different set of circumstances, Jackie might have been a great chess player, someone who could beat

the fast strategies of the men playing outside the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square where Kate later followed her twin brother Luke when he received enough merit and needbased scholarships plus loan money that it didn’t matter he had no actual money.”

Settled near Harvard Square with her professor-boyfriend in a multi-million-dollar Victorian home he’d purchased from his father for a dollar, Kate gets a call from Jackie that shakes her out of the aristocratic world she had joined.

“Mama, I’m at work. What do you want?”

Kate asked while ducking down between the rows of plants she loved to tend in the greenhouse where she worked.

“ . . . Look, I need something,” Jackie said between drags on a Kool 100.

Jackie wanted Kate to “get someone’s children,” and to entice her daughter, she added: “I have something you want.” Kate had been emotionally hollow when she left the South and her mother to be near her brother in New England. Most of all, she wanted to know where the daughter she’d given up for adoption was. Though she tried to tamp down those questions, they were never far from the surface.

Against her brother’s advice, she had even gone to the home where she thought the adoptive parents lived, just to get a glimpse of the life she had brought into the world. But there was no sign of the couple or a little girl who would, by then, be close to 8 years old.

Jackie’s phone call, and the chance that her mother might truly know where her daughter was, leads Kate back to the house where she grew up. She leaves Boston, taking her boyfriend’s Audi without his permission or even telling him she was going. Memories of a life she thought she had left behind flooded back.

“She knew driving south would be like letting poison seep into the well,” Allen writes. “She could taste it, bitter and sharp on the

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sides of her tongue, the menthol smoke, the chemical air freshener, a variety of aftershaves of strangers in their house, all of it.”

Once home, Kate found her mother deathly ill, “a skeletal, yellow-grey version of herself.” The bungalow was filled with people she didn’t know, travelers from south of the U.S. border who were there because of Maribel Reyes, a former teacher and mother of three who fled Mexico to build a better life for her family.

Maribel had moved into the Jessup home, taking on a daughter-like caregiver role for Jackie. More than that, she had created a safe house for migrant workers who made stops in southeastern North Carolina as they carved new paths in a foreign and sometimes unwelcoming land.

Maribel, Kate and Jessie may have converged in this place from different circumstances for an array of reasons but they shared a powerful bond. They were mothers who knew too well the pangs of being separated from their children. Each was willing to go to great lengths to narrow that distance, often bending the rules to achieve that greater purpose.

As the women plot the trip to get Maribel’s children out of Mexico and across the Bridge of the Americas from Cuidad Juarez into El Paso, Texas, Allen shows her deftness at describing places. You can almost feel the hot weather of the inner coastal communities. “Kate knew heat,” Allen writes. “She knew it up and down like the motion of a paper fan in a closed-window church. Blot-a-cloth-against-your-sweaty-forehead heat. Waving-up-

from-the-asphalt-like-a-mirage heat. Wet heat.”

You can visualize what the coastal community looked like before the new housing developments cropped up on old farmland and forever altered the landscape. The sounds and smells of the changes hang heavily in the air — new languages among the rural Southern accents, the chilaquiles and memelas served in kitchens where biscuits once were the main fare.

Amid all the calculating, heartbreaking and serpentine storylines of survival are moments of triumph, jubilation and humor. Allen has her readers cheering for her characters, rallying for them to forgive themselves and others and longing for new beginnings.

“Follow anything back to the beginning, and you will find a mother,” Jackie says at one point.

From start to finish, Allen will make her readers think about motherhood, how to define it, and the joys, messiness and sacrifices that come with the job.

Author Alena Dillon describes Allen’s first novel as “a literary mic drop.” Let’s hope it’s not the end of a performance, but the first of more stories to come. She’s off to a great start. PS

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

$695,000

3 bed

2.5 bath

Jennifer Nguyen (910) 585-2099

Julia Lattarulo (910) 690-9716

MLS 100372444

This charming home is a quick cart ride away from the heart of Pinehurst and minutes from First Health.

$565,000

3 bed

4 bath

Debbie Darby (910) 783-5193

MLS 100354707

You won’t believe the space & storage in this one-level Middleton Place townhome! Enjoy a finished basement plus an in-law suite.

$650,000

3 bed

2.5 bath

Jennifer Nguyen (910) 585-2099

MLS 100386797

Nestled in the pines, this home is a private oasis within a carts ride to the village of Pinehurst.

$525,000

3 bed

2 bath

Jennifer Nguyen (910) 585-2099

MLS 100388761

$634,000

3 bed

2.5 bath

Debbie Darby (910) 783-5193

MLS 100384467

This sleek and inspiring home is being sold turn-key with all furnishings. It’s never been so easy to move to Pinehurst!

LUXURY

$499,999

3 bed

2.5 bath

Jordan Baker (540) 454-3641

MLS 100384837

This charming home features a beautiful backyard oasis, many improvements, and is situated by the Southern Pines Golf Club!

You don’t want to miss this lovely home with a bonus room in the highly-desired Aboretum Neighborhood!

55 McQueen Road, Pinehurst

60 Gingham Lane, Pinehurst

107 Wimbledon Drive, Pinehurst

32 Ashley Court, Southern Pines 775 S Ridge Street, Southern Pines

August Books

FICTION

Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Both hopeful and elegiac, Tom Lake explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety.

The Night Ship, by Jess Kidd

Based on a true story, this epic historical novel illuminates the lives of two characters: a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and, 300 years later, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island. 1629: A newly orphaned young girl named Mayken is bound for the Dutch East Indies on the Batavia, one of the greatest ships of the Dutch Golden Age. Curious and mischievous, Mayken spends the long journey going on misadventures above and below the deck, searching for a mythical monster. But the true monsters might be closer than she thinks. 1989: A lonely boy named Gil is sent to live off the coast of Western Australia among the seasonal fishing community where his late mother once resided. There, on the tiny reef-shrouded island, he discovers the story of an infamous shipwreck. With her trademark storytelling, Kidd weaves a true work of magic about friendship, sacrifice, brutality and forgiveness.

My Name Is Iris, by Brando Skyhorse

Iris Prince is starting over. After years of drifting apart, she and her husband are going through a surprisingly drama-free divorce. She’s moved to a new house in a new neighborhood, and has plans for gardening, coffee clubs and spending more time with her 9-year-old daughter, Melanie. It feels like her life is finally exactly what she wants it to be. Then, one beautiful morning, she looks outside her kitchen window — and sees that a

wall has appeared in her front yard overnight. Where did it come from? What does it mean? And why does it seem to keep growing? Meanwhile, a Silicon Valley startup has launched a hightech wrist wearable called “the Band.” Pitched as a convenient, eco-friendly tool to help track local utilities and replace driver’s licenses and IDs, the Band is available only to those who can prove parental citizenship. Suddenly, Iris, a proud second-generation Mexican American, is now of “unverifiable origin,” unable to prove who she is, or where she, and her undocumented loved ones, belong. Amid a climate of fear and hate-fueled violence, Iris must confront how far she’ll go to protect what matters to her most.

NONFICTION

The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed Art Forever, by Prudence Peiffer

In this exquisite biography, an art historian and critic captures a singular moment of community and creativity in mid-20th century New York City, bringing to life a group of struggling artists and the place they all called home, an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan, Coenties Slip. For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower edge of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones — one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street. It was named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick, and the site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art — eclectic and varied — exploring how we are shaped by our environment, and how it in turn shapes our work.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

When Rubin Plays,

by

Gracey Zhang

Beautiful music is in the ear of the beholder, and in this stunning picture book from the author/illustrator of Lala’s Words, that ear is a chorus of cats! Both a celebration of music and of new musicians, this one is sure to become a storytime favorite. (Ages 3-7.)

You Can’t Be a Pterodactyl!,

by

James Breakwell

Veterinarian, garbage truck driver or nurse - kids want to grow up to be all kinds of things. But Tommy? Tommy wants to be a pterodactyl. This super-silly picture book shows that determination can go a long, long way. (Ages 3-7.)

A Shell Is Cozy, by Diana Hutts Aston

A shell is a cozy, bony shelter that keeps the delicate parts of the animal tucked safely inside, but it’s also an anatomical wonder and a beautiful treasure for the patient beachcomber. This lyrical nonfiction title is chock-full of information, yet is lovely enough to be a coffee table book. Check out the entire series, which includes A Butterfly Is Patient, An Egg Is Quiet, A Rock Is Lively, A Nest Is Noisy and A Seed Is Sleepy. (Ages 3-10.)

All That’s Left to Say, by

Emery Lord

Her prom night and her dress are ruined, and maybe her whole life, but Hannah absolutely believes that it was all worth it if she can find out the truth about what happened to Sophie. A beautiful exploration of grief, a friends-tolovers romance and an emotional thriller, All That’s Left to Say will devastate you in the best kind of way. (Ages 14 and up.) PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally.

The Best Laid Plans

The resort that almost was

By Bill Fields

On childhood visits to sleepy Jackson Springs, where my parents grew up and my maternal grandmother still lived — across the street from the Presbyterian church — the stories told of the community’s bustling days were hard to believe.

As I tried to catch minnows in Jackson Creek or filled jars of mineral water from a spigot for Ma-Ma’s kitchen, few cars drove by on Highway 73. Inside the gas station once owned by my grandfather, B.L. Henderson, there was never a line to get to the penny candy or hoop cheese.

It was hard to imagine tourists in the 1890s and early 20th century having flocked to Jackson Springs, most traveling by train on the 4-mile spur line from West End, to take the water and take a load off, lodging at the 100-room hotel on a bluff above the springs. The guests went swimming and boating in a nearby lake. They played tennis, bowled and went quail hunting. Where I spent those solitary Sunday afternoons dangling a tiny hook baited with a morsel of bread, there had been a pavilion with music and dancing.

Why didn’t Jackson Springs endure as a resort, the way Pinehurst did?

There wasn’t any golf, for one thing, although in perhaps Jackson Springs’s most intriguing chapter, in the mid-1920s, there was talk of a course — designed by Donald Ross — among other big plans that never came to fruition.

News broke in 1925 that a “Northern syndicate” was purchasing the Jackson Springs Hotel from a local owner with intentions to invest $1 million in upgrades and expansion. The New Yorkers talked about building a new, larger hotel, converting the existing structure into a sanitarium and maternity hospital, and aggressively marketing the mineral water, lauded for its curative power.

The organization incorporated in early 1926. Its president was Dr. Joseph Darwin Nagel, a physician. Born in Hungary in 1867, Nagel immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and attended the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. An author of medical textbooks, Nagel was affiliated with the Hotel Pennsylvania, then the world’s largest hotel, as

medical director.

“A man of sterling worth and whose name carries confidence and assurance wherever it is known,” The Sandhill Citizen noted of Dr. Nagel.

The corporation’s general manager, Henry Stockbridge, told The Pilot in February 1926: “As soon as Donald Ross can get to it, we intend to have him establish an eighteen-hole golf course. We will enlarge the dam and raise the height of it to supply ample water power as well as to the advantages of the lake. We have other plans in view which will be unfolded when the time is ripe and which will make Jackson Springs a more prominent influence in Moore County than it is at present.”

Stockbridge’s boast turned out to be a fiction. In the late summer of 1928, Nagel wrote to Pinehurst owner Leonard Tufts, explaining that he hadn’t been able to devote the necessary time to make development in Jackson Springs a reality. “The thought occurred to me,” Nagel wrote, “that possibly you or some of your friends, might be interested in the property . . . ”

Richard Tufts, responding for his father, told Nagel that the family had operated the Jackson Springs Hotel “for several seasons” and knew full well what it would take “to put the place on a paying basis.”

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 was a hammer to the Jackson Springs Hotel’s by-now tenuous existence. The resort chapter came to an end in April 1932, when a fire destroyed the hotel weeks before a new owner, Frank Welch of Southern Pines, planned to open it for the late spring and summer seasons. By the following summer, instead of tourists, Jackson Springs was filled with young men working at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, one of dozens of CCC installations in North Carolina.

In 1961, by which time the heyday of my parents’ hometown was a distant memory, Dr. Nagel died at age 93 in Winter Haven, Florida, where he had long wintered and later retired. His brief and ultimately aborted involvement with Jackson Springs didn’t make his obituary. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Triumph in a Bridge

Matthew Steele celebrates the beauty of the manufactured world through sculpture

By liz A RoBeRts

Infrastructure inspires Charlotte artist Matthew Steele. Bridges, highways, architecture and other physical manifestations of technology demonstrate to him the lengths human beings will go to “transcend the greatest obstacles we know.”

With honed precision, Steele’s work explores the elegance, complexity and rigor of such industrial and manmade structures,

the labor that made them, and the life they each contain. The still rotors of a turbine become a thrumming work of abstract beauty when Steele makes them of wood and copper. He allows them to hang alone, the promise of movement in every blade. Steele’s scaffold-like towers of walnut merge to create a geometric, jagged skyline, but with an irregular, tendriled base: Are they putting down roots? Are these structures not built, but alive?

“There is desire in a highway,” Steele says. “There is triumph in a bridge.”

Steele moved to Charlotte in 2012 for a McColl Center residency and has made the city his home. “I’ve always been interested in the manufactured world,” he says. “I came from a super

Telophase no.1, 2022, oak and 23-gauge nails, 24 x 24 x 72 inches

Mirrored Turbine, 2022, walnut, copper rod, 23-gauge nails, 84 x 84 x 4 inches

small town in Indiana. I knew the feeling I had when I would go to a city or a large industrial space, and just how alien it felt. I think I’m still narrowing in on that feeling.”

In 2015, Steele became an artist-in-residence at Goodyear Arts, a nonprofit arts program in Charlotte. This allowed him to further explore that feeling and its embodiment in his work, which has been exhibited and collected internationally. Steele and his wife, Susan Jedrzejewski, associate at Charlotte’s Hodges Taylor Gallery and a former codirector of Goodyear Arts, live in a 2,000-square-foot house with a walk-out basement that serves as Steele’s studio. This is where he makes the work that fuels his creativity. “There’s something incredible about waking up and making something,” Steele says, “of walking downstairs and turning on the table saw.” At the end of the day, Steele says, nothing can compare to the satisfaction of that kind of work: “Something can exist that didn’t exist that morning.”

Most of the time, that something is made of wood, and usually, that wood is walnut. It’s the wood he first learned to use many years ago when his father brought home a huge supply, and still, no other wood compares. “It’s pretty forgiving,” Steele

says. “It has a quality that feels special. I’ve created the deepest relationship with walnut.”

It’s this richly colored, earthy-scented material that forms the work inspired by steel buttresses, by engine components, by industrial infrastructure. To Steele, that paradox points to a larger message. “I remember a thought I had in college about people in the world that we build,” he says. “It’s so easy for us to think of us as separate from nature, but we make our beehives, and we make our own beaver dams. We’re just animals.”

In Charlotte, Steele is making his mark. Last year, he received an Emerging Creators Fellowship from the Arts & Science Council, and he is currently at work on a major piece of City of Charlotte-funded public art that will anchor a streetscape project on J.W. Clay Boulevard in the University City area.

Making public art — which has kept him busy in recent years — is the realization of a long-held goal. In 2019, after a series of rejections for proposals he’d submitted for public art commissions, Steele decided to make a work of art to please himself: “I just thought, Nothing is working. I’m just going to make whatever I want.” He took the form of Greek statue The Winged Victory

Basalt Pillars, 2021, walnut, 23-gauge nails, 16 x 48 x 4 inches

Sundowning, 2021, machine drawing / pen on black Stonehenge, 92 x 50 inches

Noir no.2, 2023, walnut, 23-gauge nails, 47 x 73 x 4 inches

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LYDIA BITTNER-BAIRD; COURTESY OF HODGES TAYLOR

of Samothrace as inspiration and “depicted that idealized sculpture as this sort of grim, dark oil-covered mess.” The resulting (Nothing is Working) Victory is a metal form that recalls the iconic sculpture’s shape, but is built using intersecting pieces of metal, held up on a wooden trestle. The process taught him to make organic, volumetric shapes he hadn’t been able to create before. A few weeks later, Steele got his first call to make a piece of public art — one that called on his newfound skill.

Guaranteed funding, a larger scale, a public audience and a sense of permanence make these commissions particularly prized. But the making of a piece of public art can become weighed down in procedure — paperwork and correspondence and engineering — that can remove an artist from the creative process. “It’s a tricky transition,” Steele says. “You’re using new materials, on a completely different scale.”

Schematic depictions of Fabric, the piece he’s currently working on for the City of Charlotte, clearly share the elegance, energy and story of his studio work. Before submitting his proposal for the commission, Steele researched the industrial history of the area and became inspired by the early-1900s textile mills of the NoDa area. “I found old photos from the archives, images of factory rooms with thousands of spools of thread,” he says. “I just couldn’t get over the visual, all of these threads coming through.”

He began to experiment with steel rods and developed the design for what will become a 10-foot-tall, 6-ton piece of steel

rods. Slated to be installed in 2026 on a median in J.W. Clay Boulevard, the piece will be a sort of pyramid of rebar, where slivers of daylight will shift with the movement of a viewer.

“Public art is really, really exciting,” he says. “You get to do something you wouldn’t do any other way.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

Rhino Rendering

Didion’s Masterpiece

Judson Theatre presents The Year of Magical Thinking

By Jim moR i ARty

When the late Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking was published in 2005, it instantly became the indispensable handbook for grief and loss. The book, and the subsequent one-woman play that starred Vanessa Redgrave and debuted on Broadway in 2007, was published in October of ʼ05 and won that year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction. It recounts the year following the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, from a sudden heart attack in 2003, and how that death and her ability, or inability, to process it transforms her reality. The book includes the illness of Didion and Dunne’s only child, their daughter, Quintana, and the play, a masterpiece of storytelling, expands to include Quintanaʼs death from pancreatitis in 2005.

The Year of Magical Thinking, starring Linda Purl, is the middle offering in Judson Theatre Company’s three-play summer festival, and will run from August 4-13 in the intimate McPherson Theater at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center at Sandhills Community College.

Purl is likely best known to Sandhills audiences as Andy Griffith’s daughter, Charlene, in the long-running Matlock series, or as Steve Carell’s love interest in The Office, where she played the mother of Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer). She also starred as

fallen ill. Franklin suggested Purl replace her and she agreed, but only if she could pass the role back to her friend when she recovered. “So, I started learning it, then my own mother was diagnosed with cancer, terminally,” says Purl. Her mother insisted she continue with the play, even running lines with her daughter quite literally from her deathbed. With her mother gravely ill, Purl decided she’d have to call the director and back out. “I opened my email in the morning and Bonnie had died,” says Purl. “So that was how I came to the role. Pretty intense.”

For Purl, her performances of the play have been a journey like no other. “Besides the fact that it’s a one-person play, you just feel like she (Didion) braved the rapids of how to negotiate some of the most difficult challenges one could ever face in life. It’s a template. It’s a map, and she gave it to us. I’m of an age where you lose people. Death is not a stranger.

“I did the play in Kansas and I was in the middle of the run and I was in the supermarket, and this woman came up to me

Linda Purl

and she said she’d seen the play the night before and she said, ‘My husband died three weeks ago. I thought I was going crazy and now I know I’m not.’ You want to feel that you’re doing something meaningful. If sharing her journey can be a comfort to someone else, then that’s a good day at work.”

While Purl has now done the play more times than she can recall, it’s never quite the same. “Every time I do it, it feels differently,” she says. “The play, its idea and its wisdom keep revealing itself to me. As an actress, it feeds you, too. It always feels like jumping off a cliff. But I never feel alone up there. I always feel like Joan is right there with me.”

That connection was revealed in her recent performance in London. In a review by Harry Bower for “All That Dazzles,” a theater website that popped up during the pandemic lockdown, Purl is described this way: “She knows every line of this script as if she and it are one. The inflection and delivery of each syllable is carefully measured and delivered with precision for maximum emotional impact. There is a vulnerability and sensitivity to her performance juxtaposed against a stoic bravery painted across her face in broad strokes. She is a force of nature, knowing the perfect moments to demonstrate restraint or let loose with her character’s truth. Her light-touch comic timing completes an extraordinary performance.”

The play’s passionate opening was crafted by Didion just days before its Broadway debut. Sitting and watching rehearsal, Didion looked at director David Hare and asked, “Wouldn’t this be better if it was less about me? And more about them?” And so it became about all of us. PS

Judson Theatre’s concluding play of its summer festival is The Last Five Years, running August 18-27. Tickets for either of the remaining plays are available at JudsonTheatre.com and ticketmesandhills.com.

