September PineStraw 2021 by PineStraw Magazine

McDevitt town & country properties

LUXURY

9 W Wicker Sham Court, Pinehurst

$1,200,000 5 bed • 5/1 bath

Kathy Peele (312) 623-7523 MLS 206333

Beautiful Village home located on a quiet golf front cul-de-sac located on the 13th fairway of the Tom Fazio North Course. This charming, light filled home features four en suite bedrooms and a bonus/bedroom above the coach house.

13 Elkton Drive, Pinehurst

$375,000 Kathy Peele (312) 623-7523

Water and golf front on approximately .76 acre overlooking water and the 17th fairway on North at Forest Creek Golf Club

1 Kenwood Court, Pinehurst

Kathy Peele (312) 623-7523 MLS 200777

$849,000

3 bed • 3/1 bath Jim Hurt (540) 798-1792 MLS 207389

Beautiful lot in prestigious gated community at Forest Creek Golf Club. Two Tom Fazio designed 18 holes. Opportunity to build on two lots as the neighboring lot is also available. .39 acres.

Beautiful Golf Front home on 12 th hold of Forest Creek’s South course. All brick custom home, single level with gorgeous landscaping. Wide golf views, split bedroom plan.

103 Forest Creek Drive K, Pinehurst

$300,000

1 bed • 1 bath

Kathy Peele (312) 623-7523 MLS 203664

MLS 204170

$130,000

117 Brookfield Drive, Pinehurst

Play & stay! Located in the private gated community at Forest Creek Golf Club. This clubhouse suite overlooks famed South golf course. Fully furnished and decorated by Ferry, Hayes & Allen designers of Atlanta, GA.

103 Forest Creek Drive I, Pinehurst

$419,000

1 bed • 1 bath

Kathy Peele (312) 623-7523 MLS 204121

Your very own pied-a`-terre in the cradle of America’s golf! Suite I has great views of the water on 9 South. Tom Fazio designed courses. This suite is perfect for a getaway. An approved Forest Creek membership is a requirement of owning a clubhouse suite.

33 Chestertown Drive, Pinehurst

$175,000 Kathy Peele (312) 623-7523

Remarkable golf front lot overlooking the 3rd and 4th fairways of South course at Forest Creek Golf Club. Approximately 1.70 acres.

MLS 204208

3 Kenwood Court, Pinehurst

$130,000 Kathy Peele (312) 623-7523 MLS 200778

Beautiful lot in prestigious gated community at Forest Creek Golf Club. Two Tom Fazio designed 18 holes. Opportunity to build on two lots as the neighboring lot is also available. .39 acres.

Ask us about our convenient mortgage services.

Pinehurst • 42 Chinquapin Road, Pinehurst, NC 28374 • 910 -295 - 5504 | Southern Pines • 167 Beverly Lane, Southern Pines, NC 28387 • 910-692-2635 ©2021 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC.

Get top dollar when selling your home with Moore County’s #1 Real Estate firm*

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Come see our Fall arrivals! 124 NW BROAD STREET • SOUTHERN PINES, NC 28387 • (910) 693-7463 M-SAT: 10 AM - 5 PM • SUN: 12 PM - 4 PM monkeesofthepines.com • @monkeesofthepines For private events and parties, email girls@monkeesofthepines.com Photo: Know Your Worth Media • Thanks to: Retro Hair and Makeup, and the Village Wine Shop

September �� DEPARTMENTS 21 26 31 33 39 43 47 49 53 59 61 62 65 66 69 71 73 77 133 140 143 144

Simple Life By Jim Dodson PinePitch Good Natured By Karen Frye The Omnivorous Reader By Stephen E. Smith Bookshelf The Creators of N.C. By Wiley Cash Hometown By Bill Fields In the Spirit By Tony Cross The Kitchen Garden By Jan Leitschuh Botanicus By Ross Howell Jr. Home By Design By Cynthia Adams The Hot List By Jason Oliver Nixon and John Loecke Out of the Blue By Deborah Salomon Sandhills Photography Club Pleasures of Life By Tom Allen Birdwatch By Susan Campbell Sporting Life By Tom Bryant Golftown Journal By Lee Pace Arts & Entertainment Calendar SandhillSeen PineNeedler By Mart Dickerson Southwords By Ruth Moose

FEATURES 83 Skipping Poetry By Michael McFee 84 Georgia O’Keefe and Friends By Jim Moriarty A new exhibit welcomes a modernist master

90 Golf’s Unsung Hero By Bill Case

How a unique hobby helped restore a historic course

96 A Haven of a Place By Claudia Watson

Mistletoe Farm — a sanctuary for creatures great and small

104 The Other White House By Deborah Salomon Retirement leaps out of the rocking chair, into the barn

117 September Almanac By Ashley Wahl

Cover and

photograph this page by

John Gessner

PineStraw

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Come See & Touch the Fall Collections

For over 90 years, DUX has blended sleep science with world-class craftsmanship to deliver one of the most advanced beds available. DUX, headquartered in Sweden, is committed to improving life through better sleep, combining research, the finest materials and the most experienced craftsmen, to ultimately provide a more healthful sleep. Resolve to invest in your health. Visit a DUXIANA® store near you to discover the difference The DUX Bed can make in your life.

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

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

Talent, Technology & Teamwork! Moore County’s Most Trusted Real Estate Team! CT TRA

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PINEHURST • $395,000

WHISPERING PINES • $345,000

PINEHURST • $330,000

3 DEERWOOD LANE Lovely 3 BR / 2 BA brick home situated on nice double lot in beautiful Pinehurst #6.

171 PINE LAKE DRIVE Charming 3 BR / 2.5 BA brick home in immaculate condition w/extensive upgrades and nice curb appeal.

10 LAKE HILLS ROAD Attractive white brick 3 BR / 2.5 BA home w/open and inviting floorplan all on one level.

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PINEHURST • $375,000

PINEHURST • $347,500

SOUTHERN PINES • $425,000

9 LAKE SIDE COURT Beautiful WATERFRONT lot on Lake Pinehurst. Gently sloping wooded lot that offers spectacular big water views facing south!

5 VINSON LANE Move-in ready 3 BR / 2 BA home on beautiful lot in quiet cul-de-sac in great location.

131 JAMES CREEK ROAD Charming 4 BR / 2 Full BA 2 Half BA home on beautifully wooded lot. Home has an inviting floorplan that is open and bright w/an abundance of space.

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CAMERON • $326,000

PINEHURST • $465,000

PINEHURST • $375,000

135 ALMOND DRIVE Amazing 4 BR / 2.5 BA home in immaculate condition in Forest Ridge subdivision. Move-in ready!

200 RIDGEWOOD COURT Charming 3 BR / 2.5 BA wood exterior home along sixth fairway of #3 course.

11 LAKE SIDE COURT Beautiful WATERFRONT lot situated perfectly on Lake Pinehurst! Gently sloping wooded lot in quiet location w/great orientation facing south.

IN MOORE COUNTY REAL ESTATE FOR OVER 20 YEARS!

Luxury Properties Moore County’s Most Trusted Real Estate Team! CT TRA

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SEVEN LAKES WEST • $600,000

PINEHURST • $699,000

PINEHURST • $812,500

105 COOK POINT Gorgeous WATERFRONT lot on Lake Auman w/two new docks, boat lift and electric already run!

51 STONEYKIRK DRIVE Stunning custom 5 BR / 3.5 BA brick home in beautiful Pinewild CC. Home offers exquisite finishes and detail throughout.

126 BROOKFIELD DRIVE Stately 5 BR / 4 BA home in picturesque Forest Creek community w/postcard-like golf views among massive curb appeal and Southern Charm!

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PINEHURST • $895,000

PINEHURST • $725,000

PINEHURST • $520,000

25 FIRESTONE DRIVE Glorious, Mid-Century Modern 3 BR / 4.5 BA home on 2.5 acres of beautifully landscaped property on 11th hole of #7 course.

38 MCMICHAEL DRIVE Beautiful custom built 3 BR / 2.5 BA home located on the 2nd fairway of the Holly course in popular Pinewild.

103 GREYSTONES COURT Attractive custom 4 BR / 3 BA home in Pinehurst #9 community w/extensive upgrades.

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PINEHURST • $1,300,000 13 LAKESIDE COURT Stunning 4 BR / 4.5 BA custom lakefront home on Lake Pinehurst w/expansive water views – Pinehurst living at its finest!

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SOUTHERN PINES • $686,000

PINEHURST • $660,000

1880 MIDLAND ROAD Historic 5 BR / 4.5 BA home conveniently located on Midland Road w/spacious layout and great separate apartment space.

23 STONEYKIRK DRIVE Amazingly beautiful 4 BR / 3.5 BA WATERFRONT home w/lots of curb appeal and overlooks picturesque Lake Pinewild.

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

www.ThEGENTRYTEAM.COM

• 910-295-7100

The Long View

ForesT Creek

M A G A Z I N E Volume 17, No. 9 David Woronoff, Publisher Andie Stuart Rose, Creative Director andie@thepilot.com

Jim Moriarty, Editor

jjmpinestraw@gmail.com

Alyssa Rocherolle, Digital Art Director alyssamagazines@gmail.com

Lauren M. Coffey, Graphic Designer laurenmagazines@gmail.com

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Jim Dodson, Editor Emeritus Deborah Salomon, Staff Writer

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

John Gessner, Laura Gingerich, Tim Sayer

CONTRIBUTORS Jenna Biter, Harry Blair, Tom Bryant, Susan Campbell, Bill Case, Mallory Cash, Wiley Cash, Tony Cross, Brianna Rolfe Cunningham, Mart Dickerson, Bill Fields, Laurel Holden, Sara King, Jan Leitschuh, Meridith Martens, D.G. Martin, Jason Oliver Nixon, Mary Novitsky, Lee Pace, Todd Pusser, Joyce Reehling, Scott Sheffield, Stephen E. Smith, Angie Tally, Kimberly Taws, Daniel Wallace, Ashley Wahl, Claudia Watson, Renee Whitmore ADVERTISING SALES

Ginny Trigg, Advertising Director 910.693.2481 • ginny@thepilot.com

33 Elkton Drive • Pinehurst This Forest Creek golf course residence offers luxury and drama in a home balanced with inviting, livable spaces. Soaring ceiling heights and double height windows offer dramatic views of the lake and golf course. The luxurious master suite is ideally located on the main floor. The ground floor hosts a series of game rooms and a theater, perfect for children, guests and family living. A sweeping stairwell flanked by a baby grand piano leads to the second floor library offering another dramatic lake view. A cluster of guest bedrooms on the second floor are accessed by a back stairway linked to the kitchen, breakfast room and family room. This area is serviced by the house’s second laundry room. Main floor highlights include a screened porch near the breakfast room and a deck that sweeps across the living room facade. Grand but comfortable perfectly describes this exceptional home. Built in 2006 with 6859 square feet. New Price: 1,775,000.

To view more photos, take a virtual tour or schedule a showing, go to:

Maureen Clark

www.clarkpropertiesnc.com

when experience matters

Pinehurst • Southern Pines BHHS Pinehurst Realty Group • 910.315.1080 ©2015 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of American, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC.

PineStraw

Jennie Acklin, 910.693.2515 Samantha Cunningham, 910.693.2505 Terry Hartsell, 910.693.2513 Erika Leap, 910.693.2514 ADVERTISING COORDINATOR

Emily Jolly • pilotads@thepilot.com

ADVERTISING GRAPHIC DESIGN

Mechelle Butler, Scott Yancey

PS Steve Anderson, Finance Director 910.693.2497 Darlene Stark, Circulation Director 910.693.2488 SUBSCRIPTIONS

910.693.2488 OWNERS

Jack Andrews, Frank Daniels Jr., Frank Daniels III, Lee Dirks, David Woronoff 145 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, Southern Pines, NC 28387 www.pinestrawmag.com ©Copyright 2021. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. PineStraw magazine is published by The Pilot LLC

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SOLD

451 Old Mail Road • Southern Pines

The jewel of Moore County’s horse country, Fox Hollow Farm is secluded on 10.52 acres with easy access to thousands of acres of equestrian land. 4BR, 4.5BA, 5,276 sq ft. Offered at $1,950,000.

101 Cook Point • Seven Lakes • West End

Magnificent lakefront residence on the shore of Lake Auman. There are delightful views and extraordinary aspects to every room. All the desirable lakeside amenities from an outdoor kitchen to a boat lift are featured. Offered at $1,750,000.

