From the Editor

ON THE COVER

Cake Art

Mountain Brook High School senior Ella Kampakis started baking cakes and piping icing into artistic creations during the COVID-19 quarantine last spring. Photo by Mary Fehr Design by Kimberly Myers AAs I was copyediting the pages in this issue, a theme kept popping up: stories with roots in the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we were staying home and stressing out (or at least I sure was!), it didn’t seem like anything was happening in a lot of ways. But little did we know what that time would give birth to. Ellie Thomas, a MBHS senior who worked for our magazine as part of the school’s coop program in the fall, came up with the idea to write about her classmates who had started businesses baking cakes and creating clothing designs. What I didn’t realize when Ellie pitched the idea on my front porch was that all three of these students’ crafty hobbies-turnedbusinesses started and soon blossomed during all that time staying at home last spring. Then take Christiana Roussel’s story of Evelyn’s Southern Fare (formerly

Bobby Carl’s Table) and its survival as a fledgling restaurant in unprecedented times, starting with delivering comfort curbside. As Christiana’s interviews show, the pandemic didn’t change the heart of the restaurant, but it might have helped more of us see it. Next up there’s a new home décor business calling English Village home that got its start when its founder Alex Hechart found herself with time on her hands as the quarantine began. She couldn’t sell copiers as she’d been doing, and her husband asked her, “Why don’t you do something you love?” And so she did, teaming up with her mom and a then-acquaintance from her Auburn University days. Pandemic ties are perhaps most obvious in our feature where we asked Delia Folk and Alison Bruhn of The Style That Binds Us about fashion trends they are seeing as it looked like, as far as we could see this spring, that it was time to trade our leggings and sweat pants for “real clothes.” What you won’t read about in Rick Lewis’s vignettes about historic Crestline is how many months in the making that story was, as we were hesitant for him to try to interview people who had memories from decades ago based on their age and the pandemic. But after a while we decided to move forward anyway, thanks to the help of the “What’s Happening in Mountain Brook?” group on Facebook and video and phone call technology. I’m running out of space to talk about our Mountain Brook’s Best winners this year and our coverage of the Diversity Committee at Mountain Brook Schools, but check those parts of this issue out too. Here’s to the bright blossoms of late spring and the blossoms of pandemic times!

madoline.markham@mountainbrookmagazine.com