Above: Linda Purl and Henry Winkler starring in Happy Days

Right: Andy Griffith and Linda Purl in Matlock

Hearts of Stone

A sweet and savory summer flatbread

stoRy A nd PhotogRAPh By Rose shewey

We no longer want to be just rich. We want to be eco-rich. It may be a generational thing or perhaps it is the zeitgeist, but either way, forget the townhouse with the smart fridge in your up-and-coming neighborhood. Give us an apple orchard with flower meadows on a spring-fed creek and we’ll consider ourselves wealthy. With peach vendors popping up like beach umbrellas and hot tub-sized crates of watermelon lining the produce aisles of every store this time of year, even if you’re not lucky enough to have the acreage (or the time) for a garden of your own, it’s impossible not to see the beauty and richness Mother Nature is affording us, particularly in the stone fruit department.

Cherries were my first love; I grew up with a cherry tree in my parents’ courtyard, and year after year it grew heaps of the most aromatic, crimson-colored cherries. Apricots and plums would grow lavishly in our cool temperate fields, but the climate in my home pastures didn’t allow for peaches. What once was an exotic fruit to me, lumped in with kiwis and mangoes on the market shelves, is now a cherished local harvest, thanks to the sandy soil of this region.

Let’s put the traditional grilled stone fruit and cobbler business on the back burner and try out a more hearty, wholesome meal idea. This sweet and savory flatbread comes together in no time, and cooking is completely optional — that is, if you use a store bought (or pre-made) base, otherwise it will just take minutes to make your own delicious flatbread. You can make this ahead of time or when you need it; topping options and combinations are limitless, and the end result has always been, without fail, a beautiful reflection of summer’s bounty.

Easy Skillet Flatbread

(Makes 4 medium size flatbreads)

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon sweetener, such as honey or granulated sugar

3/4 cup cold water

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and knead for 3-5 minutes, until smooth. If the dough is too sticky, add extra flour; if the dough is too dry, add water, one teaspoon at a time. Divide into four equal parts and roll out to desired shape (about 1/4-inch thick). Heat a large skillet over medium/high heat. Add heatstable oil (e.g., avocado oil) to the pan and, once heated, add rolled-out dough and cook for about 2 minutes on each side. Reduce heat slightly once you flip the bread, repeat with all remaining portions.

Whipped Goat Cheese

8 ounces goat cheese

3 ounces cream cheese

2 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon olive oil

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon lemon zest

2-3 teaspoon fresh herbs, chopped, such as chives or thyme (optional)

Remove goat cheese and cream cheese from the refrigerator about 30 minutes before preparing this dish. Add all ingredients, except for the fresh herbs, if using, to a food processor and blend until creamy. If the texture is still crumbly after blending for 1-2 minutes, add more olive oil, one teaspoon at a time. Fold in fresh herbs and refrigerate up to 3 days.

Toppings

2-3 pieces of sliced stone fruit per person (such as peaches, apricots or plums)

Prosciutto slices

Blackberries

Honey

To assemble, spread whipped goat cheese generously on your flatbread, arrange sliced stone fruit, prosciutto and berries to your liking, drizzle with honey and serve. PS

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

Three’s Company

Have liquor, will travel

By tony CRoss

On a lovely trip to Wrightsville Beach I had my fair share of margaritas and Mexican lagers from Tower 7 restaurant and Lagerheads Tavern. I also brought rum and liqueurs — as well as syrups and bitters — for my travel bar at the Airbnb. Naturally, I brought way too much. I definitely should have scaled it back. Lesson learned. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for those of you who would like to make a few quick and easy cocktails while on vacation but don’t want to lug around any more stuff than absolutely necessary. I’ll keep them in mind for my September trip, too.

Ti’ Punch

With the exception of a vodka and soda, this might be the easiest drink a beach-loving vacationer can make. Rum, lime and sugar are the only ingredients you’ll need. You may be asking yourself, “Isn’t that the recipe for a daquiri?” Well, sort of. You’ll need the end of a lime, not the juice, and this cocktail will not be shaken, only stirred, without ice. A quick history of the national drink of Martinique, per rum bartender, enthusiast and author Shannon Mustipher: “There is no real ‘recipe.’ It is meant to be built and enjoyed according to one’s own personal taste, and it is reflected in the local saying, Chacun prepare sa propre mort, which roughly translates as ‘Each prepares his own death.’”

Rhum agricole is recommended; these are usually 50 ABV or higher in spirit. I’ve used Clairin before (a Haitian rum) and thoroughly enjoyed the results. This is a spirit-forward drink and great sipper.

2 ounces rhum agricole (50 percent ABV)

1 bar spoon cane sugar or cane sugar simple syrup

1 lime

Cut a disc of skin from a lime, about the size of a silver dollar, taking as little of the pith and actual flesh of the lime as possible. In a rocks glass, muddle the lime disk with sugar or simple syrup. Top with rhum. Stir well to mix.

Gold Rush

I don’t drink a lot of whiskey during North Carolina summers, but if you do, the Gold Rush might be intriguing. It’s basically a whiskey sour, but with honey syrup for the sweetening agent. You might call it a Bee’s Knees with gin instead of whiskey. No matter how you look at it, it’s an easy cocktail to make. Use a younger bourbon, or one without a lot of oak present. As for the honey, you’ll want to make a syrup out of it, so it mixes easier when shaking the cocktail. You can do a 1:1 ratio with water, but a 2 or 3:1 ratio of honey to water will make the syrup richer and, in my opinion, a better mouthfeel.

2 ounces bourbon

3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice

1/2 ounce honey syrup (3:1). If using a smaller ratio of honey to water, use 3/4 ounce

Add all ingredients to cocktail shaker, add ice, and shake hard for 10-15 seconds. Strain into cocktail glass over a large cube. Add lemon peel for garnish.

Tommy’s Margarita

Be warned. If you haven’t had this margarita, you are going to be hooked. There’s no orange curaçao, no simple syrup, no fruit. I’m in love with this simple three-ingredient margarita that’s

PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CROSS

Don’t Miss Our Summer Rates

Warm Carolina summer weather is here this week. Bring a friend and visit us here at Whispering Pines. Our friendly staff would love to have you. See you soon !

At checkout, be sure to select one of our instant rewardsjust for booking online. See you on the 1st tee.

IN THE SPIRIT

courtesy of Julio Bermejo of Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco. From Robert Simonson’s book Modern Classic Cocktails, he writes: “The seeds of the drink were planted when Bermejo was not yet of drinking age. Like many teenagers, he experimented with booze. Beer, rum and brandy left him with bad hangovers. But he found that tequila — filched from Tommy’s, his family’s restaurant in the Richmond District — didn’t do as much damage. And Herradura tequila in particular, made from 100 percent agave, left his brain largely unscathed.” Once Bermejo was of age to bartend, he began experimenting with higher quality tequila, fresh juices, and ultimately 86-ing any orange liqueur. By the mid-’90s, his margaritas began to turn heads, including well-known bartenders and newspapers like The Wall Street Journal.

For this margarita, you’ll need to make an agave syrup. A 2:1 ratio (2 parts agave and 1 part water) works great. Add agave and water into a saucepan and put over medium heat, stirring until agave is dissolved — should take less than a minute. A quality tequila is strongly recommended. Don’t even go through the trouble making your own agave syrup if you’re going to end up using inferior tequila. Though blanco tequilas work great in margs, a good reposado tequila really shines through in this one. Herradura reposado is still a great choice. These are addicting — don’t say I didn’t warn you.

2 ounces reposado tequila

1 ounce fresh lime juice

1/2 ounce agave syrup

Take a rocks glass and use a lime wedge to rim 1/4 to 1/2 of glass. Roll that part of the rim into a small plate containing kosher salt (Celtic salt is yum). Add a large ice cube into the glass. In a cocktail shaker, add tequila, lime juice, agave syrup, and ice. Shake hard for 10-15 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass and toast the beach. PS

Tony Cross owns and operates Reverie Cocktails, a cocktail delivery service that delivers kegged cocktails for businesses to pour on tap — but once a bartender, always a bartender.

Fashion Goes Far and Wide

What goes around comes around — again

By deBoRA h sA lomon

in shock. That woman is wearing bellbottoms! But wait. Not only are the bottoms flared. The whole leg has been widened!

Are those pants . . . or pontoons?

About once every decade I need to unload on fashion. You might think that with the world in such rough shape people wouldn’t care what they wear. Then, again, maybe during hard times fashion provides a diversion — anything to get the mind off The Indictment, Meghan & Harry, Ukraine and graham crackers at $2 a box.

But we mustn’t knock a multi-billion-dollar industry (employing hundreds of thousands) too hard, even though obsolescence keeps it alive.

Nothing works like what’s happening now: Return of the bellbottoms, even more revolutionary since pants have become the default for women.

This happened gradually, as I recall. What used to be called “slacks” and “dungarees” became pants and jeans. But a businesswoman in pants? Impossible! So the designers added a matching jacket, creating a pantsuit, worn with a girly blouse . . . er, top.

Women liked this, especially the tall, long-legged ones.

This popular trend for women survived the gender divide. Men adopted flares in casual pants and “leisure suits.” I can practically date a movie by its pants, especially the high-waisted, wide-leg ones that became Katharine Hepburn’s trademark.

The ladies soon learned that pants/pantsuits were practical, comfortable, versatile. Pantyhose wasn’t required, nor were shoes as important. The same pants could bottom a multitude of tops. Denim came out of the closet and into the spotlight — dress jeans, they were called, the quintessential oxymoron.

I’ve felt a change looming for several seasons, like elephants sense a tsunami and run for the hills. It began with gauzy wideleg “palazzo” pants — OK if you’ve got a palazzo in Tuscany, not

OK for the height-challenged, who seemed to sink into their volume. Then, this spring, fashion-forward TV anchorettes debuted pants that began flaring at the knee, got wider as they approached the ankle, then swallowed the foot like a whale swallows a school of fish. To further exacerbate the situation, CNN made them stand instead of hiding their pant legs under a desk.

Despite fostering flares the ladies retained the hairstyle best achieved when a power outage happens during a blow-dry. Or locks get caught in a woodchipper.

Remember that scene from Fargo?

Now I’m seeing baggy pants previewed in fall merchandise. More fabric means higher prices. My prediction: DOA, unless John Travolta exhumes “Stayin’ Alive” for his fellow senior citizens.

As for the guys, my shock turned to giggles watching them strut skinny suit pants, usually dark colors, paired with brownishorange shoes which elongate, not minimize, big feet. What do you call a male fashionista? Fashionisti? Sorry, guys, but nothing looks better than a classic well-tailored suit, a fine shirt, maybe oxford-cloth, in the proper neck size (no gaps), with a paisley tie.

My last arrow is aimed at women’s shoe designers who lag behind the pantspeople. Boo-hoo, Jimmy Choo. Skinny stilettos don’t marry well with wide-leg bell-bottoms. They require slightly chunky footwear, with stacked heels, don’t you agree?

Agree or not, I’m betting that by December stovepipe pants will look as dated as penny loafers and pleated skirts.

Fashion is a complex element of civilization. Think of the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Elizabethans. Chinese women wore pants while colonists still sported bustles and hoop skirts. These days, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle call the shots. Because if clothes really do make a man, imagine their power over poor women like us. PS

Igasped,

Deborah Salomon is a contributing writer for PineStraw and The Pilot . She can be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

It’s not a baby hummingbird at all

By susA n CA mPBell

I am waiting, just waiting, for the first call to come in from someone who has seen a “baby hummingbird.” Although this is the time when young ruby-throateds are appearing at feeders and flowers across the state, the first report of the year is usually from a very puzzled observer. Not only has he or she spotted a very small hummer, but it looks to be of another species: The color pattern is very different. So, what is it?

The answer is always the same: It’s not a hummingbird at all, but a moth. Indeed, these insects hover to feed from brightly colored flowers and appear to have a long bill, but they are insects. The giveaway is the long antennae but, on such a small, fast flier, the antennae and three pairs of legs are easily overlooked. The odd behavior and body coloration are what grab one’s attention. The confusion is so common that many bird identification guides depict these moths on the same page alongside the details for ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Here in the North Carolina Piedmont and Sandhills, we have at least three kinds of so-called hummingbird moths, all of which are in the Sphingidae family. Two are “clearwing” moths: the hummingbird clearwing and the hummingbird hawk-moth. We have white-lined sphinx moths in late summer as well. They are all exclusively nectivorous, feeding from many of the same blooms frequented by hummingbirds. With their long proboscis, they can reach down into the tubular flowers of impatiens,

fuchsias and assorted salvias, to name a few.

The clearwings are named for the transparent midsection of their wings. The rest of the body is frequently reddish but may be a shade of blue. They are active during the day, flitting from plant to plant in search of a sweet meal. Typically clearwings are not intimidated by human activity, probably because four-legged mammals do not prey on moths in our area. That means one can usually approach these beautiful creatures very closely. If you have the patience as well as a fast shutter speed, you may be able to get some excellent shots of these very photogenic insects.

Sphinx moths are large, striking and interesting. Unlike the clearwings, they are creatures of the night. They can be abundant at the same flowers hummingbirds use during the day, but most people are totally unaware of their existence given their nocturnal habits. It’s the caterpillar of this group that is more familiar. Typically called a hornworm (given the yellowy head projections), they are voracious pests on a variety of plants such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and tobacco. However, not only are the adult sphinx moths eaten by bats and small owls but, as caterpillars, hornworms are sought out by tiny braconid wasps. The eggs of the wasp develop under the skin of the caterpillar. Once they pupate, they attach themselves externally and are mistakenly thought to be the eggs of yet more caterpillars. When the caterpillars are in this state, they have very little time to live and are no longer a threat to the plants.

Keep your eyes peeled around the yard this summer. You may be lucky enough to spot one of these “baby hummers” hovering among the blooms. PS

Susan Campbell would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photographs at susan@ncaves.com.

White-lined sphinx

Hummingbird hawk-moth

Hummingbird clearwing

Something in the Water

Diving with sand tiger sharks off the North Carolina coast

stoRy A nd P hotogRAPhs By todd P usseR

For nearly five minutes, I have been hovering motionlessly off the bow of the Hyde, some 60 feet below the ocean’s surface, staring out into the smoky, blue-gray water. Built in 1945 during the final days of World War II, the Hyde was one of the few ocean dredges outfitted with bullet-resistant steel and large guns. Once it was decommissioned, the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries intentionally sunk the ship 18 miles off the coast of Wilmington in 1988 to provide recreational opportunities for fisherman and scuba divers. The Hyde now rests upright on a vast, flat, sandy bottom and is a haven for marine life.

Exhaling into my regulator, I spy a large, dark shape, near the edge of my vision, approaching through a dense school of baitfish. On it swims, ever closer, revealing more of its distinctive features. I note the golden-brown sheen of its skin, sprinkled here and there with black spots. An arched back tapers from a wide dorsal fin down to a narrow snout. On the underside of that snout is a mouth filled with large exposed recurved teeth; an imposing maul that makes the species extremely popular attractions in zoos and aquariums.

Raising my camera up to my face mask, I frame the sand tiger shark in my viewfinder and press the shutter. The shark, 8 feet long, swims closer still, mouth slightly agape. Finally, an arm’s length away, the sand tiger veers to my right and swims slowly by, completely ignoring me. With a few gentle thrusts of its tail, the shark disappears into the blue.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have been fascinated by sharks. Their likeness features on Phoenician pottery dating back to 3,000 B.C. Aristotle wrote about them, as did Pliny the Elder, of ancient Rome. Many cultures even viewed sharks as deities. However, fascination soon gave way to fear. A vase, discovered in 725 B.C. in Ischia, Italy, depicts a shark-like fish attacking a man. The fear of being eaten alive has persisted through the centuries, eventually culminating in the 1975 movie Jaws. So strong is this fear, it is without parallel, even in a world filled with nuclear weapons and mass shootings.

Sharks have been in existence for a very long time, swimming ocean waters some 200 million years before the dinosaurs walked the Earth. Over 540 species of sharks are currently recognized by scientists. With each passing year, new species are continually being described.

In his 2003 book Sharks, Rays, and Skates of the Carolinas, the late marine biologist Frank Schwartz of the University of North Carolina Marine Sciences Institute, in Morehead City, documented 56 species of sharks swimming our state’s waters. Of the sand tiger shark, he wrote, “Common year-round in the

Carolinas, especially July-November in shallow shelf waters.” Their presence in the shallow waters off North Carolina has made the state a mecca for recreational scuba divers and underwater photographers. Believe it or not, people willing to pay good money, flock here from all over the world for the chance to swim with these predators in the wild. North Carolina is one of just a handful of spots anywhere on the planet where divers can safely observe large sharks in their natural environment without the need for metal cages or the use of bait in the water.

Despite their docile demeanor, sand tiger sharks, like all large predators, are capable of inflicting a serious bite, and should be treated with respect. Consider, as well, an interesting tidbit about their unusual reproductive biology. Female sand tiger sharks possess two uteri. Within each of these uteri, the largest embryo consumes all its siblings and any unfertilized eggs that the female produces. Talk about sibling rivalry. With no competition for food, the embryos grow to a large size for the duration of their mother’s 10-month pregnancy. Born headfirst, the pair are over a meter in length (among the largest of all sharks at birth) and come equipped with a mouth of fully functional teeth.

With air running low in my scuba tank, I swim over to the anchor line and begin my slow ascent toward the dive boat drifting overhead. Glancing down, I count at least 20 large sand tigers circling the Hyde, a testament that the moratorium on fishing for

large shark species within United States waters is working. Due to the fact that female sand tiger sharks only give birth to two pups at a time, every three years, the species is especially vulnerable to overfishing.

Off to my side, a sand tiger shark, high up in the water column, turns and slowly heads in my direction. The shark casts a curious eye as it swims by just a few feet away. This time, instead of raising my camera, I stop my ascent, and simply watch, fully enjoying the moment. 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.

cultures, nonpersonal spirituality.

You may be seeking a Faith Community that : embraces diversity and celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every person, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, or background.

AUGUST EVENTS

Aug 04 David Joy “Those We Thought We Knew”

Author Event

The Country Bookshop

Unitarian Universalism is a religion that places a strong emphasis on social justice and community service. UUs believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person and are committed to creating a more just and equitable society. This commitment is reflected in the many social justice programs and initiatives that UU congregations support, including environmental activism, im migrant rights, and LGBTQ+ rights.

Aug 4-6, Judson Theatre Co. Summer Festival 10-13 Linda Purl in “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

BPAC’s McPherson Theater

Aug 13 Parent Talk - Anxiety in Children

The Country Bookshop

Aug 18-20, Judson Theatre Co. Summer Festival 24-27 “The Last Five Years” Musical

BPAC’s McPherson Theater

You can find a comprehensive list of regularly updated events from Sandhills Trolley Company and Cameo Art House Theatre on TicketMeSandhills.com

(pictured)

Three of a Kind

Keeping Pinehurst in good hands

By lee PACe

Think of it: Trump Pinehurst. JW

Marriott Pinehurst Resort. Omni Pinehurst. Imagine checking your brokerage account for HLT and wondering if the Hilton chain stock got a nice bump during the weeks Pinehurst was hosting the U.S. Open. Oh, what could have been — and thankfully has not.

Consider this: Pinehurst (the resort and club) is 128 years old. It has had three owners. Three. In a golf industry expected to crest $41 billion by 2025 and with mergers and acquisitions flying like golf balls on Maniac Hill, Pinehurst has remained safely ensconced in private hands, never having to make its quarterly nut.

Certainly, it’s not all been peaches and cream, particularly those two years in the early 1980s when a consortium of banks was in charge after Diamondhead defaulted on its loans. Depressions and recessions generated some heartburn.

Trivia question: What do soda fountains, shipping containers and country club management have in common? Those were the arenas in which entrepreneurs that would eventually own Pinehurst generated their fortunes. James Tufts, Malcom McLean and Robert Dedman Sr. each grew from modest means to fabulous business success.

Tufts was born in 1835, grew up in the Boston suburb of Charlestown, and at age 15 was apprenticed in an apothecary shop. He established his own shop by age 21 and soon expanded to five stores. He recognized the soda fountain was a key part of what would become the modern drugstore, with customers not only buying medicine but also the drinks and ice cream concoctions from the Italian marble and silver-plated foundation apparatus.