Maureen Clark

910.315.1080 • www.clarkproperties.com

SOLD

205 Crest Road • Southern Pines

420 E. Massachusetts Ave

Classic Colonial Revival in Knollwood Heights, built in 1930 on 2 acres, 6700 sq ft with 5 BR, 5.5 BA and attached 2 car garage. Highlights include fireplaces in living, dining, master and Carolina room, original hardwoods, and large backyard pool. Offered at $850,000.

oaded with charm and stunning architectural detail, this 1914 residence features gracious proches from the past, uncommon ceiling height, and original flooring detail. Highlights include a metal roof, finished basement and proximity to downtown. 3 BR, 2.5 BA. Offered at $495,000.

SOLD

123 Pinefield Court • Southern Pines Built in 2006, this 6580 sq ft residence on 8 acres includes 5 BR, 6.5 BA, theater room, billiard room, open living plan, wine cellar, 3 car garage and outdoor kitchen. Gated privacy. Offered at $1,900,000 .

2776 Niagara Carthage Road • Carthage

This idyllic farm, nestled on a hillside above Thaggard’s Lake, has it all. The log home, centered on the property is surrounded by lush pastures, a back yard fenced for dogs, a 4-stall center isle barn, storage shed and generous carport. Offered at $975,000.

Berkshire Hathaway HomeSercies and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.Housing Opportunity.

Always a Step Ahead

Amy Stonesifer ®

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

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CELEBRATING THE RENOVATION OF WHISPERING Q!

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SIMPLE LIFE

Golf and Marriage True love and harmless fun on the links

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago, my wife, Wendy, and I were discussing our 20th wedding anniversary.

“So, Old Baggage,” I said, affecting the accent of a toffee-nosed English aristocrat. “Where exactly would you like to go? SkyMiles and hotel points are the limit!” “Oh, no,” she came back with feigned horror. “I thought we’d seen the last of that old boy!” Needless to say, I was pleased when madam suggested motoring down to a lovely old hotel and sporty golf course in South Carolina where we celebrated our 15th anniversary. But first, friends, a word of caution. Referring to your dearly beloved as “Old Baggage” does not come without certain risks to domestic harmony, though in this instance it was one of those affectionate inside jokes that long-married couples share to remind themselves of their matrimonial journey through the fairways and thickets of life. At any rate, while participating in a mixed foursomes tournament during the annual Royal & Ancient Golf Club autumn meetings some years ago, we got paired with an elderly English couple straight from the pages of P.G. Wodehouse — a crusty old RAF Colonel and his long-suffering wife, Edyth, who spent an entire trip around the Duke’s Course in St. Andrews tossing colorful insults at each other. “Alright, Old Baggage, put your considerable rump into this shot!” he urged his bride. “No half-way measures, girly! Give the old wedge a solid knock!” “Sod off,” she muttered as she settled over the ball. “How about I give you a solid knock instead?” Round they went, hole after hole. He grumbled about everything from “elephants buried in the green” to his wife’s choice of exotic leopard-print golf trousers, giving unsolicited advice on almost every shot. “Try and roll this one close to the hole for a change. Remember, never up, never in!” “You would know about that,” she snipped. “Perhaps you’d enjoy a nice nap in the bunker?” Over drinks afterwards, we were surprised to learn they’d been married for 40 years, and that their entertaining Tracy-Hepburn rouThe Art & Soul of the Sandhills

tine was designed to amuse themselves and startle unsuspecting playing partners. “Lovely way to relieve the marital tensions,” Edyth advised matter-of-factly over her raspberry gimlet. “Just a bit of harmless fun to keep mixed opponents off balance,” Lionel chortled. “Never fails to put them off their game.” “It keeps both golf and marriage interesting,” she added coyly. “True, Baggage,” he rumbled. “Damned shame, though, about that easy 10-footer for the win you missed on 17.” “Ah, well.” She gave us an unconcerned smile. “Maybe next time you should hit the ball where you were instructed.” To paraphrase our late friend John Derr, the CBS Sports broadcaster who worked with the inimitable Henry Longhurst for years (and quoted him frequently), the institution of marriage is only slightly older than the game of golf and not quite as fun. Golf has probably saved at least as many marriages as it’s ruined — and vice versa. “Blessed be the man or woman who enjoys their spouse’s company on the golf course,” the ageless “One Derr” — as Wendy and I called him — declared at our supper table one evening after we told him about our encounter with the English aristos. “For theirs is a shared adventure of fond memories and pleasant disasters, an unbreakable bond of friendship forged by generous mulligans and preferred lies in a game that cannot be beaten — only endured.” With his next breath, Derr glanced at me, smiled and added, “You’re a fortunate man to have a beautiful golfing wife, James. But I am placing you on notice that if you pre-decease me, I’m moving in on Wendy.” He’d recently turned 96. But John’s point was well-taken. Like many couples who share a love of the game and each other, golf has been a feature of our romance almost since our first hours together. The day after meeting Wendy at a dinner party thrown in honor of my first golf book, we took a casual Sunday drive that took us to one of Robert Trent Jones’ early golf course designs in upstate New York. It was there — upon the discovery that she once played in an after-work golf league and had a germ of interest in the game — that I stole my first kiss and Wendy Ann Buynak stole my heart. The last two decades have indeed been a shared adventure of bogeys and birdies, colorful characters and memorable places, beginning PineStraw

SIMPLE LIFE

with our first trip out West after we got engaged at The Lodge at Sea Island, where I threw her into the breach at Pebble Beach with a new set of Callaway golf clubs. It was her first full 18 holes of golf, as she later pointed out. Her caddie that morning had eyes like a roadmap from hell due to an all-night bachelor party. He and half a dozen Japanese gentlemen with video cameras bore witness as Dame Wendy teed up her ball and made a fierce swing. The ball trickled a few feet off the tee. Without hesitation, she fetched her ball and tried again. This time the ball rolled 10 feet. “Listen, ma’am,” groaned her suffering caddie, massaging his pink eyes. “Let’s just pick it up and go.” She blissfully ignored him, teed up again, took dead aim, and calmly swatted her drive to the heart of the fairway. The Japanese gentlemen broke into applause, and I realized this was true love on the links. The first time my bride broke 100 was on a work trip to France. It happened at the elite Golf Club de Chantilly, a famous old Tom Simpson layout. Nary a soul was visible that drowsy summer afternoon following a leisurely lunch of crusty bread, foie gras and considerable sparkling wine. The girl in the golf shop — buffing her nails with exquisite boredom — waved us out to an utterly empty course, cuckoos calling dreamily from the surrounding forest. Somewhere on the back side of the masterpiece, after all that wine and no relief station in sight, nature summoned me into the forest, af-

ter which I joked that the lone advantage God gave man over woman at the dawn of creation was the ability to make water on an empty golf course, if need be. A few holes later, I heard someone call my name and turned to see my new wife squatting behind a clump of bushes, grinning like a schoolgirl. “What was that about man’s advantage on the golf course, monsieur?” she teased. I had to laugh. “Monsieur is certainly enjoying the view,” I pointed out. Through a gap in the foliage directly behind her, an elderly gentleman in a blue beret was raking out his veggie garden. He was grinning like a teenager, too. “Bon soir!” he called out, waving. “Wee wee,” I replied in the American vernacular. We’ve had many memorable golf journeys since that incredible week of our early married days, but that time in France ranks atop both our lists of favorite moments. Which is why it was no surprise that our anniversary interlude in South Carolina was such a quiet success, a reflective moment that scored well under par as both a golf getaway and a marriage milestone. The only “baggage” we brought with us was a dozen new golf balls, 20 years of great memories — and a hope for 20 years more of the same. PS Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Lin gets Results! toP 1 % of Moore County reaLtors toP 1 % of u.s. reaLtors

ENERGY. EXPERIENCE. EFFORT. WWW.LINHUTAFF.COM

PineStraw

Lin Hutaff’s PineHurst reaLty GrouP Village of Pinehurst | 910.528.6427 | linhutaff@pinehurst.net The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

If Pinehurst has it, Lin can get it for you! Go to LinHutaff. com

34 ABBOTTSFORD DR • PINEWILD OFFERED at $825,000.

54 ROYAL COUNT DOWN • NATIONAL SOLD PRICE $ 975,000.

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14 GREYABBEY DRIVE • PINEWILD OFFERED at $795,000.

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5 BECKETT DR • FAIRWOODS ON 7 OFFERED at $750,000.

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104 LINDEN TRAIL • OFF LINDEN RD SOLD PRICE $725,000.

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64 STONEYKIRK DRIVE • PINEWILD OFFERED at $825,000. T CON

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22 MCMCMICHAEL DR • PINEWILD Offered at $739,000.

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39 WHITEHAVEN DR • PINEWILD OFFERED at $699,000.

694 AZALEA DR • WOODLAKE CC OFFERED at $595,000.

215 INVERRARY ROAD • FAIRWOODS ON 7

4 AUGUSTA WAY • PINEHURST

Private Estate on over 4 acres within the gates of Fairwoods on 7, a gated Community on the Pinehurst Country Club grounds. Surrounded by 1000 feet of Golf frontage, gracious grounds, extensive covered porches. Gorgeous home with panoramic views.

Private Estate steps from OLD TOWN with spectacular grounds in the Donald Ross area. Terraced back yard flows to large Pond with total privacy. Character and charm abound in this Southern Country home with handsome “hunt room’ and cozy wine cellar.

ENERGY. EXPERIENCE. EFFORT.

Lin Hutaff’s PineHurst reaLty GrouP Village of Pinehurst | 910.528.6427 | linhutaff@pinehurst.net

Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina Receives a 2021 Parsec Prize!

Parsec Financial, a fee-only wealth management firm with an office in Southern Pines, announces $175,000 in unrestricted Parsec Prize grants to organizations focused on food insecurity across N.C., including a $15,000 grant to the Sandhills branch of the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina.

We are so incredibly grateful for the support of Parsec Financial. This gift will help us provide 75,000 meals to the Sandhills community. We look forward to continuing this partnership as we work to nourish people, build solutions to hunger, and empower our communities together. - Michael Cotten Sandhills Branch Director of Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina

Learn more: parsecfinancial.com/parsec-prize

Scott Kittrell, CFP®, CDFA® Financial Advisor parsecfinancial.com/team/scott-kittrell

PinePitch 100 Years and Counting The Sandhills Woman’s Exchange opens for the fall season — and the beginning of its 100th year celebration — with its traditional lunch offerings on Wednesday, Sept. 8, at 15 Azalea Road, Pinehurst. The gift shop opens at 10 a.m. and lunch is served from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. For information call (910) 2954677 or visit www.sandhillswe.org.

Outdoor Flicks First Friday The bluegrass band Fireside Collective performs on the First Bank Stage at Sunrise Square to benefit the Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 3. There will be food trucks, refreshments and beer from Southern Pines Brewery. No furry friends or rolling, walking or crawling coolers, please. For more information call (910) 692-3611 or go to www. sunrisetheater.com.

Flutterby Festival Celebrate butterflies and all God’s pollinators at the Flutterby Festival at the Village Arboretum in Pinehurst on Sept. 25 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Educational activities include presentations on the lifecycle, migration and plight of the monarch butterfly. Feed and befriend hundreds of monarchs in the Magical Monarch Butterfly Tent. You can even tag and release a monarch for its flight to Mexico. For more info go to www.villageheritagefoundation.org.

Sweet on Songs The Sandhills Repertory Theatre presents America’s Sweethearts, the intricate harmony and dance moves of a dazzling trio of women, in three performances at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center, Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. The musical selections include ’50s pop, jazz and Broadway hits. Opening night is Friday, Sept. 3, at 7:30 p.m., followed by a performance on Saturday, Sept. 4, at 7:30 p.m., and a final matinee on Sunday, Sept. 5, at 2 p.m. Tickets are available at www.ticketmesandhills. com.

PineStraw

It’s like the drive-in, except you’re on foot. The Sunrise Theater will show The Princess Bride outdoors on Sunrise Square at 8 p.m. on Sept. 10 and again on Sept. 11 at the same time. Tickets are $10. In the event of inclement weather, the movie will be shown inside the theater, 250 N.W. Broad St. Bring lawn chairs or blankets, but leave the food and pets at home, please. For additional info call (910) 692-3611 or go to www.sunrisetheater.com. As an encore, Southern Pines Recreation & Parks will show Frozen 2 at the Downtown Park, Southern Pines, on Friday, Sept. 17. For additional information call (910) 692-7376.