When he was 27, Tufts developed and began manufacturing and selling the successful Arctic Soda machines through his new venture, the Arctic Soda Fountain Company. And since parts of his popular fountains were silver-plated, that led him to manufacture an extensive line of silver-plated pitchers, dishes and table accessories. Many of these items, including an Arctic Soda machine, are on display at the Tufts Archives in Pinehurst.

He became the first president of the American Soda Fountain Company through a merger in 1891, and with his wealth and business success secure, he turned his focus to other pursuits and philanthropy. The concept that became Pinehurst was the result of him wanting to create a resort in the southern United States for those like him of frail health to escape the bitter New England winters.

Golf was not part of the original vision that opened in late 1895, but it came to his attention in 1897 that guests were hitting small rubber balls with wooden sticks around the dairy fields and, in the process, aggravating the cows. Tufts built nine holes as a lark in 1898, enlisting the help of Dr. D. LeRoy Culver, a Southern Pines physician who was an avid golfer, had played in England and Scotland, and understood the gist of what a course should look like. “A nine-hole golf course has been laid out after the famous St. Andrews, near Edinburgh, Scotland,” The Pinehurst Outlook reported in February 1898.

And the dominoes started falling.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN GESSNER

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Tufts died in 1902 of heart disease, and the evolution of Pinehurst remained in the hands of his son Leonard and three grandsons. In the late 1960s, the aging of that third generation, the specter of inheritance taxes and the need to spend millions of dollars to upfit what was an aging resort in a time of rapid growth of the golf industry led the Tuftses to sell the resort and club. They found a buyer in a man who grew up 30 miles away and had just collected $160 million for selling a company that had revolutionized the shipping industry.

Malcom McLean grew up on a farm near Maxton, graduated from high school and went directly into business for himself, purchasing a used pickup truck for $120 with savings from his gas-pumping job. He and two of his six siblings — sister Clara and brother Jim — then opened McLean Trucking Company, expanding their fleet and hauling crops from farm to market, and empty tobacco barrels from market back to farm.

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Another early job during these mid-1930s formative days of what would become the second largest trucking firm in the country was in Pinehurst. McLean had the account of Pinehurst Inc. to haul guests’ luggage from the train station in Southern Pines to the hotels in Pinehurst.

Frustrated in 1937 by having to wait days at a New Jersey dock to unload his cargo of cotton onto a ship bound for Istanbul, McLean groused “there must be a better way” than loading a ship with cargo piece by piece. The idea fomented for two decades until he acted on his instincts in 1956 — that of designing cargo containers that could be easily separated from the truck bed and then neatly stacked on a ship designed to haul hundreds of containers at a time. He bought a fleet of old tankers, converted them to cargo ships and was off on his next venture, one that would revolutionize the shipping industry.

The eventual sale of Sea-Land Service Inc. to R.J. Reynolds in 1969 made the McLeans multi-millionaires. One of McLean’s sidelines was the resort and residential development concern that he named the Diamondhead Corporation, and that had projects underway in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. He remembered Pinehurst fondly from his luggage hauling days and eventually bought the resort from the Tuftses on Dec. 31, 1970, for the price of $9.2 million.

Diamondhead expanded the golf offering, building course No. 6 in the mid-1970s, creating the new World Golf Hall of Fame, and getting Pinehurst No. 2 back on the PGA Tour from 197382. It also embarked on an aggressive home-building expansion, with one ill-conceived and hideous idea to build condominiums within the No. 2 course that was thankfully thwarted by a lawsuit. In time, the company lost the resort to bankruptcy proceedings, opening the door for Dedman to step in in 1984.

Dedman was a self-made billionaire who worked his way from the farmland of Arkansas to law school and on to creating a business that owned and operated country, athletic and city clubs around the world. He was working as in-house counsel for Dallas oilman H.L. Hunt in the mid-1950s when he perceived an opportunity to spread the country club concept beyond the 1

percent of elite citizens. He saw hundreds of thousands of potential homebuyers and members amid the masses of people now working, earning a good living and raising families in the post-war ’50s.

Dedman soon learned of the inefficiencies inherent in the operation of clubs, most of which are governed by committees of members. They are experts in their chosen fields — doctoring or lawyering, for example — but limited in their expertise of club business. One of his favorite sayings was, “For God so loved the world that he didn’t send a committee to save it.” He brought systems and procedures to running his clubs. By bundling its buying power across dozens of clubs, his company found significant savings in purchases from fertilizer for golf courses to food for dining rooms.

Club Corporation of America eventually would own and operate more than 200 clubs total and have assets of more than $1.6 billion. Dedman died in 2002, and his son, Robert Jr., took over. The Dedman family sold its interests in what had become ClubCorp in 2006 but kept Pinehurst.

“Where would this place be if not for Robert Dedman?” Jim Hyler mused during his 2010-11 tenure as president of the USGA. “He might have been the one man in golf at the time who could pull it off. He literally saved the place.”

“The Dedmans are the ‘anti-Wall Street,’” added Mike Davis, the USGA’s executive director from 2011-21. “They don’t think about the next quarter. They think long term. You cannot put a value on that. We simply don’t have another relationship like the one we have with Pinehurst. They genuinely care about the game of golf, preserving and protecting the game.”

Tufts to McLean to Dedman.

Interesting to ponder over the next year as the new Golf House Pinehurst opens and Pinehurst No. 2 plays host to its fourth men’s national championship. PS

Chapel Hill based writer Lee Pace has written extensively about Pinehurst since the late 1980s and has authored a half dozen books on Sandhills area golf. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @leepacetweet.

The member’s favorite, this Pinehurst golf course offers wide manicured fairways and large elevated fast rolling greens. Fairway bunkers are strategically placed to grab the wayward shot and there is no lack of sand guarding the greens.

Widely considered the most challenging course, the Grey Fox features hilly terrain, several doglegs and towering pines. Golfers must avoid the sand and position the ball on the proper side of the fairway so that they get the best approach angle to the small greens.

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Washington as Count Dracula

Tryon Place, 1791

Washington comes in. He is wearing black velvet with gold buckles at the knee and foot, a sword with finely wrought steel hilt, in scabbard of white leather, a cocked hat with a cockade and a feather, also black. His powdered hair is gathered in a black silk bag. His hands in gloves of yellow clasp extended hands. Above his head medallions of King and Queen flicker beneath dripping wicks, the little flames in circles on the chandeliers surrounded by bits of glass, like worlds in the sky, the telescopes of astronomers. The crystals like Newton’s prisms split the flames, blue, yellow, red, violet.

As in the “The Masque of the Red Death” the dance goes on in rooms, where colors glint from rubies in women’s ears. He bows deeply, his corneas refract ideas: science dances from tiaras, bracelets, rings. The battle of Alamance was lost. The Regulators’ defeat had finished the rebellion, or so Tryon thought.

Washington’s eyes grow red. He leads the minuet.

— Paul Baker Newman

Art Here

don’t let them eat cake

Fiction by brendan Slocumb • illuStration by m ariano Santillan

He smelled like the cake factory: frosting, the yeasty stench of batter and butter, but more than anything else, sugar. Baked sugar, tangy and sweet, that coated the back of his tongue and the inside of his eyelashes. Leaving the factory at the end of the shift, he could feel the sugar aroma around him like a coat or a fog, always moving with him. Of course, his friends started calling him Bon Bon. He’d hated the nickname, but by now it had hung on him so long that he didn’t mind it.

He ordered another beer and checked his watch. His buddy, Tig, was late, as usual. Meet me at the bar at 6:30 and DONT BE LATE, Tig had texted him. SERIOUS!!!

Now it was 6:49, and he’d finished the first beer and ordered a second. Why Bon Bon had believed Tig that this time actually was urgent, Bon Bon didn’t know. He’d shown up in his work clothes without changing back into his street clothes, the King Arthur Brand cake flour misting up from his pant legs every time he

shifted on the bar stool.

“You makin’ me hungry, buddy,” Alan, the bartender, told him for the third time. “What do you think of carrot cake? You a big fan?”

“I figured you for a chocolate cake man,” Bon Bon said. “That was your wife in the shop the other day, wasn’t it? She bought the 14-inch and the 18-inch. Double chocolate.”

“Wife loves them,” Alan said, buffing the bar and looking away. His A-shirt, with dozens of stains on it — bourbons, whiskeys, wines — barely covered his paunch. Seemed like Alan loved those chocolate cakes, too.

Bon Bon nodded politely, tried to squeeze out a smile and looked again at the door.

“You must get sick of cakes,” Alan said. “All them sweets. That vanilla confetti cake is my favorite.”

“Never touch the stuff,” Bon Bon said. “I only eat salty stuff. You got more of these?” He pushed the empty dish that had con-

Here

tained pretzels and peanuts towards Alan. The first few months at the factory, Bon Bon had eaten so many pastries that he became nauseated by the sight of anything with sugar in it.

He looked at the clock. It was 6:54. If Tig didn’t show by 7, Bon Bon was out of there. Home, out of the sugar-stenched clothes and into the shower. He imagined hot water sluicing over him, the powdered sugar circling the drain and disappearing. He fumbled in his pocket for his wallet, looking for a ten, when a familiar voice said behind him, “You stink like the inside of a fat woman’s purse, you know that?”

Tig. Of course. “What?” Bon Bon asked him. “What does the inside of someone’s purse smell like? And where were you?”

“They keep cake in them,” Tig said. “The ladies.”

“Nobody keeps cake in their purse,” Bon Bon told him. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard you say.” And he’d heard Tig say plenty of stupid things over the years.

“Come on, let’s go.” Tig was already heading toward the door.

“Go where?” Bon Bon said. “Why did you want to meet here? Now we’re leaving? What’s going on?” Bon Bon grabbed a handful of the peanut-pretzel snack from the newly replenished dish, thanked Alan with a wave and trotted to keep up with Tig, who was already outside

By the time Bon Bon caught up with Tig, he was almost to his car, a beat-up dark green Chevy Malibu, whose passenger door had gotten side-swiped years ago and was missing the side mirror and

most of the chrome trim. Tig was what Bon Bon’s mother referred to as “a character.” Overalls, sleeveless shirt, dirt-and-oil-coated John Deere trucker cap, Reebok tennis shoes so faded and stained with oil and dirt that their color would forever be a mystery.

“Get in,” Tig said.

“Where are we going? When will we be back? I can’t just leave my car — ”

“GET IN,” Tig said, almost an order this time.

Bon Bon never knew why he got in the car that night. Maybe because he’d done other stupid things with Tig in the past and this was just par for the course. You wouldn’t believe what Tig just did, Bon Bon imagined texting his friends later tonight. It would be fodder for conversation for days to come.

The car stunk of cigarette smoke and chaw. A spit cup sloshed in the dashboard console. Bon Bon shoved McDonald’s wrappers, Entenmann’s boxes, Dunkin’ bags and miscellaneous trash off the seat, and got in. Before he could even buckle his seat belt, Tig spun the tires and headed out of the parking lot toward the highway.

“What’s this about?” Bon Bon repeated, swallowing the last of the pretzels.

Tig smiled. Drove for a minute, enjoying the power. Then, dramatically, he said, “I’m about to make us rich.”

“No,” Bon Bon said.

“Yep.”

“OK,” Bon Bon said. “Let me out. Turn around. Stop this piece-of-crap and let me out. I told you before. I’m not getting involved in any of your messed-up money-making — ”

“It’s guaranteed cash and you’re already in it,” Tig said without missing a beat.

“Stop the car. I mean it.”

“Too late. You’re going to thank me in about 12 hours.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Twelve hours? What did you do? What are we doing?”

“I just made you 23K. I get 27K, you get 23K.”

“For what?” Bon Bon asked. Frustration and fury boiled in his gut the way it often did when he had to deal with Tig. “You just handing me 23K for sitting here?”

“For coming with me, yeah,” Tig said, darting a glance at him. Bon Bon couldn’t decipher it. “All you gotta do is drive when I get sleepy.” The highway spooled out before them, the endless ripple of white lines bisecting the night. Few cars were out this late, and all seemed to be going in the other direction.

“Hell no. I don’t know what kind of craziness you’re getting into, but I’m out. I gotta work in the morning. Turn around. Take me back to my car.”

Tig laughed. “Bro, they won’t miss you at that cookie house. Besides, in 12 hours, you’ll have enough money to quit that job and do something that doesn’t leave you smelling like a giant cupcake. Lose that dumbass nickname. Grown man named Bon Bon. I’m doing you a favor.”

“Screw you. Dammit, I knew I should have just gone home.”

The car banked around a wide curve, then through a series of up-and-down humps in the road. If you drove fast enough, it was like riding a roller coaster. For an instant, you could lose your stomach as you crested the rise.

On the descent, a thump came from the trunk.

“What was that?” Bon Bon looked in the back seat, stacked neatly with big square boxes: Macbook Air, read several. UN3481, read others, with the logos of a battery and a flame. They were all laptop computers. The back-seat floor was the usual sea of fastfood wrappers, napkins and trash. Nothing moved.

The thump came again, as if whatever was back there shifted back to its original position.

“What’s going on?” Bon Bon asked. He couldn’t hide the note of nervousness now in his voice. “What’s in the back seat? Is that stuff stolen? You raid an Apple Store or something?” He tried to imagine how many laptops would be worth $50,000. There’d have to be at least twenty-five, maybe more.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” The car was going faster now, well over 80 mph.

“I knew it. I freakin’ knew it. What did you do? I’m not dealing in stolen goods, Tig. Stop the car.”

Tig groped in the driver side door. Bon Bon thought at first that Tig was looking for his wallet or maybe a soda bottle. But after a moment Tig retrieved a small triangular object that seemed to absorb the dim lights from the dashboard before it resolved itself into a gun. It glittered as if alive. Tig gripped the handle and then the muzzle was pointing, impossibly, at Bon Bon himself.

“T, what the . . . ”

“Just shut up,” Tig said. “I’m doing you a favor. Nobody is getting hurt. We walk away with more money than either of us has ever seen.”

Bon Bon had only seen Tig this erratic once before. It ended with Carl Simmons walking with a permanent limp and Tig spending three years in prison for aggravated assault. Bon Bon stared at the dark muzzle of the gun. His mouth had gone dry, the pretzel crumbs turned to gooey dust on his tongue. He wiped his hands on his pants and could feel the flour and sugar coating his palms. He wanted to scream. Instead he took a deep breath, looked out the window into the dark, trying to ignore the feel of the gun staring at him. “OK man, just tell me where you got all these computers from. And what we’re going to do with them.”

“The less you know the better,” Tig told him. “Get some rest. You’ll take over in six hours. We gotta make the drop by 8 a.m.”

Bon Bon had heard that Tig had gotten into some shady business while he was in prison. This whole scenario was making more sense. Tig, and now Bon Bon, were driving stolen electronics over state lines. He wondered if $23,000 was worth getting caught. If the police pulled them over —

Tig turned on the radio with an aggressive punch of his forefinger. Kellie Pickler’s “Red High Heels” deafened them. Bon Bon turned down the volume.

Over the next two hours, Bon Bon sat in silence, thinking. Tig couldn’t be reasoned with, that was pretty clear. Bon Bon could wait till Tig fell asleep and turn the car around, but what would happen when Tig woke up? Bon Bon glanced down at the gun again, resting lazily on Tig’s thigh, and looked out the window. He could grab his phone and try putting it on mute and dialing 911, but the phone’s light would turn on and Tig would see it for sure. Bon Bon’s palms felt chalky from the mixture of sweat and cake flour dust. The damp, sugary smell from his trousers made him want to retch.

“Hey,” he said when lights from the next exit glimmered on the horizon. Signs for gas, food, lodging. “I didn’t get dinner when I was sitting there waiting for you, and I’m starving. Do we need gas?” He pretended to stretch and stifle a yawn.

Tig kept his eyes on the road, but his grip tightened for an instant on the gun, then relaxed again. “OK,” he said after a minute. “I am, too. All right. I’ll pump the gas and you get us some food.” Tig took the exit too fast, the car almost on the berm before he overcorrected. Again came the thump from the trunk. “And don’t try anything, man. I’d hate to kill you, you hear me?”

The gas station was a half-mile down the road, its fluorescent lights bright and disorienting. No cars were parked at the pumps. A single beat-up Honda sat tucked against the building. Bon Bon had been hoping for a late-night police cruiser, an RV, anything.

After the car had come to a halt, Bon Bon got out, making sure his movements were slow and casual. He could run in, tell the attendant to call the cops, who could be here in minutes. He glanced over at Tig, who was staring hard at him. He looked away, pulled open the glass door. He could feel Tig’s eyes on him, even in the snack aisle.

He picked up several bags of  Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, hot chili and roasted lime Takis, jalapeño Kettle potato chips, and honey

barbecue and hot mustard pretzels. Then went to the refrigerators on the wall and pulled out four bottles of Pepsi.

At the cash register, Tig’s gaze brushed his shoulders as Bon Bon paid and the clerk stuffed everything in a plastic sack. Again and again, he contemplated saying something but then imagined Tig leveling the gun at them, the bullets spider-webbing the glass.

The door behind them jingled, and Bon Bon jumped. “You almost done, man?” Tig called in.

“Yeah,” Bon Bon said. The clerk put a handful of change on the counter, and Bon Bon swiped it into his palm. “You owe me 18 bucks,” he told Tig as he brushed past him out the door, out into the cool night and the waiting car.

“Oh you’ll get that and more soon, buddy.” Bon Bon could hear the relief in Tig’s voice. “You feel like driving now?”

“Yeah, I can take over,” Bon Bon said. “You eat up. Did you check on the trunk? On whatever fell over back there?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s fine,” Tig said.

Bon Bon pulled out of the parking lot as Tig tore open the purple bag of Takis, stuffing a handful into his mouth. “Damn these are good. You want some?”

Bon Bon shook his head. “In a sec.” He took a sip of Pepsi.

“These things are spicy,” Tig said, playing on the word spicy. “Whooo-eee.” He cracked open his Pepsi and drained half of the bottle. Bon Bon took a sip of his.

Tig didn’t tell him where they were going, just directed him once to turn south, toward the highway running to the coast. Tig broke into the potato chips and Bon Bon munched on pretzels. They passed city after city, and a rest stop in three miles.

“I’m thirsty,” Tig said when he was halfway through the Honey Barbecue Pretzels. “These pretzels are making me thirsty.”

“Seinfeld,” Bon Bon told him without looking over. He checked the rearview mirror. The boxes sat primly on the backseat, giving away nothing.

“What?”

“Seinfeld,” Bon Bon said. “That was a running joke on Seinfeld.” The rest area illuminated the road. “Remember, George said it about 200 times during that show?” They passed the entrance, kept going.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You got more to drink?” Tig said.

“There ain’t no more. We drank it all.”

“That ain’t funny,” Tig said. “I’m seriously thirsty. We gotta stop.”

“OK,” Bon Bon told him. “Next place we see. I need to take a piss, too,” he added.

They passed a sign. “Next Rest Area: 28 Miles.”

“Damn,” Bon Bon said. “Another half-hour.”

“We can make it,” Tig said, staring out at the darkness. But after another 10 minutes he said, “I really gotta go.”

“So do I,” Bon Bon said. “Bad. I’m going to pull over.”

He eased the Chevy onto the shoulder, put on his flashers. “What the hell you think you doin’?” Tig said, spraying pretzel crumbs onto Bon Bon’s shirt.

“What? You want me to piss myself in the driver’s seat? I didn’t shower after work because somebody wanted me to meet them at 6:30. So now I smell like cupcakes and if I piss myself I’ll smell a

lot worse. That is not a good combination. So you’ve got a choice. Either stop yapping in my face and let me pee, or you can drive the rest of the way in a wet seat.”

He hoped Tig would be too preoccupied to suggest that he pee in the Pepsi bottle. Tig was.

“Whatever. Don’t do nothin’ stupid.” Tig got out of the car, slammed the door. Again the thump from the trunk, and then another.

The car’s headlights beamed into the nondescript grass as Bon Bon climbed out, went around the front of the car. As he reached the berm, he stumbled, tripped, and fell. Then got up, close now to Tig.

“Clumsy idiot,” Tig said, laughing, transferring the gun from his right hand to his left, unzipping. “Next rest stop we’re gonna get something to drink. I’m really thirsty. We got how many miles? 15 or — ”

Wham. The rock that Bon Bon had just picked up struck Tig perfectly, right on the temple. Tig dropped, soundless, so quickly that Bon Bon thought for a second that he was pretending.

But he wasn’t. A moment later he groaned, reaching for his scalp. Bon Bon lunged for the gun, grabbed it and sprinted back to the car.

In a moment, cinders flew and he was back on the highway, heart in his throat, going 70, 80, 90 miles an hour.

After a couple of miles he slowed slightly, pulse still pounding. The thump from the trunk came again. Bon Bon pulled over, popped the trunk, went around back.

Inside, a young boy lay wedged against tires and fabric, his hands and feet bound with zip ties. His eyes were bigger than any eyes Bon Bon had ever seen, with such terror and misery that Bon Bon couldn’t speak for a moment as he loosened the gag. The boy struggled away, a panicked bird.

“Hey, it’s OK,” Bon Bon said. “That piece of garbage can’t hurt you.”

He looked in the front seat for a knife, scissors, anything to cut the ties, but could find nothing. So he carried the boy to the front seat, tried to make him comfortable.

“I’m taking you to the police,” Bon Bon told him as he adjusted the seat belt. “The bad man won’t hurt you anymore, OK?” He tried to sound as calm and nonthreatening as he could.

“You smell like a cupcake,” he told Bon Bon accusingly, voice rough.

Bon Bon laughed. “Story of my life,” he said. “I get that a lot.”

The little boy eyed the bag of pretzels, tucked in between the seats. “Can I have some?”

Bon Bon reached past him for the pretzels, fed him a couple at a time.

“These are making me thirsty, “ he said.”

“Do you like Seinfeld, kid?” Bon Bon said as he pulled out his phone and dialed 911. PS

Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb is a graduate of UNC Greensboro with a degree in music education. He is the author of The Violin Conspiracy and Symphony of Secrets. He is currently working on his third novel.

memoir by Stephen e. Smith • illuStration by h arry blair

“Get up! Get up! Get up, up, up!” my mother blurted.

It was at 6:30 a.m., the first day of Christmas break, and as always she felt compelled to rouse her children at the most ungodly hour. I lifted my head from the pillow and stared bleary-eyed at her figure in the bedroom doorway. Wrapped to her chin in a blue terrycloth robe, her fists were planted firmly on her hips. She meant business. “You’re to march yourself down to the Safeway and ask Mr. Short if he’ll give you a job for the holidays,” she ordered. “You can earn enough money to pay for your books next semester. And next time I see Mr. Short, I’ll find out if you asked him for a job.”

“Can’t you even say, ‘Welcome home’?” I asked.

“Sure. Welcome home, Mr. Big Shot College Guy. Now get out of that bed and get yourself down to the Safeway.”

I was suffering from severe sleep deprivation. I’d caught an allnight ride home from North Carolina and had dragged into the house on Janice Drive at 3:15 a.m. But my mother was not to be denied, so I managed to pull on the wrinkled clothes I’d worn the day before and stumbled downstairs to eat a bowl of my brother’s Froot Loops. At 8:30 a.m. I scuffled up Bayridge Avenue to the Eastport Shopping Center, where I found Mr. Short on the dock, supervising the unloading of pallets of dog food from a tractortrailer. He shook my hand and asked how college was going.

“It’s fine,” I answered. “I was hoping you might have an opening for a cashier during the holidays. I’m not looking to work eight hours a day, but, you know, something part time.”

“If I had an opening, I’d hire you,” he said. “But right now I have all the cashiers I need. I’d have to cut someone else’s hours, and that wouldn’t be fair, especially at Christmas.” My spirits soared. If he didn’t have an opening, I could pass the holidays stretched out on my bed reading P.G. Wodehouse.

“I’ll tell you what,” he continued, “I’ve got a friend who’s the manager at the Drug Fair in Parole. Go see him and tell him I sent you. He’s looking for holiday help.”

A job at Drug Fair was the last thing I wanted, but I had to make an inquiry. My mother was as good as her word, and I knew she’d buttonhole Mr. Short the next time she visited the Safeway. If she found out I hadn’t applied for the Drug Fair job, she’d make my Christmas break miserable, which she had already begun to do by wakening me before sunup.

Among cashiers, there existed a hierarchy, and working a register at Safeway carried with it a degree of status and a wage that was at least $1.75 an hour. Drug Fair was a discount pharmacy, emporium and grocery store, a low-rent warehouse for plastic crap and wilted vegetables, where the discount prices were clearly marked on each item — work for the dimwitted — and the pay was $1.25 an hour.

I caught the bus to Parole and found the Drug Fair manager, a rumpled, balding, ectomorphic fellow with thick wire spectacles and a long pointy nose, puzzling over paperwork in an elevated office that overlooked a line of disheveled employees who were pounding away at their cash registers. He appeared to be in emotional distress, his mouth screwed into a grotesque snarl.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up, snatched the glasses from his face and tossed them on the countertop in a display of frustration. “Mr. Short over at Safeway said I should talk with you about working as a cashier for the holidays. I don’t need a full-time job, just some part-time work if you’ve got it.”

Sweet relief swept over his face, his lips stretching into a half smile. “Mr. Short sent you?” he asked.

“He said you might need an experienced cashier.”

“You used to work at the Safeway?”

“For two years, until I went off to college.”

He grinned fully. I was apparently the man he’d been waiting for. He stepped out of his office, planted both feet flat on the linoleum and looked me up and down. “Can you work a register?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’ve worked stock?”

“Yes, sir.”

My God, he was going to hire me! I was going to pass the next two weeks checking out Christmas junk at the Drug Fair for minimum wage! This was not good.

The manager handed me a pen and an application clamped to a clipboard, and I took a couple of minutes to fill in the information.

“Follow me,” he said, and we walked quickly down aisle four toward the back of the crowded store. “I can use you to relieve my regular cashiers for their lunch and supper breaks, and you can help keep the shelves stocked, especially this display. We’re selling the hell out of these things.” He pointed to a chest-high pyramid of black, orange and beige boxes crowned with an unboxed white plastic kitchen device known to every American who owned a TV. “We’ve had to restock this display three times this morning. You know anything about Veg-O-Matics?” he asked.

What happened next was probably brought on by fatigue — or maybe I needed an excuse to get fired before I got hired. Whatever the cause, a synaptic misfire propelled me into the past. I picked up the display device, held it out in front of me and began to deliver the requisite spiel:

“Imagine slicing a whole potato into uniform slices with one motion. Bulk cheese costs less. Look how easy Veg-O-Matic makes many slices at once. Imagine slicing all these radishes in seconds. This is the only appliance in the world that slices whole firm tomatoes in one stroke with every seed in place. Hamburger lovers, feed whole onions into Veg-O-Matic and make these tempting thin slices. Simply turn the dial and change from thin to thick slices. You can slice a whole can of prepared meat at one time. Isn’t that amazing? Like magic, change from slicing to dicing. That’s right, it slices, it dices, it juliennes, perfect every time!”

By the time I’d finished yammering, the manager’s eyes were wide and his jaw slack.

“How’d you learn that?” he asked.

“I used to watch the commercial on TV, and it just sort of stuck in my head.”

My fascination with the Veg-O-Matic stretched back to my junior year in high school. Strung out on testosterone and teenage angst, I suffered insomnia for about six months. On those long, restless nights, I’d roll out of bed after everyone else in the house was asleep, slink down to the “rec” room and turn on the black and white TV. WJZ, the local CBS affiliate, was the only station out of Baltimore that aired anything other than an Indian Chief test pattern in the early a.m., so I’d tune in channel 13 in time to catch Father Callahan of St. Francis Xavier House of Prayer bestowing his benediction. Then I’d settle in for a three-hour run of continuous raise-your-own-chinchillas commercials.

My clandestine obsession with Father Callahan and chinchillas continued for two or three months — until the fateful night when the good Father delivered his usual homily and the chinchilla commercials failed to materialize. Instead, a plastic guillotine-like device appeared on the TV screen, contrasted against a background map of the world, below which were printed the words “World Famous Veg-O-Matic.” Then a disembodied voice said: “Imagine slicing a whole potato into uniform slices with one mo -

tion. Bulk cheese costs less. Look how easy Veg-O-Matic makes many slices at once. . . . ”

I’d spent my Father Callahan/chinchilla nights dozing fitfully on the couch and sneaking back to my room before the rest of the family awakened, but on that memorable evening — I’ve come to think of it as Night of the Veg-O-Matic — I sat there stupefied, watching the commercial over and over. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, and by morning I had the narration memorized — every nuance, modulation and inflection — to which I could add hand gestures, including the graceful, upturned palm that beckoned, “Buy me, buy me, buy me. . . .”

Later that day, I was eating lunch in the high school cafeteria with my regular buds when freckle-faced Ronnie Wheeler produced a sliced tomato his mother had wrapped in wax paper to keep it from saturating the white bread he needed to construct his BLT. I jumped up, grabbed the tomato slices and ran through the entire Veg-O-Matic routine, spreading the segments across the Formica tabletop and finishing with the obligatory “. . . perfect every time!”

My friends were speechless, especially Ronnie, whose sandwich was ruined. They stared blankly before bursting into hysterics. The vice-principal, Mr. Wetherhold, a stern disciplinarian who abhorred any form of frivolity, hurried over to our table to discern the source of the disturbance. “What’s going on here?” he asked sternly.

“Do it!” my friends begged. “Do the Veg-O-Matic thing!” They didn’t have to ask twice. When I finished my second run-through, it was Mr. Wetherhold who was howling with laughter. Suffice it to say I spent a good deal of my time in high school doing “the Veg-O-Matic thing” for my friends. They never tired of it.

Now the Drug Fair manager’s face glowed with approval, and I could see that he’d suffered an epiphany. He rushed into the stockroom and reappeared with a folding table. He extended the legs, positioned the table in front of the pyramid of boxes and covered the top with a square of red cheesecloth. He grabbed an onion from the produce aisle, peeled away the skin, and ordered me to deliver my recitation again, this time with the unboxed VegO-Matic at my fingertips.

Despite my long and intimate history with the kitchen device, this was the first time I’d worked with one. But I muddled through the presentation by recalling the images I’d watched hundreds of times on TV, each motion transmitted from memory to physical articulation. I made quick work of the onion, repeating the entire monologue. My demonstration, although clumsy, went well enough to instantly earn me the title: 1965 Parole Drug Fair Veg-O-Matic Man.

“You’re hired!” the manager said. “I want you to do a demonstration at the top of every hour. Use all the tomatoes and onions you want, but stay away from the cheese and Spam. That stuff costs money.”

“Yes, sir,” I said dutifully.

“The rest of the time you can restock these Veg-O-Matics and relieve the cashiers who are going on break. Can you start tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess.”

“Be here at 8 o’clock, and wear a white shirt.”

Crestfallen, I dragged myself into the parking lot and caught the bus back to Eastport. When I stumbled into our living room, it was 11:30 a.m., and I was whipped.

“Did Mr. Short hire you?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

“He didn’t have any openings, but I got a job at Drug Fair in Parole.”

“Excellent,” she said.

When I turned up at Drug Fair on Saturday morning ready to begin my new career, the manager had anticipated my every need. The folding table was set up in aisle four, which was stocked with kitchen junk — Melmac dishes, spatulas, plastic forks, spoons and knives, etc. — and beside the table waited a freshly replenished pyramid of multicolored boxes containing the Veg-O-Matics. The tabletop was covered with the red cheesecloth from the day before, and a white apron of the style that loops around the neck and ties in the back was folded neatly on the table. An unopened can of Spam and a brick of Kraft Velveeta cheese were stacked beside the gleaming white Veg-O-Matic display model I’d used in my earlier demonstration, and a bag of assorted vegetables — tomatoes, onions, carrots and potatoes — awaited their fate. As a touch of class, the manager had placed a roll of paper towels on the table, and a beige commercial dome-topped trash can sat directly behind my workspace.

“Here, wear this,” he said, handing me a handsome black clipon bowtie. I donned my apron and attached the bowtie to the wrinkled collar of my white shirt. “Now show me your stuff. Just use vegetables. The Spam and cheese are for show.”

I launched into my Veg-O-Matic dance at a measured pace, slicing up a small potato and allowing my hands to gracefully execute a lilting swirl at the conclusion of the shtick.

“That was even better than yesterday,” the manager beamed, “although I’d take it a little slower if I were you.” He looked up and down aisle four. “I’ll make an announcement at the top of every hour. You get yourself set up. Sell the hell out of these VegO-Matics. If you don’t, you’ll be in a checkout stand all day.” And he left me on my own.

I peeled an onion, and trimmed it to the proper size and shape. I was ready. Or as ready as I was ever going to be.

“We are pleased to direct your attention to aisle four,” I heard the manager announce over the PA system, “where you can view a demonstration of the miracle Veg-O-Matic, the 20th century’s greatest kitchen appliance. It makes an economical and useful Christmas gift! Do all your Christmas shopping in five minutes and have your Veg-O-Matics gift wrapped right here in the store. Christmas cards are available on aisle six.”

After my first two demonstrations, I discovered that operating the Veg-O-Matic wasn’t quite the effortless exercise I’d observed on TV. I directed my attention to the tomato, which I positioned perfectly between the upper and lower blades. “This is the only appliance in the world that slices whole firm tomatoes in one stroke with every seed in place,” I said, as I slammed down the top of the Veg-O-Matic. The tomato exploded like a water balloon,

splattering juice and seeds all over my apron and the tabletop. The two customers who had gathered for my demonstration jumped back and bolted for the exit.

I’d created a huge mess. I mopped the tomato slop off my hands with a paper towel and brushed the seeds from my apron, but pulp continued to dribble from the bottom of the Veg-OMatic, and I had to retreat to the stockroom to wash the blades. So tomatoes were out. Ripe ones, at least. After mopping the splatter from the tabletop, I attempted to slice an onion I’d peeled earlier. I gave a forceful downward thrust and the device worked perfectly, sending a cascade of onion slivers onto the cheesecloth. Still, it was a messy business; pieces of onion got stuck in the blades and had to be pried out. I had the same experience with carrots, stubborn chunks of which had to be worked free with my fingertips.

I settled, finally, on a peeled Idaho Russet potato. I cut the spud into four pieces, which I fed individually into the chopper. And the device worked as intended — neat and clean. The Veg-O-Matic was, after all, meant to transform a time-consuming, chaotic operation into a simple, wholesome procedure. And that’s what it did.

The secret, as with many physical actions, was in the wrist. It was all finesse. I’d place a piece of potato on the bottom blades and apply a sharp downward whack with the top. And voila! the potato was julienned, perfect for hash browns. If I spoke slowly, worked methodically and was meticulous with my cleanup, I could kill the better part of a half hour on each demonstration, thus allowing for only 30 minutes of working at a cash register before my next demonstration.

At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t sell enough Veg-O-Matics to keep my new job, but the pile of boxes diminished at an everincreasing rate as Christmas approached and the manager was a happy man. I’d sold six to eight Veg-O-Matics with each demonstration, and I noticed that many customers who didn’t make an immediate purchase returned later to snatch up two or three Veg-O-Matics, having chosen convenience over thoughtful reflection. Usually these return customers felt compelled to offer an explanation for their delayed purchase. “You know,” they’d say, “I was thinking about your demonstration, and you’re right, this will make an excellent gift for my mother.”

Every day I’d work straight through until 10 p.m., taking an hour each for lunch and dinner, and then I’d catch the bus home in the dark. I’d shower and collapse into my bed to read for a few seconds in Pigs Have Wings, my latest Wodehouse novel, before falling asleep.

And that’s how it went for seven straight days. I’d turn up at Drug Fair at 8 a.m., an hour before the store opened, to prepare the potatoes for my demonstration. I’d restock the Veg-O-Matic display, piling the boxes high in an ergonomically conical construct of my own contrivance, and check out a register tray so that I could relieve cashiers who went on break.

If my schedule was exhausting, it also had its advantages. I slept like a stone, and the days flew by. At home, I didn’t have a conversation with my mother, father or sister that lasted more than 10 seconds. “Hi, how ya doing?” was as intimate as it got, which

suited me. My father was asleep when I left in the morning and when I came in at night, I didn’t have to listen to my mother and sister bicker. Only my brother Mike, with whom I shared a room, was around when I staggered in whacked out from 12 hours of working with the public. He’d fill me in on the day’s drama with my sister, which made me glad I’d be headed back to college soon.

When the store closed at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, I used my humongous 5 percent employee discount to purchase gifts for the family — a cheap cotton bathrobe for my mother, which turned out to fit her like a circus tent, a simulated leather wallet for my father, a 45 of Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” for my brother, and the Beatles’ Help! for my sister. I was headed out the door with my packages when the manager stopped me.

“You’ve done a good job,” he said, a genuine smile on his pasty face. “And I’m hoping you’ll consider coming back to work through New Year’s Eve. You won’t be selling Veg-O-Matics, but I need experienced help to run the registers and handle returns. I could use you for at least 12 hours a day.”

Normally I would have responded with an emphatic “No,” but fresh in my memory were the money problems I’d experienced during my first four months at college and the hours I spent in McEwen Dining Hall scraping greasy dishes and scrubbing pots. With my paltry allowance, there was no hope of establishing a relationship with any of the girls I found myself drooling over as they roamed the campus. It was essential I screw up my courage and get myself an on-campus date. I’d have to double with an upperclassman who had a car, and to make that happen, I needed enough money to cover my share of the gas.

“All right,” I answered. “Can I get some overtime?”

“I’ll give you all the overtime you want. You can work 14 hours a day if you skip lunch and dinner.”

“All right,” I answered, “I’ll be glad to help out.”

So on December 27, I was standing behind a cash register refunding money for the Veg-O-Matics I’d sold the week before. “I’d like to get the money back for this thing,” the customer would say, handing me the orange and black box. They occasionally offered excuses such as “I already have one of these” or “I have no use for this piece of junk,” but what they wanted was cash. In almost every case the customer returning the Veg-O-Matic was not the person who’d bought it, so I didn’t consider the returns a criticism of my performance. I handed them the money and stuck the boxes and signed receipts under the register. At the end of the day, I toted the returned Veg-O-Matics to the storeroom and piled them up in the same space they’d occupied when they were new.

To compound this irony, the manager handed me a hammer at closing time on my first post-Christmas day as a cashier and sent me to the stockroom to smash the Veg-O-Matics the store had taken back. “Just bash those veggie things into little bits and put them back in the boxes,” he directed. “And while you’re at it, smash up these toys that didn’t get sold.” The manager didn’t explain why I needed to destroy so much perfectly good merchandise, and I didn’t ask. But I laid into my new task with gusto, obliterating hundreds of Veg-O-Matics along with Chatty Cathy

dolls, Etch-A-Sketches, tin airliners, space guns, trains, batterypowered James Bond Aston Martin cars, Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, Easy-Bake Ovens, electric football games, G.I. Joes, and the occasional Barbie doll, perfectly good toys that might have gone to poor children who’d suffered a sad Christmas. But it was exhilarating work — and strangely gratifying — an anti-capitalistic binge that assuaged the guilt I’d suffered from selling plastic crap to poor people.

But the days were long, and there was no time to hang out with my friends. When I got off work at 9 p.m., I was too worn out to go to parties or ride around with high school buds. I’d catch the bus back to Eastport and fall into bed. The following morning, I’d get up and do it again.

On my last day of work, a Friday, the manager shook my hand. “You’re a lifesaver,” he said, pumping my weary arm. “If you need a job next Christmas, just let me know.”

I smiled, gave him my college post office box number and asked him to send my check there rather than to my home address.

“You should get it before the 10th,” he said.

During the two-and-a-half weeks I’d toiled at Drug Fair, my parents hardly noticed my absence. I was a shadow who flitted in and out at odd hours. And I wanted it that way. I didn’t have to listen to them argue, which was their habitual method of communication during any holiday season when they were forced to remain in each other’s company for more than five continuous minutes. And if my parents didn’t realize the hours I was working, they’d have no idea how much money I was making. Had they an inkling of the cash I was likely to pocket, they would have given me that much less for tuition, room and board, and the endless hours I’d spent slaving at Drug Fair would have been for naught.

On the evening before my return to Elon, in honor of my having been invisible during the holiday season, my mother prepared lasagna, my favorite dish.

“You headed back tomorrow?” my father asked.

“First thing in the morning,” I answered, “I’m going to catch the bus.”

My mother looked puzzled. “It seems like you just got here,” she said.

“I’ve been working the whole time.”