Fall’s in the Air Enjoy a late September evening on the grounds of the Weymouth Center with music by Stone Dolls, supper catered by Scott’s Table and beers from the Southern Pines Brewing Company, on Wednesday, Sept. 29, from 5 – 7 p.m. at the Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. For additional information go to www. weymouthcenter.org or www.ticketmesandhills.com. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Pig o’ My Heart The Pinehurst Barbecue Festival, presented by Pinehurst Resort, US Foods and Business North Carolina, will spice up the village of Pinehurst on Labor Day weekend from Sept. 3 through Sept. 5. There are four main events: Music on Magnolia; “Q” School Grilling Classes; Bourbon & Bites; and the Ed Mitchell Pitmaster Invitational. Individual tickets are available or you can go “Whole Hog” and swallow the lot. For more information visit www.pinehurstbarbecuefestival.com or go to www.ticketmesandhills.com. Get saucy.

TEA LEAF ASTROLOGER

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

You’ve seen the cymbal-banging monkey — eyes bulging while relentlessly slamming brass cups together. Virgos are wound tighter than most. And when you consider that they are, indeed, Earth signs, you begin to realize what an enigma these strong-willed, tragically tender creatures actually are. This month, astrologically, is a bit of a perfect storm for you, Virgo. But here’s a mantra that might help: I control nothing. Try repeating this silently to yourself throughout the day, especially when you feel the overwhelming desire to fix what’s not yet broken. There may be a gift in it for you.

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you: Libra (September 23 – October 22) Perspective is everything. You’re only a fish out of water until the rain starts. Think about it. Scorpio (October 23 – November 21) Spoiler alert: The world won’t end. It’s time to stop banking on it.

Doin’ the Charleston Experience the art, architecture and cuisine of the low country in a four-day celebration of Southern elegance presented by the Arts Council of Moore County. The week’s events open with an exploration of the unique architecture of Charleston, South Carolina, featuring Charleston architects Christopher Liberatos and Jenny Bevan, along with artists Jill Hooper and Patrick Webb, at the Sunrise Theater at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 28. That’s followed by a low country cooking presentation by acclaimed author Nathalie Dupree and Sandhills Community College’s Angela Webb at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 29, at SCC’s Little Hall. There will be a low country luncheon at 195 on Thursday, Sept. 30. The cost is $55 per person, and all proceeds benefit the Arts Council’s children’s arts program. The week wraps up with a presentation and book signing by Dupree at 10 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 1, in the Moore Montessori Community School auditorium and, at 6 p.m. that evening, the Campbell House will host a gallery opening featuring the artworks of Evelyn Dempsey, Mark Horton, Carol Ezell-Gilson and Ron Rocz. In addition to the above events, all free with the exception of the luncheon, acclaimed children’s author Kelly Starling Lyons will be visiting Moore County schools on Thursday, Sept. 30. For more information call (910) 692-2787.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21) There’s a Bill Withers’ song that comes to mind. You know the one. And you know just what to do. Capricorn (December 22 – January 19) A ghost from the past wants your attention. But what do you want? Focus on that. Aquarius (January 20 – February 18) Things are in motion this month. Like, warp speed. Try sitting still. Pisces (February 19 – March 20) No need to reshuffle the deck. Just play the cards. Aries (March 21 – April 19) Radical trust. You don’t have it. But do you actually want it? Taurus (April 20 – May 20) You can’t have the sweetness without the sting. And you wouldn’t appreciate it otherwise. Gemini (May 21 – June 20) Ever tried talking to the moon? Good. Now try listening. Cancer (June 21 – July 22) What is meant for you will come to you. You’ll be ready — but not a moment too soon. Leo (July 23 – August 22) “No mud, no lotus.” You’ve heard that before, right? Keep the faith. 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. PineStraw

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A West Coast Lifestyle Boutique

A Healing Herb And it tastes like licorice By Karen Frye e have so many wonderful healing herbs that help restore and maintain good health. Many of them can be grown easily and used in tea, in recipes, or in tinctures to be used medicinally. One that grows well in the Sandhills is fennel. Fennel is a 6-foot perennial with feathery leaves and clusters of little yellow flowers. The tiny oval-shaped seeds are ribbed and greenish-gray. All the parts of the plant have a licorice-like fragrance. You can grow fennel from seeds. If you plant them in the fall, they’re ready in spring. You don’t have to give fennel a lot of attention, and the plant doesn’t require a lot of water to survive. The fennel seed is an effective digestive aid, particularly dealing with bloating, gas, and diarrhea. If you like the taste of licorice, you can chew a handful of seeds after a meal to help relieve indigestion, or you can drink a cup of fennel tea. Fennel is also available in capsules. While a previous study suggests fennel should not be used by people who have any type of liver disease, more recent studies have found it beneficial for the heart. Nitrites derived from the seeds promote vascular function. The nitrites are reduced into nitric oxide, a compound that protects the heart. Along with improved digestion, fennel can suppress the appetite. It’s helpful in promoting good function of the kidneys, liver and spleen. Fennel clears the lungs and helps reduce stomach acid. And it can ease the effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. If you aren’t a fan of the licorice flavor, try the capsules. Either way, fennel isn’t expensive, and if you choose to grow your own, it only costs pennies. There are many helpful herbs and, while most have no side effects, I always recommend that if you are on any medications, you should talk to your doctor before taking a supplement. PS Karen Frye is the owner and founder of Nature’s Own and teaches yoga at the Bikram Yoga Studio.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Schedule a tour today. Call to learn more. Residents of Quail Haven Village love the living choices, abundant resort-like amenities and nearly endless social engagements available to them. Here, residents and their families will love the emphasis on nutritious dining options, whole-person wellness and the peace of mind that comes from having continuing care in place should they need it. Call 910.295.2294 to schedule a private tour and don’t just live here...LOVE IT HERE. 155 Blake Blvd., Pinehurst, NC 28374 A Life Plan Community offered by Liberty Senior Living.

THE OMNIVOROUS READER

Overseeing the Evil and the Good Wiley Cash’s new novel weaves a tale of mystery

By Stephen E. Smith

It will come as no surprise to any-

one who’s read Wiley Cash’s previous bestselling novels — A Land More Kind Than Home, This Dark Road to Mercy and The Last Ballad — that his latest offering, When Ghosts Come Home, is a sophisticated, skillfully rendered mystery that focuses, despite being set in late October and early November 1984, on the personal, societal and racial conflicts that trouble Americans in the moment.

Cash, like most accomplished writers, is attuned to the environment from which he’s writing (even if the events he’s describing occurred decades ago), and he has, with good reason, consistently drawn on North Carolina as his setting of choice: He was born and raised in Gastonia, teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and lives in or around the Wilmington/Oak Island area, the region of the state that serves as the locale for his latest mystery. The coastal setting may be familiar to many North Carolina readers, but the story that unfolds has nothing to do with a family outing at the beach. If the region suggests tranquility, it’s also the source for the grisly ingredients that make for a good whodunit, and Cash’s leap-frogging narrative continually moves forward with an economy of style and structural tension that’s a balance of the familiar with

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

the unexpected. Despite numerous twists and turns, Cash is always the consummate craftsman; not a word or gesture or errant piece of information proves irrelevant. This storytelling acumen has earned for Cash the status as one of our state’s literary celebrities, and his latest novel places him among such luminaries as Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle and Clyde Edgerton. If this suggests a degree of parochialism, it shouldn’t. Cash has earned national accolades aplenty. The Last Ballad was an American Library Association Book of the Year and received the Southern Book Prize, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award and the Weatherford Award — the list goes on and on. Moreover, the characters he creates aren’t easy Southern stereotypes; they may live in an atmosphere troubled by shifting notions of race and social standing, and they are almost always dangerous to themselves and each other, but their view of the world is more comprehensive, more contemporary, than those of the usual Faulknerian rabble. If his characters exhibit anger, bigotry and violence — all in plentiful supply in the South — Cash never displays contempt for the foolish and unwashed, never sets himself up as arbiter. He simply oversees the evil and good, and allows his readers to make their final judgments based on their view of the available world. The mystery opens with 63-year-old Winston Barnes, the Brunswick County sheriff and the novel’s protagonist, awakening to the roar of a low-flying aircraft approaching a little-used local airport on Oak Island. Barnes is at a crisis point in his life: His wife is being treated for cancer; his daughter’s marriage is failing after the loss of a child; he’s up for re-election in a few weeks — his prospects are less than promising; and he desperately needs the health insurance that PineStraw

OMNIVOROUS READER

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comes with his job. He knows that the disturbance created by the aircraft is reason for concern, and that the publicity generated by his handling of any criminal activity on the island could be crucial to his re-election. Cash’s strong sense of place is apparent when Barnes leaves home to investigate the downed aircraft, and his use of detail and small observations deftly and beautifully brings the moment into focus: “. . . Winston watched the light from the Caswell Beach lighthouse at the far eastern end of the island strafe the waterway in perfect increments. It flashed in his rearview mirror, and for a moment he could both see and feel its light in his eyes. . . . He had been at this exact spot on the bridge at night what must have been a million times over the years, and each time he felt like he was leaving the bright gleam of the lighthouse for the tiny spot of the beacon light, a light that was overwhelmed by the darkness of the mainland that waited for him in the woods across the water.” As a young man, Cash took in those same sights on mornings when he drove to catch the ferry to Bald Head Island, where he worked as a lifeguard. “. . . when Sheriff Winston Barnes leaves home in the pre-dawn hours to drive to the airstrip to explore the sound he heard, he drives past dark, shuttered businesses, some of them closed for the off-season and others of them simply closed for the night,” Cash revealed in a recent pandemic/email interview. “I made this same drive every morning before dawn during the summer of 1998 when I was 20 and my parents had first moved to Oak Island. . . . I had to leave my parents’ house to catch the ferry to make it to a shift that began at 7 a.m. It was summer, and the island was incredibly busy, but I was always struck by how those pre-dawn hours were so still and haunting. We’d only recently moved to the island, and everything about it, especially at that early hour, felt strange and haunting. I was observing as an outsider because I didn’t belong to it, and neither does Winston.” When he arrives at the airstrip, Barnes discovers an abandoned DC-3 with its cargo hold empty. Not far from the plane, he happens upon the body of a local Black man, Rodney Bellamy, who has been shot The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

OMNIVOROUS READER

in the chest. From these simple clues the mystery wholly unfolds, and the elements in this straightforward block of information play out in the novel’s action from beginning to end. The essential characters are quickly introduced — Colleen, Barnes’ daughter; Jay, Rodney Bellamy’s teenage brother-inlaw; Ed Bellamy, Rodney’s father and a former Marine sharpshooter; Deputy Billy Englehart, a furtive white supremacist; Bradley Frye, Barnes’ opponent in the upcoming election and the obvious antagonist; and FBI agents Roundtree, Rollins and Grooms, who have ostensibly been assigned to investigate any drug connections with the case. Add to these a cast of cameo characters who agitate the subplots and there’s much to consider by way of human imperfection — race, class, jealously, betrayal, old animosities, personal history — all of it churning up a jumble of possible suspects. When Cash digs deep into his characters, he reveals the secrets that shape their prejudices, and the straightforward structure of the traditional mystery assumes a vaguely parabolic intent. Set in a time when, believe it or not, racial attitudes were less obvious, readers will sense that Cash is addressing the present racial tensions that plague America. This is no more apparent than in a scene that plays out between Barnes and Vicki, a long-time receptionist at the sheriff’s office. She’d received a deputy’s report concerning Klan members who have been cruising a Black neighborhood brandishing weapons and a Confederate flag, but she’d failed to pass this information on to Barnes, and he’s forced to confront her. “She hesitated. Winston looked into her eyes, imagined her mind tossing around words and phrases she’d grown up hearing, long-held beliefs that she insisted on holding against Black men like Ed Bellamy and his dead son. Asking her to work against suspicions and beliefs so deeply held as to seem intrinsic to life was like asking Vicki to attempt the impossible task of separating her skin from her own skeleton.” This epiphany must be similar to what many Americans have experienced in recent years. In a country divided against itself, we are suddenly forced to confront the The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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OMNIVOROUS READER

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frightening truth that underlies the attitudes and beliefs of once-trusted friends and acquaintances. “The awakening that Winston has to his secretary’s racial and cultural attitudes reflects the experiences that many of us — primarily white folks — have had over the past several years,” says Cash. “There was a time — especially in the South in the 1980s — when political and cultural attitudes were much more implicit, especially with Ronald Reagan sweeping 49 states in the 1984 election. But the past several years have caused those attitudes to become much more explicit, from the politics of vaccines and masks to carrying tiki torches when protesting the removal of monuments to storming the U.S. Capitol to overthrow American democracy. The attitudes and beliefs that were once below the surface have now become markedly apparent. Whether on social media or T-shirts or hats, we’re besieged by markers of political beliefs and cultural attitudes that align with or conflict with our own. And we’re not one bit interested in investigating the roots of our beliefs; we’re much more invested in ferreting out those who don’t agree with us.” When Ghosts Come Home is a mystery that’s compelling in its suspense and topical intrigues. Cash creates a wealth of fully dimensional characters, and he permeates the novel with a melancholy that will leave readers wondering about an open-ended denouement that invites them, via a gentle authorial nudge, to participate in fleshing out the novel’s most brutal and unexpected consequence, an act of dehumanizing violence and betrayal that could only occur in the frightening world in which we now find ourselves. When Ghosts Come Home will be in bookstores on Sept. 21. Wiley Cash will read from his novel and sign books at The Country Bookshop at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept 25. PS Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven 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. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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BOOKSHELF