“Good,” she said. “How much money did you make?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten paid yet — and the wage at Drug Fair isn’t as much as it is at the Safeway. I’ll let you know when the check arrives.” I was lying, of course. I had no intention of telling anyone how much money I’d earned. It was nobody’s business but mine. PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of eight books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Year We Danced: A Memoir.

Andi hadn’t been startled awake for several nights, ever since the contractor fixed that foundation problem, but now she sat straight up in bed. Something was wrong. The house, her new home in a new city, remained quiet, all that groaning and cracking having been eliminated by the repairs. It was that other silence — no hum of cars passing on the street, no sounds of a city waking up. And, she realized as she stared into total darkness, no streetlight glow filtering around the blinds.

For a while, she heard nothing. Gradually, light began to show and she heard a chorus of shrieks and whistles — birds? She got up, shuffled to the back door and opened it on a bright

Fiction by Valerie nieman

illuStration by Jenn h aleS

dawn, cornfields stretching flat and green in every direction. The rows came right to her steps, tassels waving well above her head. Blackbirds wheeled in huge flocks.

Her house had moved. And she had moved with it.

Even as she tried to make sense of it, speculating that this looked like Iowa — must be, maybe, everyday, common Iowa — nothing to be afraid of, the rest of her brain was rabbiting around the bonkers impossibility of her situation.

She had loved the cottage from the moment the realtor opened the door, but, after moving in, she came to realize there was an uneasiness about it. Day and night, floors creaked and popped without the weight of a footstep. When she reached to put

something in a high cupboard, the top of it did not line up with the ceiling. Everything was slightly off one way or another, but that’s the way old houses were. They settled year by year, in a long, uneven conversation with the ground.

She didn’t miss her previous home. It wasn’t that, at all. When her ex abruptly went away (for good this time), and shortly after so did her job, she’d decided she needed something smaller to meet her changed circumstances. Something older, solid, with its own history.

Stay, or go. It hadn’t been a difficult choice. Her former home had no longer felt like home. It just felt like him, his house, cold all the time.

Three different construction dates — 1921, 1927, 1928 — were listed variously on deeds, descriptions and reports. It made no sense. A house was completed or not in a certain year. The cedarshake cottage had been moved sometime in the 1970s and new sections had been added, a porch, a deck. Extensions that almost seemed to buttress the square main building, pushing out on three sides.

Andi had become fascinated by the idea of house-moving. It wasn’t unusual, of course; houses were moved out of the path of development all the time. Even lighthouses were raised up on rollers and carried inland, away from the encroaching sea. She remembered reading about a town in Minnesota that was hauled away from mining damage by horses and tractors and a steam engine. Elsewhere in North Carolina, the former village of Avalon had been moved when its mill burned down, the little houses incorporated into the neighboring textile town of Mayodan.

History was like that, for a house or a person — gaps in the record, mysteries.

The recommended contractor came within a week — the benefit of a small town, Andi supposed — and rang the doorbell with his ball cap off, gripped in his hands like he was entering a church.

“Miss Andrea?”

“Andi.”

“Miss Andi. I am pleased to meet you.” He paused and glanced inside. “What were you needing done?”

“I’d like you to look at the foundation.” It sounded too — something — to say she heard strange noises. “I understand the house was moved. Is it well supported? The home inspector didn’t mention anything.”

“Well, you are spot on about the move. I remember when they did it. Quite the show, with traffic held up and all. They put an office building where it used to be.” He kept talking as she led him back to the utility room and the trap door to the crawl space, wondering if a man that old (he had only a fringe of white hair around a polished dome) was agile enough to get around under the joists. But she needn’t have worried — he was quickly out of sight, banging around beneath the floor, and it wasn’t long until he came up out of the hole.

“Found your problem.” He turned off his flashlight, dusted off his hands. “The main support beam, a steel beam at that, has been cut in two.”

“What?” That sounded terrifying, as if the house might bend at the center like a cardboard box and fold itself flat.

“Yep. Might have been part of moving it, I don’t know.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No, no, there’s plenty of support pillars. Just . . . strange.”

She hadn’t been able get the vision of a collapse out of her mind. “Can you put it back together?”

“I can do that, sure. Have to come back with some tools, bolts and such. And good steel.”

And so it was done.

Two mornings after the cornfields appeared, she awoke to the mooing of cows.

She hadn’t ventured into the tall corn, featureless as a sea. Now she looked out on new fields that rolled away over little hills, fields bounded by hedges instead of fences. Brown and white cows. She looked out of windows on each side of the house. Far away she could see a steeple and what appeared to be a castle.

England?

The house did not move on a regular schedule. It stayed in the same place for days, even weeks, then she would hear the wind moaning from a new corner of the eaves and look outside to see — what was that?

She was cautious. When the house set down in a populated area, no one seemed to notice. People apparently could not see the house, but once she stepped off the porch, they could see her. The first time she’d tried, somewhere under a hot, pale sky, blackhaired children clamored at her and she ran back inside. They stood for a moment, wide-eyed, letting the stones drop from their hands, and fled.

Did she appear suddenly, popping into view? Was she floating in a bubble like Glinda? No way to tell.

The movement of the house in space and time became wider and wilder. One day she might look out on a Japanese seaside town with little boats and a pagoda, and a couple days later, she’d be in the United States, far to the north, in a logging town at the edge of a redwood forest. The house, severed from a permanent base, had no utilities, but Andi did have a large supply of candles. And a rain barrel that had been strapped to one of the additions.

I am resourceful, she thought. I am doing fine.

Turn and turn and turn again.

The days were long and the nights longer in the wandering house. She missed her friends, especially Nicole, a coworker who had stayed close through both the divorce and her early (forced) retirement from their employer. Nicole had always teased her for overly careful preparation, cautious decision-making. What would she say about this?

Andi even sort of missed her ex. He had been a familiar problem, at least.

She learned how to gather food in exotic places, covering her foreignness with a long, hooded cloak, a souvenir of her role in a college Shakespeare production. Where there was a store, a souk, a market cross, she waited and watched, moving in when the

crowds had thinned and the leavings were cheap. The smell of cooked meat made her ravenous.

She could barter jewelry and small items to merchants. Gestures were pretty much universal. As her hair grew unruly and her scrupulously kept-up color faded to salt-and-pepper, with her head down and a hand upturned, she could sometimes gather alms from passersby. No need to speak. Maybe she couldn’t any longer.

Andi fell asleep with the house settled someplace that was high and cold and empty, a steppe. She woke to find it beside a long lake clasped by dark-forested mountains. Well down the shore was a cluster of thatch-roofed cottages.

Hunger drove her to the village and, as she looked for someplace to get food, she was relieved to realize the people were speaking a sort of English. It wasn’t market day, but a house displayed a bush over the door. That meant beer was available, she remembered from a long-ago advertising class.

She nodded to the woman inside, dressed in a bodice and full skirts, her hair covered.

“Beer,” she ventured.

The woman, stout as one of her casks, looked oddly at her.

“Ale?” Andi mimed drinking.

The woman responded by shaking a bucket at her.

Ah. Medieval takeout. She had no pitcher, bucket, anything with which to carry the beer away.

Andi put her hand on a pottery pitcher and indicated that she would buy it. She produced a piece of jewelry she’d brought to trade, an alloy ring decorated with the figure of a nude dancing woman.

The woman backed away, eyes wide, and whispered something that sounded like “elf.” Or “help.”

A man came from outside and she pointed to the ring where it lay. He picked it up and turned it in his dirt-caked fingers, squinted at her, and then spoke to the woman, who hustled off to get someone, a priest, a soldier, someone that Andi didn’t think she should meet.

She gathered up the skirts of her cloak and ran.

The house didn’t move that night, or the next, or the next. She wished it would.

Andi did not go back to the village, fearing people who feared her. Andi imagined the townspeople might think she was something supernatural, in league with the Devil. She also considered that maybe the stylized figure of a naked woman on the ring had offended them. People went past the house, on their way to fields or driving herds of sheep along, without even a glance.

Then a man as dark as a devil stopped right in front, turned and stared into the window.

“I spy a lass, through the window,” he said.

She hid behind the curtain.

“There thou be, though how this house came hither I dinnae ken.” The man began to walk away, and she thought he’d gone until he emerged from the other side, having circled the house. He stepped up onto the porch and came to the door.

“How can you see this house?” she asked, almost whispering into the gap between the old door and the frame.

“Metal calls to me, shaped in some cantrip-time.”

Andi opened the door but stood behind the screen as though that bit of protection would be sufficient to keep out this brawny man. A blacksmith, she realized, his skin and clothing darkened by the smoke of the forge.

“The house moves,” she confided. “It was cut apart underneath and then, when it was fixed, it began moving.”

He cocked his head as he listened, the way a dog turns its head as it tries to tune in its person’s unfamiliar words. “The house is magiked.”

She nodded.

“Gie me leave then to see?”

Andi opened the flimsy door and stood back. The whiff of fire and charcoal came with him. He looked around the room, bemused (What did he make of the black slab of the television, photographs on the wall?) then followed her to the access. Like the old contractor, he moved with the assurance of someone who dealt with problems all the time, physical problems that could be addressed with tools and skill.

He was quickly back up, head and shoulders out of the trap door. He tried to explain the situation, and now she was the one who couldn’t put all the words together. However, she came to understand that he had found the steel beam bridged by the contractor’s plates and bolts.

“Can you fix it?”

“Fixt? Your house is scarcely that,” he said, a smile opening his sooty face. “I’ve a gift from the Fair Folk to forge steel that will nae break nor blunt at the bite. Aye, I can do this task. A wandering heart can be put aright, house or lass alike.”

He heaved himself out of the crawl space. She pulled back, away from his seared hands and leather apron.

“If you do, if you fix — unmend — it, what will happen?”

“The heart was cut in twain to end the wandering. If I take away the clampar, ’twill rest again.”

She thought about the various recorded dates of the house’s construction. Had it skipped from year to year, somehow, appearing and disappearing until it was tamed?

“But where? Where will it be?”

“Why, here, lass! I canna make it skip the sea from one shore to another like a stane from the hand of the giant Benandonner,” he said, laughing. “Here this house stays, and thou with it, or else be ever a-wandering like Will-o’-the-wisp.”

She looked out at the dense forests and the long silvery lake. She was aware of the interest in his merry eyes. And the able heft of the man. Solid, he was.

“My folk will thee like. There’s much eerie hereabouts, m’self not least, though we’ve never seen a lass sa conveyed.”

He offered his fire-marked hand.

“Andi,” she said, as she took it. PS

A former professor at NC A&T State University and editor for the Greensboro News & Record , Valerie Nieman lives and writes in Rockingham County. Her novel, In the Lonely Backwater, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for 2022.

Butterfly Highway

A neighborhood creates a pollinator pitstop

by Jan leit Schuh

If you have lived five or six or seven decades, you remember the abundant orange and black monarch butterflies of your childhood. Hardly a summer day would pass without seeing one, if not scores of them. Today, if you see one, it’s Facebook- or Instagramworthy because of the butterfly’s rarity. There are a number of reasons the population has crashed in the last couple decades, but crash it has.

One neighborhood in Southern Pines is fighting back. A dedicated group of neighbors is working to transform their long street into a connected and welcoming pollinator paradise, not just for monarchs but all declining butterflies, birds and native insects.

This month, the fall monarch migration begins winging its perilous journey to Mexico, laying eggs on milkweed, exclusively, along the way. An extensive stretch of Sheldon Road will be waiting with open arms with milkweed for eggs and nectar plants for sustenance — all pollinators welcome.

“Pollinators continue to make global headlines as native bees and migrating species such as monarch butterflies decline,” writes the North Carolina Wildlife Federation. “Habitat loss from development is the primary cause of population decline, followed by pesticide and fungicide use, as well as parasites and diseases.”

In response, the federation developed the concept of a North Carolina “Butterfly Highway,” a statewide conservation initiative aimed at restoring pollinator habitat, from citizen-driven, backyard “Pollinator Pitstops” to large-scale habitat rejuvenation of roadsides, agricultural margins and development.

Individuals answered the call. Homeowners and garden clubs began taking up the torch to raise awareness and create inviting habitat for these vulnerable and iconic lovelies. Some farms planted long strips of pollinator plants.

Threatened monarchs are at the forefront of the public awareness, as these butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed species. As milkweed declined due to abundant agricultural use of glysophate weed killers versus mowing (which allows the plant to regenerate from the roots) and general habitat loss, so did the monarchs. Fifteen years ago, I read about the precipitous drop in the monarch populations. Conservation organizations were sounding the alarm and pleading with anyone who would listen to plant milkweed.

A visit to a remote Virginia meadow that fall yielded several ripe pods of the common milkweed variety. I tucked the seeds in my cottage garden here and forgot them. Next spring, I had milkweed, and have ever since. Thus began my butterfly journey, near the southern end of Sheldon Road.

About the same time, interest in native plants and pollinator-friendly gardens ripened into the public awareness too. Nearly a mile away from me, on a horse farm at the far northern, sand-road end of Sheldon, retired landscape architect and beekeeper Dez MacSorley designed her farm and decided to have a pesticide-free, non-manicured, tufted grass lawn. “Aside

from the horse pastures, I turned all the other bits of land into a continuous meadow devoted to pollinator-friendly perennials and native grasses,” she says. This is the third year for the meadow and its beneficiaries.

“Come they have, “ MacSorley says. “Butterflies, bees, wasps, birds, moths — all come to feed on, find shelter in and enjoy my little meadow.”

She says her nearby Sheldon neighbors inspired her from the beginning, including avid gardeners Lynn McGugan, Cameron Sadler, Tayloe Moye and Carol Phillips, who has since passed away, all with different, complementary styles, and a passion for supporting and extending the natural environment.

In April 2021, Molly Thompson-Hopton, Cameron and Lincoln Sadler’s niece, started a Facebook garden group for her plant-loving friends, and the photo-sharing, education and awareness caught fire. “I guess you could say a love of wildlife and plants runs in our family,” she says.

“We started trading plants and knowledge,” MacSorley says. One of her neighbors, Sara Hoover, started a milkweed patch on her property adjacent to the Walthour Moss Foundation.

Thompson-Hopton, though living 8 miles away, caught the conservation bug. “After I moved to the family farm in Aberdeen, I got busy planting,” she said. “I knew I wanted to attract pollinators. I stumbled across some clasping milkweed and brought it home. I have four varieties of milkweed now and hope to add more.”

Through the plant trading on Thompson-Hopton’s social media page, I shared some milkweed plants with Lynn McGugan several years ago. She tucked them in near her other pollinator plants. McGugan, a force of nature, does nothing by half-measures. Before long, armed with information, she was out preaching the benefits of milkweed, pollinators and native plantings.

“Pollinator plantings add beauty to any landscape,” says McGugan, “and serve a purpose.”

A skilled photographer, McGugan posted gorgeous, envy-creating photos of various butterflies, caterpillars, moths and native bees feasting on her nectar banquet. Then McGugan and MacSorely hatched a plan to share the plant love even further.

“We intend to extend our pollinator-friendly native plantings down the natural edges of Sheldon Road,” says MacSorley, “creating a natural environmental corridor between all our properties, the Walthour Moss Foundation land and, who knows, maybe including some of the new houses further up Sheldon and along Youngs Road. This is truly the ‘butterfly effect’ at work.”

As tall pines came down and new houses went up this summer on Sheldon and just off it, McGugan walked up to a job site and grabbed a number off the sign, then started a conversation with Chris Styne of Homes by Dickerson. She found a willing ear in Styne. In a recent email he wrote: “Homes by Dickerson is excited to . . . be a part of such a unique and necessary organization such as this. We are committed to planting

flowers at each of our eight new homes being built on Braden and Sheldon Road.”

Encouraged, McGugan has reached out to other builders. She engaged Seth Mabus of Mabus Farm & General Contracting and came away with a commitment for all new builds to include pollinator gardens. “They have the potential for such impact by just including a few beneficial shrubs and trees,” she said. “It all adds up.”

Across the road, farm owner Tricia Greenleaf and John Robertson started their own patch of milkweed this year, right next to a massive, nectar-rich Miss Huff lantana. McGugan offered them rooted cuttings in pots from some of her own flowering shrubs.

McGugan’s near neighbors in horse country, Sadler and Moye, have cultivated stunning gardens too, sisters inheriting their mother Carol’s love of plants.

“Initially,” says Moye, “I bought a milkweed plant because I was interested in having butterflies. It got covered with caterpillars and they were eating the leaves so I used a pesticide and killed all of them. When I told Lincoln what happened, he said,

‘You just killed all the butterflies.’ That was 14 or 15 years ago.” Moye was heartsick, but soon made up for her pesticide error.

“I have been gardening since a child, continuously throughout my life,” she says, “and I believe it saved me in the worst of times. I have become more interested in native plants over the last 10 years. I’m pretty sure Lynn McGugan was my initial inspiration. I saw what she was doing and over the last three years ordered every type of milkweed I could find on the internet along with other native plants.”

On a long stretch of Sheldon Road, from Foundationadjacent horse farms to suburban new construction and out the other end to Weymouth Woods, a butterfly-friendly corridor is shaping up, thanks to enthusiastic neighbors.

“Nature fills me with joy and I feel like I’m contributing to the greater good by being an active participant,” says Moye.

Sometimes, it takes a village. PS

Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, equestrian, avid eater of fresh produce and co-founder of Sandhills Farm to Table.

GREAT PLANTS FOR CATERPILLARS

Butterflies get all the love, and they sip energy-rich nectar from many pollinator-friendly plants. But no caterpillars, no butterflies. Often, when their host plants decline, so does the species. Witness monarchs, who only lay their eggs on milkweed.

As habitat is destroyed, we can help by including a few friendlies for North Carolina butterflies to lay their eggs on, such as:

For monarchs: the milkweed family — common, tuberosa, swamp, clasping and more — offers exclusive food for the monarch caterpillars. These plants tolerate poor soil and never need fertilizing. All milkweeds contain cardiac glycosides in their sap that monarchs consume and store in their bodies. Potential predators learn to steer clear of this bitter, stored substance.

For swallowtail: Dill, fennel, parsley, common rue, carrot greens, tulip tree, wild black cherry.

For fritillaries: passion vine, maypops, violets.

For American painted lady: thistles, mallows, yellow fiddleneck.

For common buckeye: aster, peppermint, tickseed sunflower, chicory.

Dez MacSorley

n late March of 1928, a plane carrying one of the most popular and influential figures in America landed in Pinehurst. This gentleman had come to promote a sport. It wasn’t golf. In fact, he had once been at the forefront of those who held the game in disdain. Seemingly at every opportunity, he lampooned golf and those who played it. His name was Will Rogers.

Part Cherokee Indian, Rogers was born in Native American Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. His story was not a rags-to-riches one. It was more like riches to mega-riches. His father was a very successful rancher, but it appeared that Will was going to have a rough time equaling that success. He was a poor student and received a bare-bones education as he bounced from boarding school to boarding school.

His father hoped to give young Will a leg up by providing him with his own cattle ranch. Rogers soon sold it and went off to Argentina. He tried to make it as a rancher there, but in just five months, he was broke. Too embarrassed to write to his father for help, he took a job tending a load of livestock on a freighter bound for South Africa.

Once ashore, Rogers was hired by the ranch where the livestock were destined to go. The owner was a wealthy Englishman who was very demanding and boisterous, characteristics that didn’t match up well with Will’s laid-back attitude. Rogers quickly found himself on the move again. He hooked on with, of all things, a Wild West show. After a stint there, he moved to Australia, where he worked in a circus.

Rogers eventually returned to the United States and began appearing intermittently on the vaudeville circuit, doing rope tricks with his lariat and offering his humorous observations on the American scene. In 1904, he was one of the performers at a Wild West show at Madison Square Garden in New York City when a huge steer broke loose. The steer jumped over the guard rail and into the stands. Pandemonium ensued. The audience scattered. With his lariat in hand, Will and several of the show’s other performers were in hot pursuit. The steer reached the upstairs balcony where Rogers was able to rope it and guide it back onto the arena floor.

His heroic actions made the front page of The New York Times, and Rogers’ career skyrocketed, eventually turning him into an early 20th century multi-media darling. He made motion pictures and wrote one of the most successful newspaper columns in that medium’s history. He toured the country doing live shows that sold out wherever he appeared.

Through his folksy commentary in his newspaper column, Rogers captured the hearts of ordinary Americans. The same could hardly be said for the game of golf. It had the look of an activity for those who also yachted as they summered. Two of the country’s most talked about golf zealots were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s two richest citizens. Carnegie’s name was bandied about as a potential president of the United States Golf Association, a nascent organization born three days before Christmas in 1894.

Golf’s deep connection to the nation’s upper crust resulted in much of the country’s rank and file looking at the game with

contempt, if they looked on it at all. This contempt was fueled by the stance taken by one of America’s most popular presidents — Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was the quintessential man’s man. While president, he hunted. He boxed. He chopped down trees. On more than one occasion, he took winter swims across the Potomac. Roosevelt let it be known widely and often that he viewed golf with scorn. He called it a game for dudes and snobs.

After Roosevelt’s passing in 1919, Rogers took the point for the anti-golf crowd, drawing huge laughs about the game in his stage act and his writing. Some of his more notable barbs included:

Golf is good for the soul. You get so mad at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it’s called golf.

Rail-splitting produced an immortal president in Lincoln, but golf hasn’t produced even a good Congressman.

Golf antipathy even spilled over into the 1920 presidential election. During the Republican Party convention in Chicago, a deal was cut by the party’s bosses that gave the 1920 nomination for president to Warren G. Harding, a United States senator from Marion, Ohio.

Harding’s team decided that for the general election, they would utilize a “front porch” campaign. Instead of barnstorming the country, their candidate would remain close to home and let supporters and the press come to him.

This homey approach was augmented by a well-orchestrated use of print media and a thorough stroking of the newsreel distributors. (Newsreels were shown in movie houses before the main feature.) One of the first newsreels featuring their candidate showed Harding, adorned in fancy knickers, teeing off and putting at a golf course near his home.

As soon as the golf newsreel began to roll in movie houses around the country, the Harding campaign was inundated with negative reactions to it. One United States senator who was backing Harding said he’d been in a packed theater where the newsreel was shown and there was not one applauding set of hands in the entire place.

It was clear to the Harding team that they had ingested a huge dose of political poison. Desperate to get back on track, they hatched a plan involving baseball that would show the country their man was as mainstream as it gets.

In late August, the Chicago Cubs were on their way to another lackluster finish in the National League pennant race. Sticking to their front porch strategy, the Harding campaign’s plan was to bring the Cubs — whose owner was a Harding backer — to Marion, on one of their off days for an exhibition game.

The Cubs took on a team of locals and a crowd of 7,000 showed up at the rickety Marion ballpark to watch the game. The campaign sent out press releases a few days before chronicling Harding’s playing days as a bare-handed first baseman in his

youth and detailed how he was once a major stockholder in a professional team in the Ohio State League.

Harding arrived at the game with the newsreel cameras rolling and received a rousing welcome from the crowd. He then warmed up the Cubs starting pitcher, future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander. After the warm-up session, Harding threw out the first pitch and then whooped it up in the stands for the benefit of the cameras the rest of the afternoon. When the game’s newsreel footage reached the movie houses, the favorable reaction it received more than canceled out Harding’s golfing blunder. He won the election, handily defeating his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox.

Harding’s frequent golfing and the criticism he received about it would dog him all through his presidency. It started the first Sunday he was in the White House, when he skipped church and headed to the course. By 1922, it was a public relations nightmare, and it was about to get even worse because Will Rogers had rolled into town.

When Rogers arrived, he was extended an invitation to the White House to meet the president. His visit was cordial and friendly. Harding even expressed an interest in seeing Will’s show. Rogers’ golf and political jibes quickly became the talk of the town. After just a few shows, one of Harding’s aides went to see Rogers and asked that he not do so many golf jokes about the president because the newspapers were making too much of it.

Although surprised at the request, Rogers agreed to it and eliminated several golf jokes from his act. A couple of nights later, it was announced that Harding was going out to the theater — there were only two shows in town — and Rogers took this to mean he was coming to see him. When the curtain rose, Harding was nowhere

to be seen. He had gone to the other show. The following night, Rogers turned the heat back up, putting the previous jokes about Harding’s golf back in his routine and adding more.

One turned out to be quite prophetic. There had been a fire that damaged the Treasury Department building, and Rogers used it for comedic effect. “The fire started on the roof and burned down to where the money was supposed to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it,” Rogers said.

Soon after Rogers’ show left Washington the biggest and most sensational scandal to hit American politics, to that point, broke: Tea Pot Dome.

n 1923, an effort was made to bring Rogers to Pinehurst for a show at the recently opened Theater Building. Due to other contractual obligations, Rogers doubted he could work Pinehurst into his schedule and, on the Pinehurst end, it was felt that Rogers’ fee of $500 was too mercenary.

Five years later, in the spring of 1928, Leonard Tufts, the owner of the Pinehurst Resort, footed the bill for Rogers to make an appearance, and the entertainer was more than happy to make the trip. It would involve two things he had become very passionate about: aviation and polo.

Rogers’ affection for aviation had turned him into the country’s first frequent flyer. Air travel was just what he needed to accommodate his demanding schedule. Paying by the pound, Rogers flew in mail planes to destinations across the country. He became good friends with aviators Charles Lindbergh and Billy Mitchell, regarded as the father of the United States Air Force. Rogers was flown to Pinehurst from Atlanta, where he was per-

Will Rogers in hot pursuit.

forming, by Pinehurst’s Lloyd Yost, a well-known aviator and the manager of the local airfield.

Rogers’ second passion, polo, was a sport every bit as highbrow as golf, the game he had mocked and made fun of for so many years. A fellow performer with Rogers in the Wild West show that fateful day at Madison Square Garden had a decade later begun training horses for polo in New Jersey. Rogers visited him and became hooked on a sport that allowed him to saddle up and get back to his cowboy roots. He became so “all-in” for polo that when he purchased the property for his ranch in Santa Monica, California, a polo field was laid out before the design for the ranch’s house.

Rogers hosted matches on the weekends whenever his travel schedule permitted. The regular participants were some of Hollywood’s biggest names: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Hal Roach, Walt Disney.

Rogers played polo with reckless abandon and had the broken bones to show for it. He once said of the sport, “They call it a gentlemen’s game for the same reason they call a tall man Shorty.” Los Angeles Times sportswriter Frank Finch wrote of Rogers, “He erased the tea-drinking, ‘High Society’ ideas about the mallet sport by appearing at swank polo clubs donned in overalls, cowboy boots, hatless and coatless, his $1.98 shirt open at the throat.”

The polo match in Pinehurst that Rogers saddled up for took place on the grounds of the harness track. The contest featured two local teams. Rogers took part as a member of the “The Yellows.” The match ended in a 3-3 tie with Rogers scoring all three of the Yellow team’s goals.

That evening Rogers put on his one-man show in the Theater Building. His appearance had been highly promoted with ads appearing in local newspapers since early February and was a soldout performance.

Well before his trip to Pinehurst, Rogers’ jokes about golf seemed to be tapering off. The sport had turned something of a popularity corner. Another icon who, like Rogers, was a hero to

the common man had become the country’s most high-profile golf fanatic — Babe Ruth. The baseball slugger’s exploits on the golf course flooded newspapers during the off-season.

And, two years prior to Rogers’ appearance in Pinehurst, Bobby Jones had been celebrated with a ticker-tape parade in New York City when he returned from winning the British Open and British Amateur. In 1930 Jones would collect all four championships in a calendar year — the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur, British Open and British Amateur — to complete his Grand Slam, earning a second ticker-tape celebration. Jones and John Glenn, the fighter pilot, astronaut and senator from Ohio, are the only people to have been so honored twice.

Over the next few years, Rogers developed a friendship with Jones. When Jones was in Hollywood to make a series of short films titled How I Play Golf, he spent time at Rogers’ ranch. Jones would hit golf balls around the ranch’s vast open spaces while Rogers accompanied him on horseback.

Rogers’ career continued to reach new heights. In 1935, he signed a movie contract with Fox Studios that would pay him $8,000 a week — the equivalent $176,000 in 2023. By late July of 1935, he had made four movies that were playing across the country and had just wrapped up the production of a fifth, titled In Old Kentucky. After that stretch of moviemaking, he was ready to get back to traveling.

Two weeks later, near Point Barrow, Alaska, an Eskimo man made a rapid trek on foot, covering 15 miles over rugged terrain in three hours to reach the Army Signal Corps station. So exhausted he could hardly speak, he told the personnel that a plane had crashed and its two occupants were dead. The pilot of the plane was renowned aviator Wiley Post. His passenger was Will Rogers. PS

David Sowell writes about golf history. He has written for the USGA’s Golf Journal and he is the author of the book The Masters: a Holeby-Hole History of America’s Golf Classic . He moved to Pinehurst in 2020.

Rogers and friends at the Harness Track

Doing It Their Way

Creating a little jewel box

by deborah Salomon

photographS by John geSSner

Homes fall into categories: fixer-upper, starter, family, dream, downsized, retirement. In the 20-some years Mike Jones and his wife, Annie Hallinan, have lived in Southern Pines, two homes have added a category: ours. Defying trends, periods, heirlooms and High Point, they plot a floor plan, hang paintings and arrange furniture their way.

This method fits a couple that has traveled the world on larks or for business while employed by AT&T/Verizon.

Annie is a petite Scottish lass who, as a cheeky 17-year-old, left home to find adventure, first in London, then New York. Mike, known as a pilot who flies his Cessna to the beach for the day, takes children for a ride or delivers rescued dogs to forever homes, grew up in Connecticut. They discovered Moore County on a 50th birthday jaunt, a look-see after rejecting Myrtle Beach, California and Arizona.

“Pinehurst fit like a beautiful jacket,” Mike recalls. The Moore County airport sealed the deal.

While he was playing golf, Annie — retired on a buyout — bought a house at Talamore, which soon proved too small. So she replaced it with a 7,000-square-foot Italianate villa, once a mail-order orchid nursery, possibly the only residence anywhere with a kitchen door opening directly into the greenhouse.

Lemon basil, anyone?

Chimbly, named for the industrial chimney rising over an outbuilding, became a Knollwood showcase. From there Annie wrote children’s books, and Mike, when not aloft, managed his family’s industrial cleaning products business.

After a decade, encapsulating seemed wise, hopefully in the neighborhood they loved.

“We wanted a little jewel box,” Annie says. How about directly across the street?

When its elderly resident vacated this adorable 2,000-square-foot cottage, Mike and Annie pounced. Never mind that it needed everything. For them, this was a plus, an invitation to create, indulge. Who cares if the contractor recommended demolition, then starting fresh?

“Nooo,” Annie insisted. “That would destroy the history, the character.” Instead . . .

“Let’s reallocate space.”

Start by moving the front door and ripping out the kitchen, which made room for an airy vestibule where a wood-paneled archway raises the ceiling and a huge lopsided compass covers the floor. Referencing Mike’s navigational prowess, the “N” arrow points true north, although the vestibule does not. A small rear porch was enclosed, fireplace and leather massage chair added. Now they had somewhere to eat dinner, read, watch storms roll in over the golf course and, Mike adds, “Enjoy each other.”

Let’s build: Annie and Mike named their project

The Wee House for good reasons, tiny bedrooms being one. Solution: Convert the front-facing double garage into a master suite and L-angle a new garage which, with the circular drive and mature dogwood tree, channels a European courtyard. Then, add a deck across the back, loaded with flowerpots and a fountain. But don’t mess with the cream-colored shakes and blue roof, since they hint at imagination within.

Let’s cook: Mike does the honors, superbly. “When he’s gone I eat cereal,” Annie admits. The couple entertains often, most recently a party celebrating Mike’s newly minted doctorate in business administration, at 72. His open, flow-through kitchen centers the entire house. He chose bright navy cupboards; a painting over the sink; blue granite countertops uncluttered by appliances; a range placement that allows him to converse with guests while sautéing; the Rolls-Royce of French-door refrigerators; a steam oven for high-rise muffins, yeast breads and his signature salmon en croute; and a “canapé counter” for cocktail party tidbits. Here, like elsewhere, the ceiling fixture masquerades as suspended sculpture.

Let’s be practical: All the systems — heat, AC, plumbing, electrical, needed replacing. Doors were widened and bathrooms, including the shower, made wheelchair accessible just in case. A

corner of the yard was fenced for three elderly rescue dogs, should walks become difficult. Annie and Mike each have an office; his, in the basement, hers in a small former bedroom, where Wee House’s only TV is located. Here, they start each day with coffee and the news.

Let’s have fun: Annie calls their quirky little touches “Easter eggs.” There’s Mike’s teddy bear collection, used during Angel Flights, sitting on a ceiling shelf; a second dishwasher in the laundry room/butler’s pantry; a suspended metal rod “toasting bar” running down the center of the dining room table, to clink glasses during dinner party toasts; shelves built to display Annie’s shoe collection; bathroom washbasins hand painted, in the Chinese mode, with serpents and other fanciful motifs, to complement similar wallpaper. But the premier egg has to be the bar Mike contrived from a hall closet opposite the living room, centered on a portrait of a Mexican woman. The walls, countertops, appliances, floor — are all black illuminated by flickering clear Christmas-tree lights. Here, Mike stores his single-malt Scotch.

Let’s gather: Only the living room retains some resemblance of the original layout. A stone chimney rises from the wood-burning hearth to the cathedral ceiling. Opposite it, light streams through 14-foot windows with wood-framed panes. Furnishings are comfortable, sparse, not to detract from the art. “I’d rather have art than furniture,” Annie says.

Let’s keep it simple: Clutter is not permitted at Wee House. Annie shudders at the mention. Before vacating Chimbly, she selected which furniture would cross the road, then invited friends to a giveaway. Habitat carted off the rest. “I call it Spartan, spare, no froufrou,” Mike adds. Most of their beloved, often huge, paintings survived the cut, including a nearly lifesized reclining female nude. Some pieces have animal themes, others suggest Modigliani or Chagall. Mike’s favorite is a tabletop-sized carving depicting a woman hugging her dog.

Renovations took more than a year, with Annie and Mike dropping in often. No thought was given to resale of this two-bedroom gem with a small living room but panoramic view of Mid Pines’ 12th fairway — and a kitchen positioned for cooking in the round. “We use every room, every day. We surround ourselves with things that make us happy,” Annie explains, including people, animals, art . . . and each other. PS

ALMANAC

by a Shley Wal She

Going Moony

August slows us down. Speeds us up. Goes by a host of honest names. Call it “Epoch of Purple Coneflowers” or “Dawn of the Swamp Rose Mallow” or “Rudbeckia in C Major.” In the garden, call it “abundance.”

Call it “too many tomatoes” or “fresh salsa for days” or “winter marinara.”

Call it sweet corn tossed with butter. Pickled chili peppers. Green beans sizzling in the skillet. Call up the neighbors to share the harvest.

The bees seem to know these days are numbered. The butterflies, too. They sip warm nectar long and slow as if to become it. As if the beauty might swallow them whole.

It’s the beginning of the end. Summer’s swan song. The firefly’s last dance.

Perhaps you call it bittersweet, the way the golden light begins to soften. How the cicada still sings. How it’s all so subtle.

Black snake basks in candied light. As the season fades, the crickets play their hearts out. Beautyberries bear whorls of purple fruit. The gray squirrel bears her second litter.

It’s the beginning of something new.

By month’s end, the hives are fat with honey. The spring fawns have lost their spots. The crickets perform late summer’s opus.

“Rudbeckia in C Minor” swells into the balmy evening.

As the earliest apples ripen, something in the air will shift. You’ll want to name it “joy” or “sorrow” — maybe even “respite.” Call it what you’d like: gift, heartache or threshold. August is all of it.

Those who garden by the moon’s phases should know that two full moons will grace us with their brilliance this month — on the first and last day. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, this age-old planting practice is based on the idea that the gravitational pull of the moon “affects the moisture in the soil” just as it causes the tides to swell and recede.

Ever tried it? Annual flowers and above-ground crops (as in your fall greens) should be sown into the earth during the waxing phase of the moon. In other words, from the new moon (August 16) until the blue moon (August 31). Flowering bulbs (think spider lily and sternbergia) and below-ground crops (beets, radishes and rutabaga) are said to thrive when planted during the moon’s waning phase, beginning the day after it is full (in this case, August 2) until the day before it is new again.

If those full moons happen to look just a bit bigger and brighter this month, it’s because they are, in fact, supermoons — as close to the Earth as they can get.

August of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sun and the lilies again are spread across the water.

— Mary Oliver

The Bees Knees

Among the native wildflowers sure to dazzle pollinators and nature lovers alike, behold the blooming swamp rose mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos), found thriving in moist soil and full sun, especially alongside creeks and ponds. Irresistible to bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, this showy perennial is known for its sizable pink and white flowers. Fragrant and funnel-shaped, these five-petaled wonders open at night, revealing a vibrant red or purple center with a riot of yellow stamens. Long bloom this late summer beauty! PS

PS PROfiles

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

AUGUST 2023

SPONSORED SECTION

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOLLY NAZARIO

RICK & TERRY YOUNG PHYSICAL THERAPISTS

In Downtown Aberdeen, there’s a feel good story hiding in plain sight. Literally, the owners of Aberdeen Physical Therapy and Wellness, LLC, are not only an inspirational pair of entrepreneurs, they can actually help you feel good – chronic pain treatment being among their many métiers.

Long-established in the historic downtown building they renovated themselves in 2010, Co-Owners Rick and Terry Young each have a list of specialty certifications. With their staff of six they treat general orthopedic and neurologic patients while specializing in shoulder rehab, dry needling, temporomandibular disorders and the oft-overlooked area of male pelvic health. Their expertise in sports specific problems serves our area of avid golfers and equestrians well, as manual, hands-on therapists.

Terry first moved to Moore County in 1979, where she attended Sandhills Community College and paired a love of psychology with the art of movement, volunteering at her first PT job right here in Pinehurst. A return to Pennsylvania introduced her to Rick, who was implementing his interest in biological psychology to improve stroke rehabilitation outcomes. They married and started their family, but when a job offered itself in 2001, and the couple returned to reestablish their Carolina roots.

Moore County may be where they raised their babies, but it’s also where they continue to grow. They are always reinventing themselves and learning something new— Rick bagpipes competitively for the local Highland Games, while Terry has earned the quirky title of 2018 Sardine Queen at the Aberdeen Sardine Festival. Beyond community ties, what distinguishes them is their one-on-one approach. Fundamentally, they prioritize providing quality, individualized patient care as a more important metric than the number of patients they see.

Maintaining a patient-centered business in this age of revenue-driven health care is hard, but Rick and Terry are proud that they’ve remained true to their vision of compassion for others and that they still love what they do.

200 N Poplar St, Aberdeen, NC 910.944.1169

www.aberdeenptw.com

CILE WILLIAMSON, MD, MPH, FACOG KARIN DIMON, MD

Dr. Cile Williamson has been around the world –from residency in Colorado to hiking on the famed Machu Picchu trail – but her family’s ultimate relocation to Moore County 25 years ago was a homecoming for Dr. Williamson, who was born down the road in Hamlet and completed her professional schooling at UNC Chapel Hill.

After years practicing in the Sandhills, she founded Williamson Gynecology in 2010. Ten years of delivering babies and providing primarily obstetric services had brought her to the realization that women in the Sandhills needed comprehensive gynecological health care, a feature of Williamson Gynecology that first attracted new physician Dr. Karin Dimon to the practice.

Born and raised in the southeast, including attending high school in Charlotte, Dr. Dimon is no stranger to North Carolina. She practiced as an OB/GYN for many years in Michigan before limiting her practice to gynecology. Many of the babies that she delivered became her gynecology patients. After recently deciding to return to her southern roots, she felt that Williamson Gynecology was a perfect fit. Her husband, three teenaged children and three dogs will not miss the cold Michigan winters! Starting in August, Dr. Dimon says she is excited and passionate about providing the most up-to-date and compassionate care that she can to her new patients at Williamson Gynecology.

Dr. Williamson and her staff have worked hard to create and maintain a small, intimate office setting, with a family atmosphere that starts the minute you walk into the lobby. Besides Dr. Williamson and Dr. Dimon, our provider team also includes Amy LaFrenz, WHNP, who has a loyal patient base and has been a provider at Williamson Gynecology for over 10 years, and Rachel Thomasson, FNP who has been building her practice over the past year with amazing patient reviews. The tight knit staff includes an efficient front office team, talented and caring licensed medical professionals, an in-house phlebotomist, an ultrasound technologist, and an experienced biller. To have all of these services in the office is an asset as it reduces stress and streamlines care – saving everyone time and putting excellent individualized care first.