September Books

FICTION Matrix, by Lauren Groff A woman’s power is often judged by her beauty, wealth and situation in life. Marie — awkward, too tall, illegitimate, without means, and orphaned — has none of these. Sent to the most wretched abbey England has to offer in 1158, Marie comes to understand that a woman’s power comes from cleverness, ingenuity, fortitude and the bond of sisterhood. In this first novel since the brilliant Fates and Furies, Groff delivers a story that shakes the walls of the age-old patriarchy. The Magician, by Colm Tóibín In a provincial German city at the turn of the 20th century, Thomas Mann grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. As a boy, Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter, Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He becomes the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. In a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled, and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire. The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife, Katia, and the times in which they lived — World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile. Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr Like the characters of Marie-Laure and Werner in Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders who find resourcefulness and hope in the midst of the gravest danger. Their lives are gloriously intertwined as Doerr’s dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own. Dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come,” Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship — of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart. The Santa Suit, by Mary Kay Andrews When newly divorced Ivy Perkins buys an old farmhouse sight unThe Art & Soul of the Sandhills

seen, she is looking for a change in her life. The farmhouse, The Four Roses, is a labor of love, but Ivy didn’t bargain on just how much labor. The previous family left so much furniture and so much junk, it’s a fulltime job sorting through it. At the top of a closet, Ivy finds a Santa suit, beautifully made and decades old. In the pocket is a note written in a childish hand from a little girl who has one Christmas wish, and that is for her father to return home from the war. The discovery sets Ivy off on a mission. Who wrote the note? Did the man ever come home? What mysteries did the Rose family hold? Ivy just might find more than she ever thought possible: a welcoming town, a family reunited, a mystery solved, and a second chance at love. NONFICTION Cuba: An American History, by Ada Ferrer Cuba’s history is full of violent conquest, invasions and military occupations; conspiracies against slavery, colonialism and dictators; revolutions attempted, victorious and undone. Ferrer, a celebrated New York University professor and the daughter of Cuban immigrants, brings her personal perspective to this sweeping history of Cuba, and its complex and intimate ties to the United States, utilizing stories from both well-known and little-known characters from Cuban history. She documents the enormous influence the U.S. has had on Cuba and the many ways in which Cuba is a recurring presence in U.S. history, beginning with its key role in the American Revolution. Travels with George: In Search of Washington and his Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick When George Washington became president in 1798, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the exColonies to talk to ordinary citizens about their lives and their feelings about the new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing — Americans. Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what it has become in the nearly 225 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his travel companions (his wife and puppy), Philbrick follows Washington’s tour of America — an almost 2,000-mile journey. The narrative moves smoothly back and forth from the 18th to 21st centuries, seeing the country through Washington’s eyes as well as Philbrick’s. Written at a moment when PineStraw

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America’s foundational ideals are under scrutiny, Travels with George grapples bluntly and honestly with Washington’s legacy as a man of the people, a mythical figure of the early republic, a reluctant president, and a plantation owner who held people in slavery. Philbrick paints a picture of 18th century America as divided and fraught as modern America, and comes to understand how Washington, through belief, vision and sheer will, created a sense of national solidarity that had never existed before. CHILDREN’S BOOKS Isobel Adds Up, by Kristy Everington Isobel loves to solve problems. Multiplication, subtraction, addition, bring them on! But she begins to have some trouble when a new loud neighbor moves into the apartment next door. Of course, clever Isabel has a solution and maybe also a new friend. Math-loving young readers will delight in this fun new problem-solving story that is sure to bring on some giggles. (Ages 5-7.)

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Negative Cat, by Sophie Blackall When a boy finally gets his long-awaited cat, things don’t go quite as expected, but sometimes it takes a bit to discover the joy that comes from being just a little outside the box. Fun for anyone who loves an animal that’s just a little unusual, and a perfect read-aloud by the Caldecott-winning illustrator Sophie Blackall. (Ages 3-6.) Dozens of Dachshunds, by Stephanie Calmenson Dozens of dachshunds waltz, woof and wag their way across the page and into the hearts of readers in this adorable read-aloud. Long-haired, smooth-haired and wirehaired dachshunds alike are all dressed in costume (of course there’s a hot dog!) for the Dachshund Day parade. With a seek-and-find game and back matter on real Dachshund Day celebrations, this one’s sure to have everyone barking for more. (Ages 3-6.) PS Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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

Moving On Up History is brewing again in downtown Asheville. By Wiley and Mallory Cash

In 1994, Oscar Wong began brewing beer

in the basement of Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria in downtown Asheville. Wong, the son of Chinese immigrants, grew up in Jamaica and moved to the states to study civil engineering at the University Notre Dame. After forging a successful career in nuclear engineering, he would later create an innovative nuclear waste disposal company and then go on to found Highland Brewing Company, Asheville’s oldest independent brewery. As the first legal brewery in Western North Carolina following the repeal of prohibition, you can imagine its allure. Still, it took Wong eight years to break even. Why? Because he was

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

determined to produce a high-quality product on a consistent basis. He invested in his vision. While that superior quality persists, little else remains from those early days in the basement.

In 2011, Wong’s daughter, Leah Wong Ashburn, officially joined the team at Highland Brewery. More than a decade earlier, Ashburn had applied for a position with her father’s company after graduating with a degree in journalism from UNC-Chapel Hill, but her father turned down her application. He wanted her to find her own way, he told her. And so she did. Years later, after Ashburn built a thriving career in sales and marketing with a yearbook publisher in Charlotte, her father actually recruited her for a position at Highland, but in the intervening years, the tables had turned: He could no longer afford her. But blood is thicker than water, and, apparently, so is beer. “Other things became more important and the brewery was one of those more important things,” Ashburn said in a 2018 interview with Business North Carolina. “It was about being part of the community. You can’t put a value on that.” Leah Wong Ashburn is now Highland’s president and PineStraw

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

CEO, and her tenure has marked an era of rapid change, both for the company and the city of Asheville. In 2011, Highland opened a tasting room at their mountaintop manufacturing facility in east Asheville, which has now grown to 70,000 square feet and offers complimentary tours of their onsite brewery, a lively taproom with ample seating, a performance stage, a rooftop garden bar and an indoor event space. According to Brock Ashburn, Leah’s husband and the company’s vice president, “We built the taproom to accommodate the throngs of people who were showing up, part of an ever-increasing interested public who wanted to drink our beer where it was made.” Over the past decade, a lot of people have — as Brock Ashburn puts it — “shown up” in Asheville, and the city is now an international destination for foodies, beer connoisseurs and outdoor enthusiasts. “There’s always been a soul and a spirit in Asheville,” Leah says, “and Highland got to join up with other people who believed in the potential for Asheville. Great beer is a complement to great food and quality of life.” Community and regional pride are more than just branding tools; Highland is a company whose culture is built on stewardship and community responsibility, tenets made apparent in their practices of reducing or reusing waste, partnering with local nonprofits and embracing solar power. The company also collaborates with the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, naming seasonal beers after unique regional landscapes. Ashburn has always made clear that she intends to keep the company concentrated on regional endeavors and has no plans to ship beer across the country, choosing instead to focus the company’s efforts within the confines of the Southeast. This comes as no surprise for a brewery that has spent two and a half decades fostering a regional brand in a region that has quickly gained international attention. Today, Leah and Brock are sitting at the brewery’s new downtown taproom in the old S&W Building, a quintessential example of Asheville’s stunning 1920s Art-Deco architecture. Late morning sunlight pours through tall windows that look out on Pritchard Park, illuminating the gold-plated fixtures and ceiling tiles, the two-story mar-

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ble columns and tiled floors in a glowing aura that sweeps visitors back into the roaring ’20s. You can almost sense what Asheville must have been like a century ago, when it was first known as a destination for Hollywood stars, politicians and titans of industry. Highland anchors the new S&W Market’s downstairs dining area with a taproom, along with several local restaurants that provide counter service. Upstairs, on the mezzanine level, Highland has opened a full bar and tasting room with ample space for guests to relax over a pint. One can only imagine what it must mean to Leah for Highland to return to downtown, where it all started from such humble beginnings over a quarter century ago. “As a second-generation owner, I was encouraged to make the brewery my own,” she says. “That did not feel safe to me at first because of the long history of Highland, but my father’s sentiment was honest, and he’s let us create our own vision.” That meant changing the beer portfolio and re-envisioning the brand. She says it also meant improving the property: “We started as a manufacturing company, but Brock’s an engineer and a builder, and I’m a marketer,” Leah says. Combining all of those interests and backgrounds led to a complementary hospitality component. “It appeals to tourists because it highlights some of the great things about Asheville in one location.” Outside, people are waiting for the S&W Market’s doors to be unlocked for the day’s business. A line of tourists and downtown office workers in business attire snakes down the sidewalk. Leah and Brock look out the window and pause for a moment, perhaps recalling the throngs of beer enthusiasts who showed up the minute the first taproom opened at Highland’s manufacturing site a decade earlier. “This is an opportunity to tell our story downtown and also attract people to come out to East Asheville to visit our brewery,” Brock says. “It’s a great opportunity to get our brand out there and let people know where this all started.” From a downtown basement to a mountaintop in East Asheville to the second floor of one of the city’s most iconic downtown buildings, Highland has come a long way. But whether it’s the quality of the beer or the family name, some things never change. PS Wiley Cash is the writer-in-residence at the University of North CarolinaAsheville. His new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, will be released this month. Mallory Cash is an editorial and portrait photographer.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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HOMETOWN

Heroes and Helmets Autumn’s guilty pleasure

By Bill Fields

I don’t usually get nervous

before an interview, but a few years ago, when the subject was a childhood hero, I confess to having had the jitters.

A friend of Sonny Jurgensen kindly passed along his phone number so I could try to get him for a story I was writing about his youth in Wilmington years before he was a star quarterback in the National Football League. He was north of 80 by this point, the ginger hair long gone white; the golden arm that could zing passes to a receiver on a down-and-out better than anyone, alive only on NFL Films. Our call was brief and his answers perfunctory. Despite the disappointing substance of the conversation, I hung up pleased that I’d gotten to speak with Number 9 in burgundy, gold and white decades after his autographed photo hung on my bedroom wall. He was why I drew plays in the dirt and threw passes at the trunk of a pine tree if no one was around. I wasn’t tough enough for football despite all the neighborhood prep; a year of Midget League was enough. But I care about football these days in part because — like many who grew up in pre-Panthers North Carolina — I cared so much about Sonny and his Washington teammates more than 50 years ago. I still root for the team that Jurgensen led out of the huddle from 1964 to 1974. My alma mater, the University of North Carolina, is supposed to be strong this season. Maybe the Tar Heels will make it to the ACC title game and beat Clemson. My adopted college team, Ohio State, has enlivened my autumns since I became a fan thanks to my girlfriend, for whom Buckeye football is her only sporting interest. We went to a game in Columbus several years ago. Even though it was a cakewalk non-conference matchup, the stadium was filled on

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

a beautiful Saturday afternoon, making it a day I won’t forget. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, thanks to the annual Michigan game, has become much more than another day in a long holiday weekend. What football fan doesn’t hope that the pandemic will have eased enough to allow the stands to look like they once did? As another football season kicks off, though, the sport seems an increasingly guilty pleasure given the growing evidence of longterm damage from repeated hits to the head in a game in which the athletes seem bigger, stronger and faster every year. The NFL increasingly is in the same sentence with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive brain degeneration that can afflict those who play contact sports. Pro football players are handsomely paid in the current era — as opposed to the athletes competing long ago when many of us got hooked on watching them play — but the riches come with a potential cost much greater than arthritic joints in retirement. It has always been a brutal game, but the CTE studies and evidence have quantified the brutality in ways impossible to ignore, and dementia hurried along by blows to the head is a much different outcome than seeing a man who used to sprint like a gazelle have trouble getting up a flight of stairs. Like many others, I will still watch, grateful for the games in which nobody is seriously hurt. I hope the rules of the game continue to evolve so that they might lessen the potential for severe injury, that more athletes leave the game without suffering long-term effects from their careers. This fall I will be thinking about another red-headed football player, my great-nephew, a senior at his North Carolina high school. He is an all-conference defensive end, a quick and strong teenager who loves his chosen sport despite the hand fractures he has sustained as a prep athlete. I hope he has a great season — and decides he’s had enough football. PS Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. PineStraw

Fully Restored and Open for Play Grand Opening: September 9, 2021

Southern Pines Golf Club, a vintage Donald Ross-designed course dating to the early 1900s, has been undergoing a full course restoration that included design tweaks from architect Kyle Franz since 2020. The goal of the restoration was to make the golf course feel as much like a Ross original, staying true to the well preserved routing and removing the superfluous elements that have been added over the decades. The crew removed hundreds of trees, widened fairways, removed and rebuilt bunkers, revived a Lost Hole, reshaped greens and installed all new piping around the greens and new wiring in the fairways for a modernized irrigation system. Almost a year later, the course is open for play the way Donald Ross intended it.