The customized, patient-focused care at Williamson Gynecology includes well-woman visits, vaginal health treatments, contraception, menopause management, incontinence treatment, gynecological surgery and more. Their team is grateful to continue providing a comprehensive range of gynecological services for women in a small and personable office environment where everyone feels welcomed and at home. The practice accept referrals from outside providers and are taking new patients.

SIERRA MELLO REAL ESTATE AGENT

For Sierra Mello, Moore County is more than a red hot real estate market – it’s home, and has been since her family’s U.S. Army service brought her to Southern Pines. This local upbringing has provided her with extensive knowledge of the area, making her an invaluable resource for families searching for their ideal home.

Sierra’s journey in the field of sales and customer service began at Morgan Miller in Southern Pines. After graduating from PHS, she further solidified her commitment to the industry by earning a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. Starting as an intern, Sierra was promoted six times and ended her career as a Branch Manager at one of the largest Enterprise locations in the state.

Encouraged by her family, Sierra embarked on a new path and became a realtor. Now, she leverages her passion for real estate to serve not only her friends and family but also her clients, who quickly become lifelong friends.

Sierra’s personal drive and motivation run deeper than a mere desire for success. They stem from the influence of a beloved brother, Greg, whom she tragically lost in 2021. He served as her inspiration to pursue higher education, seek out scholarships, and become a realtor. He was her unwavering support system. In honor of his memory, Sierra devotes her time to advocating and fundraising for mental health organizations.

Sierra’s versatility and expertise extend far beyond Moore County. She has facilitated real estate transactions in 11 other counties, showcasing her ability to navigate diverse locations and cater to a wide range of clients.

Having helped hundreds of families successfully buy and sell homes, Sierra’s ultimate goal is to become one of the most trusted names in residential real estate in the area. Working alongside her mentor and broker-in-charge, Nikki Bowman, Sierra is dedicated to assisting you in planting your own deep roots in the Moore County area.

When you choose Sierra Mello as your realtor, you gain not only an experienced professional but also a caring and compassionate partner who understands the significance of finding the perfect place to call home. With Sierra by your side, your real estate journey in Moore County will be met with unwavering dedication, expertise and the promise of a lifelong friendship.

910.691.8584

realestate@sierramello.com

WEBB & MORTON

Clients want a law firm that is very good at a few important things – not mediocre in many things. That specialization in success is what sets local law firm Webb & Morton, PLLC, apart from others. Webb & Morton concentrates on a few very important areas of the law, including Tax Law, Estate Planning/ Probate, and Asset Protection. As a small boutique firm, it’s able to provide clients the attention they need without sacrificing the institutional knowledge of a large law firm. It’s a trait that attracts clients from around the world, from Moore County to the Ukraine to Japan. Each client can be confident they are in good hands, relying on the firm’s nearly 90 years of legal experience to best protect their interests.

Senior Partner Alex Webb (JD, CPA, PFS), who recently celebrated 50 years of practicing law, is best known for his success lobbying for a state-of-the-art North Carolina Captive Insurance law in 2013, which provides business owners tremendous opportunities for tax savings and asset protection. When away from the office, Alex enjoys snorkeling and spending time with his wife, Dianne, in her wine shop in Carthage, “The Watering Can”, and traveling to France and Italy.

Partner Jason Morton (JD, CCE), a Pinebluff native, has 15 years of experience as a first-class tax lawyer, and was an early adopter of digital assets, which led him to cryptocurrencies before they made headlines. He now advises many crypto clients, blockchain startups, and produces videos for the firm’s YouTube Channel with nearly 50 videos and more coming. Jason also specializes in all aspects of tax defense, including audit defense, foreign compliance, innocent spouse claims and more. Jason also serves his country as an Army NG JAG officer and lives in Carthage with his wife, their son, and beloved canines and other farm animals.

Senior Attorney

Austin Chestnut (JD, MBA, CTFA), a Southern Pines native, has focused his over 20-year career on Fiduciary Law matters and

Estates and Trusts, and is a former Vice President with SunTrust Bank. Austin is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys spending time with his two teenage sons. Webb and Morton’s motto is “we help clients sleep at night” because it aggressively protects its clients when facing some of life’s biggest challenges, be it health issues and needed estate planning, planning for a special needs child, proactively protecting hard-earned assets from attack, or fending off overbearing tax authorities, the IRS and NC Dept. of Revenue. At Webb & Morton, find comfort in knowing this team will defend you smartly with a caring and thoughtful hand.

PETER ELLMAN, M.D., FACS CARDIOVASCULAR & THORACIC SURGEON

FirstHealth leads the region in advanced heart care, and that tradition continues with the Reid Heart Center. The state-of-theart heart center is in the top five% nationwide, though that’s not its defining factor.

“The physical plant itself is special; but it’s the people who work here that make it great,” says Dr. Peter Ellman, MD. He is a cardiothoracic surgeon with over 22 years of experience and is convinced there is nowhere better to go for heart care. “You can build the most technologically advanced hospital in the world, but if you don’t have great people inside of it, it’s not going to be worth anything. So you put great people together with a great place in central North Carolina, and it’s an anomaly, it really is.”

Dr. Ellman is among the terrific people that make Reid Heart Center so special. Medicine has always been a part of his life, with a general surgeon father and a gastroenterologist maternal grandfather, who fostered his own aptitude for the sciences. After earning a medical degree from University of Pennsylvania, his training took him up and down the east coast with a residency in General Surgery at the University of Virginia, followed by a second fellowship in Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery at the University of Florida. With technical expertise secured, Peter Ellman had his pick of hospitals but chose Moore Regional. He has loved the area for years, having first visited Pinehurst for a golf camp at the age of 12. It was something about the landscape, the long leaf pines, “the magic of the resort” that really made him want to call the Sandhills home. When the opportunity arose to actually move here to practice heart surgery, it seemed like destiny calling for him and his wife, Sarah, co-owner of Southern Pines Crossfit. They have certainly put down permanent roots since they answered the call.

The Moore County health community touched Dr. Ellman’s own life last year, when a former surgery patient, (also a colleague and friend) whose life he had saved seven years ago, saved his life through a kidney donation. “Here, we don’t have residents or medical students – we are here because we want to be able to provide focused care to our patients directly,” he says. “To walk into a room and engage with somebody and know that’s what it is all about – helping somebody feel better.”

That’s what you call heart warming.

DR. LEJLA STREETS, DMD

Comfort. Relaxation Dental work? It’s an uncommon trio, but one Dr. Lejla Streets, DMD, PLLC, has achieved at her clinic, Smiles in the Pines. With calming decor, state-of-the-art technology and a uniquely attentive patient-doctor relationship, Dr. Lejla Streets creates a special experience for patients with her new, breathtakingly aesthetic clinic, Smiles in the Pines.

Born in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a childhood in Germany, Dr. Streets spent a majority of her life in the Boston area before a commission in the U.S. Army brought her to the former Fort Bragg. As a veteran and military spouse, she’s proud to continue a sense of service in all she does. Throughout 2023, her team held free pediatric screenings for sleep disordered breathing, providing assistance to over 52 children and their families through collaborative care with other medical professionals. Her clinic is an active sponsor of numerous local nonprofits.

That caring love for her community, for building lasting relationships with patients, is what brought Lejla to dentistry. The ability to change someone’s life contrasted with an interest in the science behind oral and systemic health still influences her today. Knowing that the mouth is the gateway to health, she strives

to help patients achieve holistic wellness. State-of-the-art dental technology makes appointments more comfortable and treatments more advanced.

Smiles in the Pines services range from general dentistry to specialized treatments like Dental Sleep Medicine, laser dentistry, early orthodontics, TMJ treatment, and holistic care. And more improvements are on the horizon, including the EMS Airflow Plus to reduce patient sensitivity in cleanings, ozone therapy, increased biocompatibility and the incorporation of fluoride-alternative treatment options for patients. Accepting most insurances, it is unique in it’s special program for uninsured patients covering numerous services and discounted rates on others. Most importantly, Dr. Lejla will be taking time with every patient to give them her full attention. Now that’s something to smile about.

GARY MCGAHEY PRESIDENT PATRICK MCBRAYER VICE PRESIDENT

Buying your first home? Finally got your dream car? Need private health insurance for the first time? Who do you call to protect the things that matter most to you? The Insurance Center — where experienced, local, licensed insurance advisors are there to assist you with your insurance decisions.

Gary R. McGahey [President] and Patrick A. McBrayer [Vice President] of The Insurance Center in Southern Pines promise that personal relationships are key and your telephone calls will be answered by a real person every time. Their independent insurance agency was formed over 42 years ago and was forged on establishing personal relationships with all of their clients. Gary and Patrick undertook a seamless ownership transition over three years ago which was completed at the beginning of this year.

Gary and his wife Debbie moved to Moore County 36 years ago when Gary joined The Insurance Center in a producer/ownership role in early 1987. They have always been very involved in the community along with their four children, Mike, Jenny, Kelli, Molly, their spouses and their nine grandchildren.

Patrick is one of those friendly, local folks who was born and raised in Moore County. He graduated from Pinecrest High School and Sandhills Community College. After 10 years in the restaurant industry, Patrick and his wife, Devin, had a desire to come back home to the Sandhills. He joined the The Insurance Center team after just a couple of meetings, and became licensed in all lines of insurance. When he is not working, he enjoys spending time with Devin and their daughter Eliza or cooking for family and friends.

Over almost a half century in the insurance business Gary has seen just about everything. Working alongside a team of agents — Beth, Danica, Carrasse, Amanda, Odette, Cydney and Jasmine — to properly offer coverage for personal, commercial, farm, health, group health, life, dental, vision, and medi-care supplemental/ advantage plans, the folks at The Insurance Center will help you in the tough and uncertain times in order to make your future brighter.

145 W. Vermont Avenue

Southern Pines, NC 28387

910-692-9251

SANDY STEWART

SANDHILLS COMMUNITY

PRESIDENT

COLLEGE

Recently named as the third president of Sandhills Community College, Alexander “Sandy” Stewart is no stranger to Moore County. A Moore County native, Sandy has served as the assistant commissioner of agricultural services for the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services since 2018, as well as a trustee for Sandhills’ Board of Trustees for seven years. He holds masters and doctoral degrees in crop science from N.C. State University and has done extensive work managing agricultural research facilities and crop research in the private sector.

When he’s not laboring on his family’s working farm in Carthage, Sandy enjoys traveling, backpacking in the mountains, camping with his family, trying out new recipes in the kitchen and playing golf — or as he says, “playing at golf.” He and his wife Carol, who met on a blind date years ago, are the proud parents of three children who are creative and different in their own ways - Martha Grace (18) who will be attending Appalachian State University in the fall, Virgie (15) and Palmer (13), both students at Sandhills Classical Christian School.

Sandy is thankful to have been led by great bosses and mentors in his lifetime, from George Thompson, former superintendent at CCNC, to Steve Troxler, N.C. commissioner of agriculture. “I’ve been fortunate to be able to just observe and learn how they lead and manage. I hope I’ve been able to pick a lot of that up through my career.”

He also has a great appreciation for what Moore County has to offer in terms of diverse natural beauty and amenities, and feels at very much at home across the county, from Robbins and Highfalls in the northern end all eh way down to the Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen area. “I have deep roots in Moore County, so naturally there is a sense of place and being at home for me.”

In a special to The Pilot, Sandy’s predecessor, Dr. Dempsey, insisted that a college’s board of trustees “has one task that towers in importance above all others: Hire the right president. In choosing Sandy Stewart, the board has done just that.”

Although he has plenty of accolades under his belt already, Sandy knows that his greatest accomplishment is still in his future. He admits that he has big shoes to fill, and he looks forward to leading Sandhills into its next chapter along the way.

arts & entertainment

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 any events.

TECH HELP SESSIONS. SPPL offers one-on-one Technology Help Sessions. A library staff member will sit with you to assist with accessing eBooks, learning how to use a new device, navigating a computer, and to answer any other basic technology questions. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. To make an appointment come into the library or visit www.sppl.net.

PHOTO HISTORY 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. The historical association will host an exhibit, “Southern Pines Then and Now,” featuring photographs taken 100 years ago and what the same area looks like today. Free admission. Water Department, 180 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines.

AUGUST EVENTS

Tuesday, August 1

BRAIN FITNESS. 10 - 11 a.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to a 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.

TEEN CRAFTS. 4 p.m. Come by the library to get the craft kit of the night. Work at your own pace or take it home. This is an open space for attendees and is not a guided program. You may come and go as you please. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.sppl.net or email: kbroughey@sppl.net.

Thursday, August 3

SOUL FLOW. 6:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older.

08.04

the exhibit “More than Miniatures — Small Art ” Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: www.artistleague.org.

FIRST FRIDAY. 5 - 8 p.m. Caitlin Krisko and The Broadcast perform. Free admission. There will be food trucks and Southern Pines Brewing Company beer on tap. No pets allowed. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 420-2549 or www.sunrisetheater.com.

FINE ARTS FESTIVAL. 6 - 8 p.m. The Arts Council of Moore County will host the opening reception for the Fine Arts Festival. The art will be on exhibit through Aug. 30. Campbell House Galleries, 482 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2787 or www.mooreart.org.

Join a gentle flow to soothe the mind, body and soul. A mixture of yin and restorative yoga. Great for all levels. Cost is $12 for residents and $17 for non-residents. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Friday, August 4 LUNCH BUNCH. 11:30 a.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to dine on varied cuisines each month as you visit different restaurants in the area. Carpool with friends or meet at the restaurant. Dining locations will be chosen the week before. Info: Douglass Community Center, (910) 692-7376.

BOOK EVENT. 5 - 6 p.m. David Joy will be speaking about his book Those We Thought We Knew. Free event. The Country Bookshop, 140 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

ART EXHIBIT. 5 - 7 p.m. The Artists League of the Sandhills will host its opening reception for

THEATER PRODUCTION. 8 - 9:30 p.m. Enjoy a production of The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, featuring actress Linda Purl. Performances continue through Aug. 13. McPherson Theater at BPAC, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

DANCE SOCIAL. 8 - 9:30 p.m. Join Carolina DanceWorks for a dance social. There will be a second social held on August 25. Carolina DanceWorks, 712 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1846 or www.carolinadanceworks.com.

Saturday, August 5

KID’S SATURDAY. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Families are invited to a monthly themed craft event to socialize and get creative. Geared toward ages 3 - 10. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-3642 or www.vopnc.org.

HORSE EVENT. SPEA War Horse Event Series. The event continues through Aug. 6. Carolina Horse Park, 2814 Montrose Road, Raeford. Info: www.carolinahorsepark.com.

DANCE SOCIAL. 7 - 11 p.m. Come out for hot music and cold ice cream at Moore Area Shag Society’s Social. Doors open at 6:30 with DJ Roger Holcomb playing great dance tunes. There is a cash bar, and you may bring snacks for your table. Admission is $10. Must be 21 or older. Down Memory Lane, 161 Dawkins St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 215-4054.

Tuesday, August 8

AARP TALK. 12 - 12:30 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to join AARP for a fraud talk. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

CALENDAR

Arboretum, 375 Magnolia Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-3642 or www.vopnc.org.

Saturday, August 12

COMMUNITY YARD SALE. 9 a.m. - 2 p.m. Enjoy shopping 20 - 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. 73, West End. Info: (910) 420-8970.

OPEN AUDITIONS. 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Whether you are an experienced actor or just want to try something new, come out and audition for Miracle on 34th Street and/or Don’t Dress for Dinner. There are roles for children and adults. Encore Center, 160 E. New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.encorecenter.net.

TEA WITH POTTERS. 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Spend the day cruising the Seagrove countryside, discovering handmade pottery, and sampling teas and pastries along the way. Drink iced tea from Carriage House Tea, eat pastries from the Table Farmhouse Bakery and Holly Hill Farm, and try homemade treats at Blue Hen Pottery, Dean & Martin Pottery, Eck McCanless Pottery, From the Ground Up, Red Hare Pottery and Thomas Pottery. N.C. Pottery Highway 705, Seagrove.

Sunday, August 13

PARENT TALK. 2 p.m. Angela Manning, a professional in the education field, will host a talk about anxiety in children and how to support them in today’s world. The Country Bookshop, 140 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Book Club

TEEN WRITING CLUB. 4 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: www.sppl.net or email: kbroughey@sppl.net.

Wednesday, August 9

PLAYTIME IN THE PARK. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Kids ages 3 - 12 and their parents can join others for giant checkers, jingo, bubbles and more. Free of charge. Downtown Park, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Friday, August 11

LIVE AFTER 5. 5:15 - 9 p.m. Heads Up Penny performs at Live After 5. Local soloist Julia Golden is back as the opening act. There will also be kids’ activities and food trucks. Beer, wine and additional beverages will be available for purchase. Picnic baskets are allowed; outside alcoholic beverages are not permitted. Free event. Bring your lawn chairs, blankets and dancing shoes. The Village

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 projects and activities. This month we will be making ice cream. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or kbroughey@sppl.net.

Monday, August 14

PHOTO CLUB. 7 p.m. The Sandhills Photography Club monthly meeting will be a competition. The topic will be “Animals on the Move,” judged by Julie Countryman, a certified professional photographer based in Arizona. Guests are welcome. Sandhills Horticultural Gardens Visitors Center, 3245 Airport Road, Southern Pines. Info: www.sandhillsphotoclub.org.

Tuesday, August 15

BRAIN FITNESS. 10 - 11 a.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to a 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.

BINGO. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to play 10 games of bingo. Cost is $4 for residents and $6 for non-residents. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

BOOK CLUB. 2 p.m. The James Boyd Book Club meets for this month’s book, The Outer Banks House, by Diann Ducharme. Free admission, registration required. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

TEEN BOARD GAME NIGHT. 4 p.m. BYOG (Bring Your Own Game) or use one of ours. This is an open space for attendees and is not a guided program. You may come and go as you please. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.sppl.net or email: kbroughey@sppl.net.

Wednesday, August 16

WHITEHALL BOOK CLUB. 2 p.m. Southern Pines Public Library’s book club for adults meets to discuss this month’s book. The book club is open to the public. Whitehall Property, 490 Pee Dee Road, Southern Pines. Info: mmiller@sppl.net.

Thursday, August 17

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.

MOVIE. 7 p.m. Enjoy the summer classic movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Tickets are $6. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 420-2549 or www.sunrisetheater.com.

Friday, August 18

FINANCIAL PRESENTATION. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. Join Kasey Dixon from First Bank for a presentation on “Financial Wellness.” Learn strategies to build your credit score and more. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.sppl.net.

HORSE EVENT. Sedgefield at the Park Late Summer NCHJA ‘C’ H/J Show. The event continues through August 20. Carolina Horse Park, 2814 Montrose Road, Raeford. Info: www.carolinahorsepark.com.

MUSICAL. 8 - 9:30 p.m. The Judson Theatre Company presents The Last Five Years. Performances continue through Aug. 27. McPherson Theater at BPAC, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Saturday, August 19

CRAFT DAYS. Children and their families can come by the library for Drop-in Craft Days and work on crafts at their own pace or take it home. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

DANCING. 6 p.m. Carolina Pines Dance Club invites you for a fun evening of swing, shag, ballroom, Latin and line dancing. Doors open at 6 p.m. Dance lessons from 6:30 - 7:30 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. Tyson Sinclair Ballroom (second floor), 105 McReynolds St., Carthage. Info: (910) 331-9965.

Monday, August 21

SENIOR CITIZENS DAY. 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to join Southern Pines Parks and Recreation as we celebrate National Senior Citizens Day. Enjoy games, prizes, tasty treats, fellowship and much more. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Tuesday, August 22

TEEN WRITING CLUB. 4 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: www.sppl.net or email: kbroughey@sppl.net.

Friday, August 25

PADDLE UNDER THE STARS. 8 p.m. Adults 18 and older can enjoy a mix of science and mythology about the night sky while kicking back in canoes or kayaks on the reservoir. Bring your own canoe/kayak/paddleboard, a flashlight and life jacket. Free of charge, registration required. Reservoir Park, 300 Reservoir Park Drive, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Saturday, August 26

DODGEBALL TOURNAMENT. 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Join us for a fun day of dodgeball and fundraising for the CARE Group programs. Cost is $150 for a team of six plus one substitute player and $5 for Fan in the Stands pass. There will be food trucks, drinks, raffles, contests and prizes. Old Aberdeen Elementary School Gym, 305 Elm St., Aberdeen. Info: www.thecaregroupinc.org/ events/dodgeball-tournament.

MOVIE NIGHT. 8 p.m. The town of Vass will host a movie night and will be showing Super Mario Brothers. Sandy Ramey Keith Park, 3600 U.S. 1 Business, Vass. Info: www.townofvassnc.gov.

Sunday, August 27

JAZZ ON THE LAWN. Join us outdoors on the grounds at the Weymouth Center for live jazz featuring The Matt White Quartet, whose brash and invigorating music is rooted in the jazz tradition. Bring your own blanket, chairs and a picnic, and enjoy our cash bar with mimosas, beer, wine and nonalcoholic beverages available. Tickets start at $27.50 and children 12 and under are admitted free. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

Tuesday, August 29

TEEN CRAFTS. 4 p.m. Come by the library to get the craft kit of the night. Work at your own pace or take it home. This is an open space for attendees and is not a guided program. You may come and go as you please. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.sppl.net or email: kbroughey@sppl.net.

MUSICIANS’ JAM SESSION. 6 - 9 p.m. Bring your own instrument and beverage or just come

Jazz on the Lawn

and enjoy the music. Attendees must have the COVID vaccination. Free admission, registration required. Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

Wednesday, August 30

SENIOR TRIP. 9:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to visit the North Carolina Veterans Park. Afterward enjoy a lunch at Fuller’s BBQ. Cost is $8 for residents and $12 for non-residents. Info: (910) 692-7376.

Thursday, August 31

DOUGLASS CENTER BOOK CLUB. 10:30 a.m. Multiple copies of the selected book are available for checkout at the library. The Douglass Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: mmiller@sppl.net.

MEDICAL MINUTES. 1 - 2 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to learn about different topics beneficial to the senior community. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

SOUL FLOW. 6:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Join a gentle flow to soothe the mind, body and soul. A mixture of yin and restorative yoga. Great for all levels. Cost is $12 for residents and $17 for non-residents. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

MOVIE. 7 p.m. Enjoy the summer classic movie National Lampoon’s Vacation. Tickets are $6. Sunrise

Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 420-2549 or www.sunrisetheater.com.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Sunday, September 3

WRITING GROUP. 3 p.m. Are you interested in creating fiction, nonfiction, poetry or comics? Come to the Sunday Afternoon Writing Group. Connect with other writers and artists, chat about your craft, and get feedback about your work. All levels welcome. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: lholden@sppl.net.

WEEKLY EVENTS

Mondays

WORKSPACES. 7 a.m. - 3p.m. The Given Tufts Bookshop has a new pop-in co-workspace open on Mondays and Thursdays in the upstairs conference room. Bookshop floor and private meeting room by reservation only. Info: www.giventuftsfoundation.com.

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: (910) 692-7376.

CHAIR YOGA. 9 - 10 a.m. For adults 55 and older. Help offset body aches encountered with desk work. This is an accessible yoga class for bodies not able to easily get up from and down to the floor. Do standing or sitting in a chair. Also available Wednesdays 10 - 11 a.m. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

WALK WITH EASE. 10 - 11 a.m. For adults 55 and older. Don’t miss out on this free health program to reduce joint pain and stiffness and improve energy, stamina, strength, balance, activity and independence. Classes continue each week through September 20. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (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. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

RESTORATIVE YOGA. 12 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Practice gentle movements to improve your well-being. 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: (910) 692-7376.

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.

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 corn hole, 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: (910) 692-7376.

TAI CHI. 1:30 - 2:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Improve your balance both mentally and physically, which can significantly reduce the rate of falls in older adults, while improving relaxation, vitality and posture. Classes continue each week through October 18. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (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: (910) 692-7376.

SOUTHERN SOUL LINE DANCING. 6 p.m. No experience necessary, put on your comfy shoes and groove to some funky tunes with funk master Terry Julius. For adults 55 and older. Cost is $6 for Southern Pines residents and $9 for non-residents. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

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MUSIC BINGO. 6 p.m. Music bingo with DJ Mike. Come have a blast and try to identify the tune before the next song starts. Southern Pines Brewing Company, 565 Air Tool Drive, Southern Pines. Info: www.southernpinesbrewing.com.

DANCE CLASSES. 7 p.m. Carolina DanceWorks will hold a beginner’s country western class. Carolina DanceWorks, 712 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1846 or www.carolinadanceworks.com.

Tuesdays

PLAYFUL LEARNING. 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Come for a drop-in, open playtime for ages birth - 3 years to interact with other children and have educational playtime. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-3642.

HATHA YOGA. 10 - 11 a.m. For adults 55 and older. Increase your flexibility, balance, stability, and muscle tone while learning the basic principles of alignment and breathing. You may gain strength, improve circulation and reduce chronic pain as we practice gentle yoga postures and mindfulness. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

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. An active library card is required. Dates this month are Aug. 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

HEALING YOGA. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. Adults 55 and older can try an entry-level class, for a mind and body workout that fuses dance moves with gentle aerobics, tai chi, and yoga. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

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.

TEEN TUESDAYS. 4 - 5 p.m. Teens in middle and high school can join us every week to connect with other teens in a fun and safe space. Each week is a different topic or activity. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.sppl.net.

TRIVIA. 7 p.m. Trivia with DJ Mike. Current events and pop-culture. Winner gets a brewery gift card. Southern Pines Brewing Company, 205 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.southernpinesbrewing.com.

DANCE CLASSES. 7 p.m. Carolina DanceWorks offers swing classes. Carolina DanceWorks, 712 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1846 or www.carolinadanceworks.com.

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.

Wednesdays

HUMMINGBIRD BANDING. 8:30 - 11 a.m. Join Susan Campbell, our park naturalist and hummingbird expert, for a banding demonstra-

Wed.

Hummingbird Banding

tion and Q&A on the ecology and behavior of the ruby-throated hummingbird. Weymouth Woods Visitor Center, 1024 Fort Bragg Rd., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167.

WALK WITH EASE. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Don’t miss out on this free health program to reduce joint pain and stiffness and improve energy, stamina, strength, balance, activity and independence. Classes continue each week through September 20. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

LEARN AND PLAY. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Come in for an open 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 August 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

LINE DANCING. 12 - 1 p.m. Looking for new ways to get your daily exercise in and care for yourself? Try line dancing. For adults 55 and older. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

SLOW AND STRETCHY. 12 - 1 p.m. Adults 55 and older can flow through yoga poses slowly and intentionally, stretching everything from your head to your toes. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

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: (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: (910) 692-7376.

DANCE. 2 - 2:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Instructor Maria Amaya will introduce you to dance fitness in this class designed for anyone who wants

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Sizzlin Hot Sale for August! 25% off on select items

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Hours: Mon-Sat 10-6

MOORE COUNTY

MARKET Courtesy of the Town of Southern Pines

THURSDAYS

604 W. Morganton Rd Southern Pines, NC (Armory Sports Complex) 9 am - 1 pm I ALL YEAR

SATURDAYS

Downtown Southern Pines SE Broad & New York Ave Southern Pines, NC 8 am- Noon | Late April thru October

For more info on vendors and special event closures please visit: www.MooreCountyFarmersMarket.com

Featuring Fine Furniture

CALENDAR

to gently and gradually increase their cardio function, mobility and balance and have fun at the same time. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

LINE DANCING. 2 p.m. The town of Vass will host line dancing for seniors every other Wednesday. Cost is $5 per session. Vass Town Hall, 140 S. Alma St., Vass. Info: www.townofvassnc.gov.

TAI CHI. 2 - 3 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Improve your balance, both mentally and physically, to significantly reduce the rate of falls in older adults, while enhancing relaxation, vitality and posture. Classes continue each week through October 18. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

SANDHILLS FARMERS MARKET. 3 - 6 p.m. The Sandhills Farmers Market features some of the many wonderful farms, nurseries, bakeries, meat and egg providers, cheesemakers and specialty food producers our area has to offer. You will find this incredible mix of vendors through October 1. Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.vopnc.org.

LIBRARY PROGRAM. 3:30 p.m. At The Library After School (ATLAS) is an after-school program for kindergarten through second graders who enjoy activities, crafts, stories and learning. Dates this month are August 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

POWER VINYASA FLOW. 4 - 5 p.m. For adults 18 and older. Explore the mind/body connection, using your breath to guide you through powerful flowing movements in a non-judgmental space. Created for all experience levels. Cost is $6 for residents and $9 for non-residents. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

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.

YOGA. 6:30 - 7:30 p.m. Grab your yoga mat and head to Hatchet for a yoga session with Brady. Session cost is $10 and includes a pint of our DILLIGAF lager. Hatchet Brewing Company, 490 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.hatchetbrewing.com.

DANCE CLASSES. 7 p.m. Carolina DanceWorks will hold newcomers group classes focusing on the waltz and rumba. Dates are August 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30. Carolina DanceWorks, 712 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1846 or www.carolinadanceworks.com.

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. Bring your preschooler to enjoy stories, songs and activities. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info: ( 910) 295-3642.

BALANCE AND FLEXIBILITY. 10 - 11 a.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to enjoy a class that will help reduce the risk of taking a tumble and increase your ability to recover. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

CROCHET CLUB. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to come with friends to create fun designs and memories. Supplies are provided. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

MUSIC AND MOTION. 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 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 2 – 5. An active library card is required. Dates this month are August 3, 10, 17, 24 and 31. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

ADAPTIVE YOGA. 12 - 1 p.m. Adults 55 and older can enjoy yoga that meets you where you are. We’ll be creating a sense of balance and ease by slowly increasing your range of motion and mobility while maintaining your natural abilities. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (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: (910) 692-7376.

Thurs. Trivia Night

MEDITATION. 1 - 2 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to connect with nature and with yourself in this 30-minute meditation. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (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 the cabins are open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Shaw House, 110 W. Morganton Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2051 or www.moorehistory.com.

TRIVIA. 6 p.m. Trivia with Hallie. Current events and pop culture. Winner gets a brewery gift card. Southern Pines Brewing Company, 565 Air Tool Dr., Southern Pines. Info: www.southernpinesbrewing.com.

ORCHESTRA REHEARSALS. 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. The Moore Philharmonic Orchestra has weekly rehearsals. Membership is open to youth and adult community members and there is no fee to join. Pinecrest High School, 250 Voit Gilmore Lane, Southern Pines. Info: www.mporchestra.com or email moorephilharmonicorchestra@gmail.com.

DANCE CLASSES. 7 p.m. Join Carolina DanceWorks for a level two country western class. Dates are August 10, 17, 24 and 31. Carolina DanceWorks, 712 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1846 or www.carolinadanceworks.com.

TRIVIA NIGHT. 7 - 9 p.m. Come enjoy a beer and some trivia. Hatchet Brewing Company, 490 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.hatchetbrewing.com.

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: (910) 692-7376.

TAP CLASS. 10 - 11:30 a.m. For adults 55 and older. All levels welcome. Cost per class: $15/resident; $30/non-resident. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

QIGONG. 1 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Classes will consist of chair and standing movements that can help soothe achy feet, tight hips, and low back pain and ease restriction in mobility. Free of charge. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (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: (910) 692-7376.

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: $36 for residents and $52 for non-residents per month. Cost is for a monthly membership. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376.

DANCE CLASSES. 7 p.m. Carolina DanceWorks offers a newcomers group class focusing on the waltz and rumba. Dates are August 4, 18 and 25. Carolina DanceWorks, 712 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1846 or www.carolinadanceworks.com.

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. Downtown Southern Pines, 156 S.E. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: www.moorecountyfarmersmarket.com.

SANDHILLS FARMERS MARKET. 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. The Sandhills Farmers Market features some of the many wonderful farms, nurseries, bakeries, meat and egg providers, cheesemakers and specialty food producers our area has to offer. You will find this incredible mix of vendors through October 1. Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.vopnc.org. PS

910-944-3979

Gallery Hours: Monday - Saturday 12-3pm 129 Exchange Street in Aberdeen, NC artistleague@windstream.net • www.artistleague.org

MORE THAN MINIATURES-SMALL ART

Opening Reception

Friday, August 4 – 5:00-7:00

Art work that is 8 x 10 or smaller will be on display. The exhibit and sale will continue through August 26.

OIL AND ACRYLIC: Mixing Luscious Colors in Oil - Courtney Herndon - Saturday, August 5, 10:00-3:30 $54

Next Step-Oil Painting - Linda Bruening – Monday & Tuesday, August 7, 8, 9:30-3:30 $120

Intro to Plein Air Painting - Harry Neely - Monday-Wednesday, August 14, 15, 16, 10:00-1:00 $108

Using Cold Wax Medium with Oils to Paint Abstracts and Abstracted LandscapesJude Winkley - Saturday, August 26, 9:30-3:30 $81

Beginner’s Acrylic Pouring - Meredith Markfield - Saturday, September 23, 10:00-1:00 $39/$42/$46

Impressionist Landscape Land & Sea - Courtney Herndon – Monday & Tuesday, October 2, 3, 10:00-3:30 $108

WATERCOLOR: Exploring Gouache - Christine Stackhouse - Monday, October 16, 12:30-3:30 $46

DRAWING: Drawing Basics I - Laureen Kirk – Thursday & Friday, September 21, 22, 10:00-3:00 $101

OTHER MEDIUMS: Next Step Cake Decorating/Flowers - Pam Griner - Thursday, August 10, 12:30-2:30 $39

Beginning Alcohol Ink - Pam Griner - Wednesday, August 23, 11:30-2:30 $46

Intermediate Alcohol Ink - Pam Griner - Wednesday, September 6, 11:30-2:30 $46

Fabulous Fibers: Meet-Cute! – Connie Genuardi - Friday, September 8, 10:30-3:30 $59

Mix It Up! - Carol Gradwohl - Monday & Tuesday, September 18, 19, 10:30-3:00 $104

Intro to Encaustic Wax - Pam Griner - Wednesday, September 20, 1:00-3:00 $40

Silk Painting Introduction - Kathy Leuck - Tuesday & Wednesday, September 26, 27, 9:30-12:30 $117

Mixed Media Mania - Carol Gradwohl – Wednesday & Thursday, October 4, 5, 9:30-12:30 $92

Advanced Alcohol Ink - Pam Griner - Wednesday, October 18, 11:30-2:30 $46

Beginning Scratchboard - Emma Wilson - Thursday, October 19, 10:00-2:00 $53

Members Only Sale:

Monday, August 21st: 12-6pm

Public Book Sales:

Friday, August 25th: 12-5pm Saturday, August 26th: 10-4pm Sunday, August 27th: 2-5pm

Headquarters Library – 300 Maiden Lane, Fayetteville cumberlandcountylibraryfriends.com Facebook page (Friends of the Library Fayetteville NC) For questions, please call 910-483-7727 ext. 1304

SandhillSeen

“Come Sunday” Jazz Series

Sunday, May 8, 2023

Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities

Photographs by Diane McKay

Kate Tuomala, Belinda & Terry Bryant

Anne Howell, Maryfaith Cartwright, Thea Pitassy

Harold, baby Leon & Sandra Gutfleisch

Margie Wilder, Stanley Atwater

John & Aline Lafferty

Carol Mulcahy, Bette Rycroft, Maryfaith Cartwright

Izzy & Nate Grotzke

Wendy, Adam & Mike Malone

John & Carol Malach, Ned & Nancy Benson

The Kate McGarry and Keith Ganz Ensemble

James Herron, Karen Noonan

Alice, Maggie & Molly Phillips

September 21, 2023

Discourse and Politics in Contemporary America

FALL 2023 SPEAKERS

All lectures are free to the public. Lectures begin at 7:00 p.m. at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center on the campus of Sandhills Community College.

October 19, 2023

Climate Change and the North Carolina Coast

November 9, 2023

The Mandela-DeKlerk “Miracle”: South Africa’s Transition from Apartheid to Democracy

SCAN FOR FULL SERIES INFO

www.ruthpauley.org

The Ruth Pauley Lecture Series

Frank Bruni Dr. Reide Corbett Bill Lucas

SandhillSeen

First Friday

Friday, June 2, 2023

Downtown Southern Pines

Photographs by Diane McKay

Carol Scantlin, Barbara Scaduto, Lorraine Scantlin, Deb D'Angelo, Jan CarleyTurnbow, Baby Girl (dog)

Gianna Ravelo, Sailor Sykes, Christian Stewart, Alejandro Juarez

Kelsey Wood, Sarah Wilson

Chastity York

The Grahams, Palmator, Williams & Breitbards (Families)

Orland & Neneth Dizon, Elyza Erguiza

Bob & Rita Weber

The King Family

Mike Murphy, Aimee Haley, Kevin Dietzel

Marjorie Cey, Charlotte Owen

Elanie Twiggs, Linda Hoover

Andrea Siracuse, Nathan Presnal, Amanda & Sean Callahan

August PineNeedler

ACROSS

1. Sort

4 Recedes

8 Beet with large leaves

13 Born, in bios

14 Algonquin Indian

15. DVD alternative (hyph)

16. Lagos native 18. Distill

57. Aisle escorts

58. Canal problems, perhaps

62. Bag holder 63. Cutlet?

64. 50 Cent output 65. Paltry

66. Cafeteria carrier 67. Pig pen DOWN

1. Setting for TV’s “Newhart”

2. “Fantasy Island” prop

3. Beer container

4 Almond color

5 Bars for tars

6. Actor Bridges

7. Feeling

8. Musical sign

9. In a , bad humor

10. Opera highlight

11. Hindu princess

Seasonal Undertaking

“

28. Physics units

29. It’s a wrap

30. Speaker

31. Expired (2wds)

32. Cab fare devices

34. Cast a ballot

37. Gangster’s gun

38. “If only listened . . .”

45. Mass transit vehicle

46. After-bath powder

49. Ram

50. On the briny

51. room, phone correspondance

52. Saved

53. “Iliad” city

54. “Aquarius” musical

55. Killer whale

56. Like certain trees

59. “48 ”

60. “Dig in!”

61. 007, for one

Today

39. “Absolutely!”

41. Commission rate

44 Fowl seat

Puzzle answers on page 110 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.

Letter to Charlotte

By LuELLEn Hunt LEy

She’s cute the last time we shop for groceries, wearing pressed jeans with a sparkle button jean jacket, exactly hemmed. Hair washed, set and combed the way she likes it. After putting almost everything on her “list” into our cart, she needs a restroom break. When she comes out, she’s forgotten it all. I show her our cart, nearly full. She wants to start over with all the things on the list. This is how it goes, sooner or later. Our grocery shopping together ends this day. I take over writing down the grocery items on her notepad at home, but a time comes when even the list doesn’t matter anymore.

Three years before our last shopping trip, during a daily visit, she says, “I’ve written a birthday letter for Charlotte’s second birthday.” Charlotte is her first great-grandchild. She has four grown children, four adult grandchildren, and by the time she writes her letter to Charlotte, three great-grandchildren. She has seen pictures of her two great-grandsons, but Charlotte is the only one she’s held

in her arms. She occupies her mind that day. “I want you to keep this and give it to Charlotte’s parents when she’s 11,” she says.

Her mind has not yet betrayed her, but it will. Sooner than we dare to think. She looks me in the eye when giving directives, as she always does. Her commanding codes, spoken and unspoken, reflect her resolve, an attribute refined from teaching elementary school. Her handwriting on the envelope — meticulous as ever — betrays what I know. She’s written this over and over again for perfection.

I’m charmed by my mother’s unquestioning trust in me as her courier. Although it’s been a gradual shift, our roles as mother and daughter have reversed. And here she is, having completed an assignment she has given herself, sharing wisdom with her greatgranddaughter, and honoring me to be the messenger. It’s a sacred trust. My father, her high school sweetheart, passed away seven months before and she’s carrying on. In private, I know she suffers. We all do.

In August 2022, eight years after my mother writes her letter and more than two years after she, herself, has passed away, I send it to Charlotte’s parents. It’s her 10th birthday. It’s written on two notebook pages, front and back. Her voice is in every line. She tells Charlotte she knows what it’s like to be young and to want to be admired but to understand that she already is. Walk proudly, she says, and that when hard times come faith will see her through, just as it did her.

On August 21, 2023, Charlotte will be 11. When she reads the letter from her great-grandmother, her brown eyes will grow wide. Written in the past, it’s delivered in the present to the future, from an old soul to a young one. Ink on paper. A list for life. PS

LuEllen Huntley, associate professor emerita in the UNCW Department of English, lives in Pinehurst. She is originally from Wadesboro, in Anson County.