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IN THE SPIRIT

Online Amaro Tax write-offs never tasted so good

is a good place to start. As far as cocktails go, I would mix this with a cola-tasting rum, like Zaya.

By Tony Cross

I recently re-

PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CROSS

ceived my online, bi-yearly shipment of spirits. Just under one grand and a week or so later, a big box with lots of stickers sits on my front doorstep like one of those old-fashioned steamer trunks in black and white movies. My latest treasures included a bunch of amari that I cannot get at any local ABC.

Amaro Lucano

Amaro (amari is the plural) is Italian for “bitter” and has been extremely popular over the last decade or so. While lots of cocktail bars use these in mixed drinks, amaro was first intended as a digestif to be taken after a meal. Lots of countries have their own version of digestifs: cognac in France or underberg in Germany, for example. In Italy, it’s amaro. I’ll be using author Brad Thomas Parsons’ book Amaro: The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs as a reference in the quick summary below. I’m not going to pretend I’m a bitter liqueur scholar. I’m not. I’m neither bitter nor scholarly. I’m listing these in order from lowest to highest ABV (alcohol by volume). The differences are minute, 21-35 percent, but I’m tasting them this way because, well, why not?

Per the back label: “Created in 1894, Amaro Lucano today still uses the same secret ancient recipe. A skillful blend of more than 30 herbs that the Vena family has handed down from generation to generation.” This amaro doesn’t have that gentian kick like the Bráulio; instead, I’m smelling something sweeter — if I made a Coke from scratch and let it go flat, that’s what it would smell like. Amaro purists are probably wincing right now. There is a lot going on palate-wise. Front palate has me wowed. What the hell am I tasting? Help me out, Brad. “Medium sweetness with herbal bitterness and notes of cinnamon, licorice, and caramel.” OK, I get the licorice and caramel for sure. Cinnamon is pretty faint, but it doesn’t matter — this amaro is delicious. “Headquartered in Pisticci Scalo, a small southern Italian town in the Matera province in the region of Basilicata, the Lucano brand was founded in 1894 by Cavalier Pasquale Vena, and his descendants, now representing the fourth generation, run the family business to this day.” As Parsons also notes, the fifth generation is helping their brand reach cocktail enthusiasts by ramping up production. It’s very impressive how balanced this amaro is with over 30 ingredients. Talk about talent.

Amaro Bráulio

Averna

First up is Amaro Bráulio. Created in the Italian Alps in 1875 by pharmacist Dr. Francesco Peloni, this amaro hit me with heavy gentian on the nose right off the bat. Now, I’m not the best taste-tester, but I have a large nose and I work with gentian root quite a lot (it’s one of the ingredients in my business’s tonic syrup). On the palate, I taste some sort of mint, spices and a touch of bitterness. Not too bitter at all, and I’d even say that if you’re a beginner with amaro, this The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

While I’m trying the other three amari on their own for the first time, I poured this one over a big rock with an orange peel last weekend and it was so good I just did it again. Phenomenal after-dinner drink. I’ve had this (and the next amaro on the list) mixed in cocktails, but never have I owned a bottle and savored it on its own. This is an easy sipper for me. Parsons’ book says that the known ingredients are lemon and orange essential oils, and pomegranate. Orange PineStraw

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IN THE SPIRIT

is definitely a standout, which is why adding a peel from the fruit makes its flavors pop. There’s not a lot of bitterness due to the sweetness from a cola flavor. As far back as 1859, the spirit was used by monks who passed the recipe on to Salvatore Averna, a benefactor to San Spirito Abbey in Caltanissetta, Sicily. Soon after, Averna “was the official supplier to the royal house of King Vittorio Emanuele III and the royal coat of arms was permitted to be displayed on the label of the bottle.” Parsons notes that in 2014, Averna was sold to Gruppo Campari for $143 million dollars.

A Morning Swim

F IN

D THE

Tony Cross is a bartender (well, ex-bartender) who runs cocktail catering company Reverie Cocktails in Southern Pines. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

L WO R L

We finish with Amaro Nonino Quintessentia, the most beautiful of the four bottles, and the amaro with the highest ABV. I smell chocolate on the nose. Sue me. I do. On the palate, caramel and orange right off the bat. The flavors (also a nuanced bitterness) linger quite a bit longer than the other amari. I’m guessing this has to do with the higher proof. Parsons calls the bottle and finished product “elegant,” and I couldn’t agree more. Parsons writes that the Nonino family’s “amaro story begins in 1933, when (owner) Benito’s father, Antonio Nonino, made a grappa-based amaro he called Amaro Carnia, named after the nearby mountains. In 1984, Benito and (wife) Giannola developed their proprietary ÙE Grape Distillate, a unique distillation of the whole grape-skins, pulp, and juice — that captures the production elements of a wine distillate with the craft of grappa.” The recipe was reformulated in 1987. The grappa distillate and ÙE were aged for five years in barriques (wine barrels, especially small ones from France that are made from oak) and sherry barrels. Parsons writes about his tastings in New York and Friuli, Italy with one of Benito’s daughters, Elisabetta. She taught him the way she enjoys her family’s spirit, which he refers to as “Elisabetta style.” It’s Nonino in a small glass with two ice cubes and an orange slice. And that’s exactly how I’ll imbibe mine tonight. PS

Amaro Nonino Quintessentia

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THE KITCHEN GARDEN

Of Monarchs and Milkweed Can you give a butterfly a hand?

By Jan Leitschuh

The iconic, orange and black mon-

arch butterflies are in shocking decline and could use a little help.

Luckily, our kitchen gardens — or any sunny patch of ground — can do more than grow a tomato. Since the life of the monarch butterfly is intimately entwined with that of the milkweed species, what if we were able to lend a little hand on our home turf? Right now, the monarch butterflies are migrating southward through North Carolina on their awe-inspiring journey to their winter grounds in southern Mexico. But what will they eat? The only food a monarch caterpillar can consume is milkweed. Monarchs have lost an estimated 165 million acres of critical breeding habitat in the United States to herbicide spraying, deforestation and development in recent decades. Sharp declines in milkweed populations in the agricultural Midwest have been reported. In the early ’90s, the increased spraying of glyphosate, or Roundup, following the introduction of crops genetically modified to withstand the herbicide, wiped out large tracts of perennial milkweed on farmland. Do you have milkweed in your garden or yard? You could. Right

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

now, and for the next couple of months, milkweed pods will be ripening and releasing their seeds. I gathered some fat pods from a Virginia mountain meadow six years ago and have had milkweed — and monarch caterpillars — ever since. Throughout the United States, concerned gardeners are creating monarch-safe havens, little habitat “steppingstones” similar in intent to pollinator gardens, to recreate habitat for declining insect populations. Though the migration is on now, you’ll be hard-pressed to spot the familiar monarch. In fact, seeing one is an Instagram-worthy moment these days. Staggering declines in these showy butterflies were reported in the 2000s. In Mexico, where the bulk of the migratory overwintering population returns to a specific area, the monarchs once occupied 45 acres at their peak in the mid-1990s. Recently, that population plunged to cover a mere 1.65 acres, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The many troubles of the beautiful monarch butterfly are well documented. Severe and changing weather has damaged eggs and reduced hatch numbers. But most scientists concur that the monarch’s number one threat to survival is the dwindling number of wild milkweed plants available on which to lay their eggs. This is where gardeners and landowners can fill in some of the gaps. The story of today’s butterfly began with its great-grandparent leaving the forests of Mexico and heading for the milkweed of Texas. PineStraw

THE KITCHEN GARDEN

Adult monarchs consume plant nectar, but they lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed. The eggs hatch into the notable green-whiteblack caterpillars. After feeding on milkweed leaves for two weeks (if they survive bird and insect predators, that is), they form a chrysalis on the underside of the milkweed leaf, eventually hatching into a bright orange butterfly — their numbers fanning out across the United States as far north as Canada. Given milkweed, another summer hatch ensues. Finally, on the return trip — happening now — a third generation can hatch. This “super generation” mysteriously returns to the same Mexican forest its great-grandparents left from, though it had never been there. No one knows how this happens. The monarch is the only butterfly known to make this two-way migratory journey as birds do. There are much smaller populations that overwinter in Hawaii, Florida and California, too. Back to your garden. There are several kinds of milkweed you could add that might suit. The entire milkweed family is catnip to butterflies of all sorts, and other native pollinators. Milkweeds establish large, deep root systems and prefer not to be transplanted. Some species are small and neat, some are large and coarse and are better suited to meadows, back of the border, under power lines and sunny edges of the property. If you have a very neat, formal urban garden, seek out Asclepias tuberosa, or butterfly weed. Butterfly weed is a small, neat plant that does well in droughts, heat and Sandhills soil. The compact perennial displays flaming orange or cheerful, yellow blossoms. Establish several

plants together to ensure sufficient food for hungry young caterpillars. Your local nursery can likely hook you up with a potted plant or three. A little larger is whorled milkweed, (Asclepias verticillata), about 12-24-inches tall and wide. This white-flowered variety also does well in our dry summer conditions. You may have to order this from a specialty company such as the online retailer American Meadows, which ships potted plants. This unique company also has plenty of informative how-to information on its website. Buying local? Sorrell’s Nursery in Dunn has a wide selection of native milkweeds that are organically grown — check out their Facebook page. MonarchWatch.Org is another excellent resource with leads on milkweed plants and seed. Use care with the non-native, pretty, tropical milkweed, (Asclepias curassavica), say experts, as its long season of nectar could cause the monarchs to linger too long up north and get caught out by colder temps in fall. Some feel this is not an issue for Zone 7 and below. If used, experts suggest cutting this variety back in fall and winter. Swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) prefers moist areas, so if you have a nearby swamp, pond, lake or bog, check it out. Again, unless you have access to wild milkweed seed, you may have to order this. The best-known milkweed is the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). Children enjoy tossing the fluff that carries each seed from this variety’s pod. In World War II, this fluff was used as a kapok substitute in life preservers — two bags of pods would fill one life jacket. This is the one I gathered as ripe seed pods from a sunny, unmown meadow and brought home to the Sandhills.

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THE KITCHEN GARDEN

If you have a little space, or a “back of the border” that you could dedicate to a 36- 48-inch-tall plant, common milkweed produces tremendous lavender-pink blooms in June and is absolutely beloved by many pollinators. During the spring and fall monarch migrations, the abundant milkweed leaves of this plant provide food for a new generation of caterpillars. One caution, though; your deeply rooted milkweed plot will grow slowly, so be sure to place it in a spot where it can quietly expand. If, after a few years, you want to contain its spread, common milkweed is easy to control by pulling, mowing or cutting. You can even share with a neighbor who has more monarch caterpillars than available food — just stick a few cut milkweed stalks in a vase or bottle and pass it along. The caterpillars prefer the younger, more tender leaves rather than the leaves of podded stalks. Besides the host plant milkweed, nectar plants that bloom at different times are needed for the monarch. The caterpillars eat the milkweed, but the parent butterflies need nectar. Check out the North Carolina Wildlife Federation’s “Butterfly Highway.” Consider putting your butterfly/pollinator garden on the highway at: https://ncwf.org/habitat/butterfly-highway. There are useful Facebook pages and groups dedicated to assisting monarchs and helping milkweed growers. Monarchs & Milkweed of Wake Forest is a good one, with a friendly community that reports sightings of monarchs, eggs, and caterpillars.

Monarchs, Milkweed and More is another Facebook group. Raleigh Area Monarchs and Milkweed is a third. If gathering milkweed, select only a few pods, leaving the rest to spread from the mother plants. Look for a pod that has split, showing ripe, brown seeds. Pale seeds are not yet ripe. Or ask around among friends with farms and wilder spaces. To start milkweed from seed, the easiest way is to emulate Mother Nature and plant them in the fall. I scattered seed across lightly disturbed soil and raked it in. Some separate the milkweed "fluff" from the seed, but I did not. Come spring, I had milkweed. If you really want to start your seeds in the spring, American Meadows advises that you first break their dormancy with cold stratification. In the wild, says the online wildflower retailer, milkweed plants scatter their seeds quite late in the season. The coming cold would normally kill any seedlings that germinated right away. However, the seeds of milkweed (and other late-season flower plants) "are cleverly programmed to delay germination until after they've been exposed to winter’s cold, followed by gradually rising temperatures in springtime." This adaptation is known as stratification. So, if you have a little bit of space to offer a safe haven, you may become a critical stop-off for the struggling monarch species. PS Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, avid eater of fresh produce and cofounder of Sandhills Farm to Table.

Photo by John Gessner

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B O TA N I C U S

Goldenrod

Behold the flaming yellow glory of this native flowering plant

A native plant I love to see this time of year is Solidago, from the Latin solidare — “to make whole” — which suggests the medicinal powers sometimes attributed to the genus.

Commonly called “goldenrod,” it’s a perennial that bursts into magnificent yellow fireworks across the mountains, piedmont, sandhills and coastal plains of our Old North State. At least a dozen varieties are found regionally in the wild, according to the North Carolina Native Plant Society. I’m not alone in my admiration for a goldenrod. My neighbor, Steve Windham, native plant specialist, tells me why he enjoys hiking the Appalachian Trail as summer turns toward fall. “If you’ve ever walked out into a mountain meadow under a blue autumn sky with goldenrod in bloom,” Windham says, “you’ll know how truly spectacular it is.” I remember just such a sight on the farm where I grew up, a fallow field resplendent with goldenrod, joe-pye weed, milkweed and ironweed. On that brilliant palette danced flights of butterflies — monarch, red admiral and tiger swallowtail — plus a host of skippers, cobalts and other beetles, bumblebees and metallic green flies. It was a sight wonderful to behold. So why not replicate it in your home landscape? Enterprising growers and nurseries have expanded the number of goldenrod varieties available for your yard or garden to more than 200. “I use goldenrod in my garden and in my landscape designs because it’s so tough, so easy to grow and attracts so many pollinators,” Windham says. He tells me that, in his own backyard, he has a perennial border featuring a goldenrod cultivar called “Skyrocket,” which stands about three feet tall. Lower-growing The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

dwarf cultivars can also be planted. Windham, who helped install the ornamental grasses and pollinator meadow at the Greensboro Arboretum, recommends adding to your goldenrod native grasses such as little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) or big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium fistulosum), ironweed (Vernonia glauca), phlox (Phlox carolina), asters (Aster paten) and bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana). Even after the flowers’ colors have faded, you’ll have a garden or border featuring interesting foliage that lasts into the winter months. Those of you who suffer from fall allergies may think that Steve and I have lost our minds when we recommend goldenrod for your home garden. Well, the goldenrod is not likely responsible for your runny nose and itchy eyeballs. The culprit is another N.C. native perennial in the genus Ambrosia, from the Latin “food of the gods.” Maybe the botanist responsible for giving this plant a name had a wicked sense of humor, but poor Ambrosia artemisiifolia is commonly called “ragweed.” It also bursts into bloom across the mountains, piedmont, sandhills and coastal plain of our Old North State in about the same habitats and at the same time of year as goldenrod. Ragweed produces green, unremarkable blooms that release vast numbers of small, lightweight granules of airborne pollen that can be spread for miles by the wind. By contrast, goldenrod draws pollinators to its brilliant yellow flowers with nectar, relying on the pollinators to spread the relatively heavy pollen granules that glom onto their bodies and legs. So plant beautiful Solidago. And forgive pesky Ambrosia. If you were a plant and somebody called you “ragweed,” you’d probably have a vengeful attitude, too. OH Ross Howell Jr. is a freelance writer in Greensboro. PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

HOME BY DESIGN

The Knife at Rest

It’s the little things — and sometimes the finer things By Cynthia Adams

We were lunching in rare

style. Good food, good company, a splendid table before us — and everyone was in excellent spirits. The table? It looked like a page torn from Architectural Digest: heirloom china, delicate crystal and antique French silverware on creamy linens. An artist and her close friend paused mid-sentence, suddenly noticing a set of what turned out to be silver knife rests. The artist’s mouth opened, then closed. What are those? She pointed to the elegant silver rectangles positioned above the antique table knife. Our host, an enthusiastic collector, explained: they were, quite simply, a resting place for a used knife, which kept linens safe from the greasy slurry on the plate. The artist began to speculate about tired knives requiring rest. “Too weary to cut it!” “Lying down on the job!” “Stop me before I cut in again.” She held a handsome knife up for inspection. “After they rest, then what?” “They obviously move in for the kill,” she quipped. We laughed ourselves silly, enjoying the word play. The fun added to a good meal at a great table. As the conversation evolved, someone mentioned how we, after all, eat with our eyes. True, yet times have changed. There’s always fashion and history at work in our kitchens and dining rooms, as good ideas come and go from favor. A knife rest is straight out of an Edith Wharton setting: a classic remnant of fine dining. What other objects are from tables past, things once used and now idling in the drawer? Those who love Wharton will reel from the pronouncements of Bob Vila, a former Sears’ pitchman who rose to fame with This Old House. Despite This Old House, Vila has very modern opinions. Here’s a short list on his outmoded and, therefore, verboten picks: fancy forks — including oyster forks, fish forks, salad forks, pickle forks and dessert forks. All out. Other things deemed pointless by Vila: butter picks. (The butter pick is used for choosing/skewering single pats of butter.)

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Napkin rings are also a thing of the past, Vila insists. I am glad my mother did not live to read this. If she were not dead already, this news would doubtless kill her. Dedicated stemware is also outmoded, he claims. He says that it is completely modern to use a stemless glass for all wines. In fact, one multipurpose glass twill suffice. Even, dear God, a Mason jar. To all my friends and family, I am sorry to convey this, not only because we are all stemware-struck, but because I personally own tons of outmoded glassware by Vila’s standards, including champagne coupes. I shudder to imagine the Queen being served her beloved Bollinger in a pickle jar. The mind reels. Also, Vila says egg cups are déclassé. If you followed The Crown, you already know the Queen takes a morning egg in an egg cup and toast in a proper toast rack. Jelly spoons are another fatality of Vila’s list, and so he would banish little Lilibet from taking her marmalade with a proper jelly spoon. (BTW, did you know that the British call congealed salads and gelatins like Jell-O “jelly”?) Table runners, something many of us have clung to long after parting with other life niceties, are vile to Vila. Try telling that to Williams-Sonoma. The shocker on Vila’s list may require sitting down (in the event you prefer to read standing): wedding china. He deems it outmoded. Dated. Unnecessary. He asserts that we are a nation of casual diners who no longer eat off of fancy plates. But any Southerner with a thimble full of sense knows there is no separating a Southern gal from her wedding china. His claim is a step too far. Like our grandmother’s Blue Willow, we know and love it from the mists of time. We eat off our ancestral plates, even if chipped. We stand in line to admire the White House china patterns. When the late Julia Reed was promoting the entertaining guide, Julia Reed’s South, she talked about using antique wine rinsers for flowers and old silver ashtrays for salt cellars. “Use everything,” she said. If it chips, it chips. And the unpretentious Reed added something worth noting: “What I love about the South in general is that there is nothing too small to celebrate, and if you’re really lucky you learn about grace and small joys, which are, after all, what make up big lives.” The clincher? “Keep the beautiful things alive.” Long live the knife rest. PS Cynthia Adams, a contributing editor of O.Henry, is looking for a set of antique knife rests. PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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OUT OF THE BLUE

Shopper’s Remorse, Kinda To browse or not to browse, that is the question

By Deborah Salomon

If shopping were an Olympic sport,

I’d win the gold medal. I can happily while away an hour just looking at stuff, be it books or blouses, now called “tops.” Yet when the news that Target might be coming to Southern Pines roared through town I couldn’t muster much excitement.

Maybe the thrill is gone. Maybe Target drowns in too much stuff. The thrill, in my case, has less to do with buying than with the experience characteristic of the shop-till-you-drop USA. My brief forays abroad indicate that in most cultures, people shop to satisfy a need — like socks or wine or paper towels. They look around, find something acceptable, pay and leave. I shop as a pastime, a learning experience. I look at colors. I read labels that reveal where the merchandise was made and what it is made of. I ponder prices. In small stores I ask questions. This doesn’t make me popular with proprietors answering my questions, always pleasantly, while sensing I have no intention of buying those stunning handcrafted silver earrings, for $65. I enjoy shopping the big boxes, too. A bundle of dresses is still smashed from the box where it was packed by hands on the other side of the globe, then shipped across many oceans in boxcar-sized containers. That makes me remember when Walmart et al. began adding groceries to smashed dresses. At first, the sight of cauliflower and ground beef sharing a cart with jeans, house paint and mittens seemed odd. It still does, really. Convenience hath its price. I’m not an organized shopper. I rarely make a list. That way, I can wander, hoping that seeing Tide on sale will remind me. Wandering is a luxury afforded by age. I retain mixed memories of weaving in and out of the aisles with a toddler in the shopping cart seat and two others, only slightly older, dashing ahead, begging, “Can we buy this, Mommy? Please, please . . . ” Stop to read a label and they’re climbing the shelves in pursuit of some repulsive purple cereal. I remember, too, the times my elderly father visited. Supermarket trips were a thrill because he appreciated food, having grown up poor and often hungry. He would feign outrage at the prices, which never kept him from eating what I bought. But as we approached the checkout, he’d disappear. “I’ll meet you at the car.” The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Seeing the total was just too painful. And that was when grapefruit were four for a dollar and sirloin, $1.25 a pound. I never minded shopping for clothes but despised try-on rooms with their three-way mirrors; an unexpected full rear view can ruin the experience. Therefore, half my untried-on purchases went back. I thought about that last winter, when the virus closed dressing rooms and returned purchases were, I guess, restocked. Not a pleasant thought. Shopping for a new car . . . another story. Takes me about 15 minutes to find one I like, another 10 to do the math. The salesperson always looks disappointed at not having to cajole, convince, bargain, use all those snappy phrases learned at training sessions. So, if I can decide in 25 minutes, why does the paperwork take 45? Still, I’m suspicious of shop-at-home dealerships advertised on TV. Shopping online guarantees pleasures and perils. You can’t feel the fabric (is it scratchy?) or see the color (duller than expected). Return postage is exorbitant (except for Amazon, with drop-offs at Kohl’s), so I usually end up keeping the borderline-satisfactory purchase. That’s why, with all due respect, I don’t really care if Target comes to town. I’ve shopped their Greensboro store. Nice housewares, OK selection of packaged groceries, good pet supplies, not much fresh stuff. I couldn’t relate to the clothes. Sorry if I sound negative. Not my intention. I grew up in the fab Manhattan department store era: B. Altman, Lord &Taylor, Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Best & Company, now just names engraved on tombstones. They had lovely cafés for lunch, free delivery, nice rest rooms. Perfume counters sprayed samples, and elevator operators wore white gloves. Years later their arty shopping bags were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Now that was shopping, neither convenient nor quick. Not even price-conscious, although shoppers probably bought less. I thought about those department stores and primordial supermarkets (A&P, Piggly Wiggly, Gristedes) during a recent safari through the enormous Harris Teeter in Taylortown, where I spent 15 minutes finding shoe polish — same time it took to select my last car. No, retail therapy isn’t what it used to be. “The customer is always right” maxim has been maxed out. But if a new Target the size of two football fields stocked from A (apples) to Z (zippers) pushes your buttons, go for it. Me? I’ll hold out for the $65 earrings. Gift-wrapped and carried home in a frameable shopping bag, please. PS Deborah Salomon is a writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com. PineStraw

Sandhills Photography Club

Tools of the Trade Tier 1 WINNERS

1st Place: Tom Batts, Honey Wagon

2nd Place: Susan Batts, S Wrench

Tier 2 WINNERS

3rd Place: Shari Dutton, Grandma’s Pincushion 1st Place: Shari Dutton, Potter's Tool

Honorable Mention: Dee Williams, Image Creation

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Tier 3 WINNERS

Honorable Mention: Neva Scheve, Hands and a Wheel 1st Place: Diane McCall, From a Lump of Clay

2nd Place: Donna Ford, Creative Sparks

Tier 2 WINNER

3rd Place: Dale Jennings, Venice Car Wash

The Sandhills Photography Club meets the second Monday of each month at 7 p.m. in the theater of the Hannah Marie Bradshaw Activities Center at The O’Neal School at 3300 Airport Road in Pinehurst. Visit www.sandhillsphotoclub.org.

2nd Place: Diane McKay, Master at Work The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PLEASURES OF LIFE

Find Yourself Up a Tree? It might be good for you

By Tom Allen

Recently, on a walk in my neighborhood, to log those elusive 10,000 daily steps we’re now told we don’t necessarily need, I had the bejeebies scared out of me. As I passed a thicket of trees, someone called out from above, “Hello, there.”

I’m a man of faith but, really? Somewhat shaken, I responded, “Hello to you.” And I continued my walk. When I reversed my direction and passed by the same stand of trees, I saw a neighborhood kid, maybe 8 or 9, who had climbed a tree and was sitting on a limb, like the Cheshire Cat, as content as could be. A kid up a tree. Not on his PS5 or Xbox. He climbed a tree and, from what I saw, he wasn’t on a cellphone, scrolling through social media or Googling something he shouldn’t be Googling. He had climbed a tree. And, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t trying to scare the bejeebies out of me, he was rather friendly. The next day, I saw two teenagers gliding down the road on skateboards. Kids at play. What a concept. A wall at a new elementary school has caused quite a stir with the slogan “In the business of play.” I’ll let the powers that be hash out what welcomes folks at a newly constructed school. But whether you write it on a wall, a billboard or a T-shirt, one thing’s for sure: Children, really all of us, need the gift and therapy play provides. We’re all familiar with the saying “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The phrase comes from a collection of proverbs, written in 1659 by James Howell, a British historian and writer. Jack might have been real or fictitious, a friend or a figment. Howell’s father and older brother were Church of England clergy. Maybe James saw his dad and sibling as 17th century workaholics. Maybe they were boring chaps at family gatherings, or maybe they were so busy rescuing souls that they had little time for family, a relaxing hunt in the country, or a nice swim in the Thames. Maybe they, or even Howell himself, had trouble keeping the Sabbath as a day of rest. In his day, a plethora of seventh-day restrictions existed, many prohibiting even a modicum of recreation and revelry. Or perhaps Jack was a boy, a kid, who for whatever reason never skipped stones across a pond, turned somersaults down a hill, chased a butterfly, or even climbed a tree. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

When we hear someone’s found themselves “up a tree” that usually means they’re in a pickle. But sometimes, finding yourself up a tree, or in a hammock, or simply doing nothing, might be the best thing. The anecdote is cliché by now, but we are human beings, not human doings. I’m not advocating putting yourself at risk. Your hips and knees recognize boundaries. But maybe after a year and a half of isolating and masking, we need to give ourselves permission to climb trees and fly kites, to fish and swim, to sing and laugh and do, well, a little of nothing. St. Luke’s Gospel records the story of Zacchaeus, a fellow short in stature who wanted to catch a glimpse of Jesus when he came into town. Unable to get a good view, he climbed a tree. The story carries a profound message. This little man, a tax collector, despised by his culture and an outcast in his religion, is befriended by one who wants to have dinner with him, but the story, like Noah and his beloved ark full of animals, has been passed down as more of a children’s tale. Why? Maybe because climbing a tree is for kids, not grownups. A beloved British children’s Sunday school song reinforces the idea: Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he, He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see, And as the Lord did pass that way, he looked up in that tree, And he said, “Zacchaeus, you come down, for I’m going to your house for tea.” Our Americanized version replaces “for tea” with “today.” Either way, the little man who found himself up a tree came out the recipient of quite a surprise. The next time someone tells you to “go fly a kite” or “take a hike,” the old-fashioned ways of saying “get lost,” try responding with, “Don’t mind if I do.” Or when life finds you in a pickle and “up a tree,” consider climbing one, or at least, sitting beneath its shade, if only to impart insight into the tension between uncertainty and hope. And if someone passes by, offer a kind, “Hello, there.” Who knows, you might just make a friend, get invited to dinner, or find your way back to childhood days, carefree and playful, when summer morphed into fall. I think you deserve it. I think we all do. PS Tom Allen is minister of education at First Baptist Church, Southern Pines. PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

B I R D WA T C H

Swirling Birds The return of the chimney swifts

By Susan Campbell

The approach of fall means many

things to many people: cooler days, longer nights, the smell of pumpkin spice — all things that I love. But the much anticipated evening congregations of chimney swifts is also near the top of the list. Swirls of these long-distance migrants form at dusk for several weeks as the birds pass through North Carolina on their way south. If during the warm weather you have seen small, twittering, fast-flying birds wheeling about high overhead, you are likely seeing chimney swifts. These “flying cigars” can be observed across the state, but given their affinity for human habitation, they are more abundant where people, buildings and, as their name implies, chimneys are found. Chimney swifts are known to breed throughout North Carolina from the mountains to the coast. Historically, they were undoubtedly sparsely distributed, nesting in big hollow trees in old growth forests in the eastern two-thirds of the United States. But as settlers spread across our state and provided abundant nesting cavities in the form of chimneys, swifts became more common. Today they are virtually dependent on humans for their reproductive success. But, unfortunately, most modern chimneys with caps or extensive lining are unsuitable for the birds. If they can enter a newer chimney, the smooth substrate within the brick or stone prevents the birds from clinging and, furthermore, does not allow adhesion of the nest (built with small sticks and saliva) to the wall. As a result, recent declines in the chimney swift population have been documented across the species range.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Without a doubt, these small birds are incredible fliers, more so than swallows and martins. They spend the vast majority of their waking hours on the wing, except while nesting. Even courtship and copulation occur in mid-air. Only at night do they descend to rest in a protected spot — which is almost always a chimney of some sort. By late July, flocks of swifts begin congregating, feeding on abundant aerial insects, and roosting together in larger chimneys. These aggregations begin to move southward in August on prevailing northerly air currents to wintering grounds in the tropics. You may find hundreds swirling around in the vicinity of older schools, churches and office buildings that still retain substantial brick chimneys. Such chimneys are more spacious and year after year provide critical staging grounds for generations of swifts. It is an awesome sight to see thousands of individuals pouring into a roost site at dark. Unfortunately, these unique birds have been misunderstood at this time of year and are often thought to be disease-carrying bats. As a result, significant numbers of sites have been capped for fear of being a human health hazard. Big old chimneys are lost across our state each year to such misunderstandings. Additionally, changes in modes of heating result in large chimneys being retired: usually covered and rendered unavailable to swifts. Quite simply, there is a general lack of awareness of the structures as an important biological resource. Furthermore, across most of our state, we are still in the process of identifying major roost sites. During the winter months, chimney swifts are found in loose aggregations throughout the upper Amazon basin of South America. There they loaf and feed on an abundance of flying insects until lengthening days urge them northward again. The return trip brings individuals, swirling and darting, back to their summer homes by early April. PS Susan Campbell would love to hear from you. Feel free to send questions or wildlife observations to susan@ncaves.com. PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SPORTING LIFE

A Hunt to Remember One of life’s seasons

“To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” — Ecclesiastes 3, King James Version By Tom Bryant

The first time I ran across this quote

from the Bible, I thought some guy had stolen the words from my mother. It was one of her favorites.

A good example: When I was able to squeak by, grade-wise, and graduate from high school and was complaining one night at the supper table about not being able to play baseball or football for good old AHS, Mom said, “Son, there is a season for all things, and that season at Aberdeen High School has ended. But a completely new season is beginning for you at Brevard College. Remember what the dean said? If you make the grades and survive probation, maybe you can play baseball for them.” The favorite quote from Mom came back to me the other evening as I was up in the Roost, a small apartment over our garage. I usually hang out there when I need to write a column or work on my novel. On this particular evening, I was sorting through some dove hunting equipment. I mean, after all, the season is upon us, and that’s the kind of season I like. Dove hunting season is never over or at least will never be over in my lifetime. What’s beyond that is anyone’s guess. I ran across a small box in the corner of the closet where I store most of my hunting clothes. It was full of a bunch of Ducks Unlimited paraphernalia. At one time I was into that conservation club in a big way because, in the early days, if you were a duck hunter and worth your salt, you were a member of DU. For years I was a sponsor, not particularly because I was such a conservationist, although in reality I am, but primarily because of all the perks that went with the title. In the beginning years of DU, the cost to be a sponsor in the Alamance County Chapter was two or three hundred dollars, not a trivial amount in those days. My partner and I had just started a small weekly newspaper and were working hard to make ends meet, but we had enough money to sponsor what we considered a noble cause. Also, we figured we would find some good stories by being part of the local chapter. And we surely did. There was a huge competition between chapters across the state to raise the most money supporting habitat for waterfowl. Jim, my business partner, and I got caught in the middle. But we weren’t alone. Numerous hunters in our area spent countless hours, and some of the

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

members spent big bucks, to make the Alamance Chapter fly. They were a varied group. Richard Cockman, a furniture company representative, headed the local chapter DU board, along with Dick Coleman, a haberdasher and specialty clothing store owner. Other board members included Ronald and Jim Copland, owners and executive officers of Copland fabrics; Don and Steve Scott, owners and officers of their long-standing family textile company; and Nat Harris, an insurance executive with clients from all over the country. Nat still serves on the board of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. Also on the board was Bennett Sapp, a clothing broker with one of the first outlets in the Burlington area; and last but not least, Ernie Koury, whose family was into a little of everything, from textiles to real estate holdings. The Ducks Unlimited leaders during those early days carried financial weight as well as a ton of business influence. The banquets put together for the area sponsors were top of the line. Held at the Alamance Country Club, the event would begin with a cocktail hour. Koury, whose family members were big supporters of UNC-Chapel Hill, would recruit cheerleaders from the university to sell raffle tickets during the libation hour. And they sold a bunch. Items raffled during the banquet were acquired throughout the year from local merchants and were first class. Auction items were even better. Prizes included an oceanfront cottage for a week at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina; a goose hunt in Easton, Maryland; the DU gun of the year; and numerous quality art objects from paintings to sculptures to decoys. The top prize, though, was a puppy, either a bird dog or a Labrador retriever with champion lineage. These pups brought a lot of attention and dollars to the event. Auction items generated “big bucks for the ducks,” but Jim and I usually stood back and watched. We did buy several raffle tickets and won items too numerous for me to remember. Sponsors looked forward to the Ducks Unlimited banquet every year, but the greatest perk for me was the opening day dove hunt. I went on several DU dove hunts in those early years, but there is one that was an almost perfect weekend of sport shooting and camaraderie. All hunters have a particular hunt or experience that deserves a gold star in the hunting journal, and this weekend was one of those. This was before the Weather Channel made a living by reporting one disaster after another and blaming it all on global warming. Growing up in the South, we expected hot weather at the beginning of dove season and looked forward to more of the same on this specific hunt. The Friday before opening day dawned with a hint of coolness PineStraw

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in the air. I was up early that morning letting my puppy, Paddle, out of her kennel. The air was still and dry, with low humidity and only a smidgen of a breeze from the northwest. Dogwood leaves in the backyard, already turning a burnt orange color, also added to the false image of an early fall. Paddle romped around the backyard, did her business and came charging back to me as if to say, “Come on, boss. Let’s go do something, like hunt birds.” She was a small, young, yellow Lab and had added so much to my hunting experiences that every time I looked at her, I couldn’t help but smile. “No, girl,” I said to her, “we’ve got some doings to take care of before we can head to the fields.” The doings I referred to was a cocktail party and pig picking that evening at the pool area of the country club. The pig picking had become a tradition for the DU folks the evening before the opening day shoot. It was put on by none other than the famous and popular Junior Teague, a farmer and county commissioner from the southern end of the county. The next morning, though, all that was just a pleasant memory as I loaded up the old Bronco with guns, my 10-year-old son, Tommy, Paddle, and a cooler filled with plenty of water. We were ready to roll. Our weather luck was still holding, low humidity with the same soft breeze from the northwest. The jumping off point was a local bank at the shopping center. We would meet the group there, then caravan to the cut cornfield where we would spend the afternoon dove hunting. In those days, we were hunting the fields of then-Gov. Bob Scott, and what a hunt it was. Suffice it to say, the gold star in the hunting journal had another added to it. As I read the entry I made so many years ago, I recalled Mother and her seasons reflection. I added a thought of my own as a postscript to the note in the journal: “Mom was right when she emphasized the quote from the Bible, ‘There is a season for all things.’ It’s been my fantastic luck during my lifetime that when one season ended for me, another began.” PS

Tom Bryant, a Southern Pines resident, is a lifelong outdoorsman and PineStraw’s Sporting Life columnist. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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

The Short List Learning how to save shots, and your score By Lee Pace

Kelly Mitchum is standing front-

right of the 10th green at Pinehurst No. 4, his golf ball sitting slightly down in Bermuda rough, a bunker set between him and the putting surface. There’s a good 50 feet of green between the bunker and the cup.

“You can’t assume the only play is the lob wedge just because you’ve got to clear a bunker,” Mitchum says. “You’ve got plenty of room for the ball to run. And you’re going uphill, which will help slow it down.” Later he’s standing to the right of the 16th green, his ball in light rough 30 feet from the green, with a slight upslope to the putting surface and a pin on the near side of the green. “Could you putt this?” Mitchum asks. “Yes, you could. This course and No. 2 lend themselves to putting from off the green. Martin Kaymer won the 2014 U.S. Open putting from all over the place. “The lower the shot, the safer the shot. Always look to go low first.” Mitchum takes a close look at the pathway a putt would have to take along the turf. “But,” he says, pointing at the grass still glistening with some morning dew, “here I think there’s too much grass to putt through. And it’s a little wet.” Instead, he takes his 54-degree wedge (the second-most lofted club in his bag, next to the 60-degree), chips the ball into the side slope, watches it bounce and pop up and land gently on the green, well within a putter’s length of making the putt for an up-and-down. “This is the fun part of golf to me,” he says. “It’s creativity, imagination, strategy.” Mitchum is leading our group in the Pinehurst Short Game Academy one Friday morning around several holes on the course

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

to illustrate various scenarios golfers find themselves in within 100 yards of the green. The next day, we’ll spend time on course No. 2, the site of three men’s U.S. Opens, a fourth in 2024, and one women’s U.S. Open. Over the course of two-plus days, Mitchum, the resort’s shortgame expert, opens our eyes to a myriad of nuances in reading greens, executing short shots and managing our way around the greens. To wit: Grain: Light colored grass or darker? Sand: Firm packed or fluffy? Grass: Tight-clipped or longish? Dry or dew-covered? Green slope: One degree? Two or more? These questions and more, combined with technique and equipment, blend into the realm of the short game — pitching, chipping, putting and bunker play. “The short game has been my passion,” says Mitchum, a 23-year veteran of the Pinehurst teaching staff. “Not being super long off the tee, it’s been my way of equalizing and giving me a chance against guys longer off the tee.” Mitchum went to Pinecrest High School, played golf at N.C. State, winning the 1991 ACC title, and won the 1993 North and South Amateur. He tried the professional tours for four years and then joined the Pinehurst golf staff in 1998, and while working the resort’s golf schools and giving individual lessons, has found time to play in four PGA Championships and multiple PGA Tour events that come through the Carolinas. He approached Eric Alpenfels, the resort’s director of golf instruction, in 2017 with the idea of creating a short-game focused school within the Pinehurst Golf Academy. “It’s been well-received,” Mitchum says. “We’ve pretty much filled up all the short-game availabilities through the summer of 2021.” Mitchum became a YouTube sensation in July 2015 with a PineStraw

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20-second clip of him striking three right-toleft putts within one second of each other, the balls traveling on different paths and reaching the bottom of the same hole in rapid-fire succession. What made the feat so awe-inspiring is that the third putt hit the hole first, followed by the second, followed by the first. “There is definitely a huge application from a green-reading standpoint,” Mitchum says of his trick shot, which had more than 100,000 views within six weeks. “It clearly shows you can make a breaking putt on different lines, depending on the speed.” Green reading is certainly an element of my game I need help with on this July weekend. Over my lifelong golf career, I’ll give a putt a quick plumb-bob and a cursory survey of the green’s landscape, but honestly, I never delved much further. “You see any young players on the pro tour or amateur golf plumb-bobbing?” Mitchum asks. “Not many. You know why? It doesn’t work very well on a consistent basis.” Instead, Mitchum teaches learning to feel and read side-to-side break with your feet as well as your eyes. He shows us how to straddle the ball facing the cup and feel which way the ground is sloping. Next, Mitchum teaches us to take a look at the putt from the low side, about halfway between the ball and the cup; if you determine it’s a right-to-left breaker, stand on the left side. “If it is, in fact, the low side, you’ll be able to look across the line and see the ground on the other side is higher,” Mitchum says. “You look into the face of the slope and it becomes clear.” Our putting mechanics are measured and tweaked, and Mitchum follows the green-reading portion with a chapter on speed control. “No one ever says, ‘I’m going to practice my distance-control putting,’” he says, “but, if forced to say what I think is the most important part of putting, I’d have to lean toward speed control. There are more threeputts because of poor distance control than any other reason.” Once your mechanics and slope-reading skills are honed, distance control is mostly a matter of practice. Mitchum shows us a number of games we can play around the putting green to make it fun and challenging. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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“One reason most golfers are bad putters is they don’t practice it,” he says. “And putting practice can get boring. You have to make it interesting and engaging. That’s how you get better.” Of course, putting is just one element of a comprehensive short-game education. There’s chipping, bunker play and halfwedges. There’s the element of taking it from the practice ground to the golf course. There’s the mind game of figuring airtime, bounce and roll. Our newfound skills are put to work on The Cradle, the nine-hole par-3 course with holes ranging from 58 to 127 yards. It’s no wonder that Gil Hanse’s creation that opened in 2017 quickly captured Mitchum’s fancy, and he’s taken to playing as many as 30-plus rounds in one day in the annual Winter Solstice Marathon he organizes each December. “The Cradle’s a lot of fun,” he says. “Every part of your short game gets a test there.” On the fourth hole, I was 30 feet short of the green and thought I had way too much grass to putt through. I knew a lob wedge wasn’t the play given a fairly tight lie, so I thought of chipping with a 9-iron, landing it short of the green and letting it run up. I quickly got a lesson in nuance. Contrasting this shot to the one on course No. 4 the day before, Mitchum looked closely at the turf in front of the green. It was almost noon on a sunny day, and the patch had been in sunlight all morning. “It’s thin and dry,” Mitchum said. “That’s actually really good to roll it through. Remember: Look to go low.” I analyzed a slight left-to-right break, took the grass and a slight upslope on the green to the hole into consideration and judged my stroke accordingly. The ball rolled to two feet, an easy follow-up for my par. Never before would I have thought to putt that ball, but now after a weekend in Pinehurst I have pages of notes pared down to my ultimate short list. PS Lee Pace has written about golf in the Sandhills for three decades. His newest book, Good Walks — Rediscovering the Soul of Golf at 18 Top Carolinas Courses, is available wherever books are sold.

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Georgia O’Keeffe and Friends A new exhibit welcomes a modernist master By Jim Moriarty

eginning on the 10th of September the Reynolda House Museum of American Art will be throwing a welcoming party for a particularly interesting work by Georgia O’Keeffe, the renowned 20th century American modernist. The celebration, housed in two rooms, continues until March 6. As if to make the iconic painter of flowers and skulls feel at home in her new home, she’ll be accompanied by old friends, the artists she appeared alongside in famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s series of Manhattan galleries — 291, An Intimate Gallery and An American Place — and the ones she chose to surround herself with during the rest of her life in an exhibition titled “The O’Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector.” “We wanted to welcome the painting to Reynolda with a splash,” says Phil Archer, the museum’s deputy director. The work, a promised gift from Barbara Babcock Millhouse, the founding president of the museum and its primary donor, is Cedar Tree with Lavender Hills, one of O’Keeffe’s works depicting her beloved New Mexico landscape, first exhibited at An American Place in 1937 and purchased by Millhouse 40 years later. “I have O’Keeffe’s letter to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, about doing that painting,” says Archer. “She says, ‘I can set it by the window and when I look at the painting and I look out the window, I have actually captured the way my world looks.’” The painting will appear alongside another O’Keeffe work already in the museum’s collection, Pond in the Woods, Lake George. “It’s great for Reynolda because we’ll now have a painting from each of O’Keeffe’s main loci of inspiration,” says Archer. Joining O’Keeffe will be a brace of her contemporaries, including John Marin, Arthur Dove, Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz and Charles Demuth, a flock of artists more often described as the Stieglitz Circle but who are recognized here for their effect on, friendships with and passion for O’Keeffe. “Stieglitz was always declaiming who was the next artist and why people should appreciate them,” says Archer. “The exhibit is kind of a pocket-sized pantheon of the great, early moderns. They’ve all drunk from the well of French modernism. They’ve all read Kandinsky about the spiritual potential of art and abstraction. There’s this kind of

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Abraham Walkowitz, Isadora Duncan (1916), colored crayon, watercolor, ink and graphite on paper, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Hirshhorn in honor of Nancy Susan Reynolds PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Max Weber, The Dancers (1948), oil on canvas, Gift of Dorothy F. and Maynard J. Weber, Reynolda House Museum of American Art

reckoning. What will Americans make of the new artistic world in the teens and twenties? That’s what Stieglitz was calling for — what will modernism mean for us?” And, in Stieglitz’s mind, the abstract movement went hand-in-glove with the elevation of photography as an art form all its own. Demuth was not originally in the Stieglitz stable, but in 1921, when he became “one of us,” as O’Keeffe described him, she enjoyed his company immensely. A friend of the poet William Carlos Williams, he was elegant and urbane, a gay artist with a lively sense of humor but frail health. Though he turned to oils later in his life, he was best known as a lively watercolorist. As a mark of his friendship with O’Keeffe, when he passed away in 1935, he left all his oil paintings to her. Marin was introduced to Stieglitz by his friend and fellow photographer Edward Steichen and became enough of a commercial success to buy his own small island in Maine, where he lived during the summer. O’Keeffe admired his work, including a blue crayon abstract drawing. In Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, Roxana Robinson writes, “Its intimate scale and its clear aesthetic independence made it suddenly accessible to O’Keeffe: conceptually, this was very close to her own work. It occurred to her that if Marin could make a living selling this eccentric expression of a private aesthetic vision, then she might be able to do the same.” He was close enough to both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe to be a witness at their 1924 wedding. O’Keeffe’s first exposure to Dove at 291 was his painting Leaf Forms. After returning from Europe in 1909, Dove spent weeks camping alone in the woods. His abstract paintings “found a strong echo in Georgia’s developing aesthetic The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

philosophy,” writes Robinson. “Dove’s work validated her own inclinations . . . she sensed the deep affinity between them.” Dove was equally enamored. “That girl is doing without effort what all we moderns have been trying to do,” he said to the poet Jean Toomer. Walkowitz worked so closely with Stieglitz at 291 that in 1912 and again in 1914 Stieglitz exhibited the work of the children Walkowitz was teaching in a Lower East Side settlement house. In this exhibit, Walkowitz is represented by one of his 5000plus drawings of Isadora Duncan. “She had no laws. She did not dance according to the rules. She created,” Walkowitz said — words that he could have applied to O’Keeffe just as readily. Paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, and Auguste Rodin’s drawings were first shown in America at 291. Marin and Maurer appeared on their heels. Maurer, like O’Keeffe, had studied with William Merritt Chase. Maurer’s father created Currier and Ives lithographs and never approved of his son’s modernist leanings. Shortly after his father passed away at the age of 100, Maurer committed suicide. The mercurial Weber was responsible for Henri Rousseau’s first U.S. exhibit, and he helped introduce cubism to America, a thankless task in 1911. According to the art historian Milton Brown, he was rewarded with “one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America.” And it was an exhibition of Hartley’s work that first brought O’Keeffe to the 291 gallery where she met Stieglitz. Soon they would be lovers. Though the works linked to O’Keeffe as a collector, or perhaps appreciator, in the exhibit are not the precise pieces PineStraw

Alfred Henry Maurer, Landscape: Provence (circa 1916), oil on paper, mounted on board, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Gift of Emily and Milton Rose

she held in her collection, they are representative of those that were and of the relationships she enjoyed. Among the latter is her abiding friendship with Ansel Adams, who is represented by one of his prints of Yosemite Valley, a place O’Keeffe and Adams visited together. In a letter to Stieglitz, Adams wrote, “O’Keeffe is supremely happy and painting, as usual, supremely swell things. When she goes out riding with a blue shirt, black vest and black hat, she scampers around against the thunder clouds — I tell you, it’s something.” The exhibit includes a photograph of Adams and O’Keeffe taken by Adams’ assistant, Alan Ross. “Ansel Adams was the first professional photographer to capture her on camera and then in 1981, close to both of their deaths, she went back to Carmel, California, and, as she’s setting up, she’s sort of smiling, his assistant took a quick snapshot,” says Archer. Also included in this section of the exhibit is an Akari paper lantern by Isamu Noguchi similar to the one O’Keeffe alternately hung over her dining room table or her bed in her house in Abiquiu, New Mexico. There is a mobile by Alexander Calder — who designed the OK pin O’Keeffe wears in countless photos — that is analogous to the one O’Keeffe hung in her New Mexico home. A triptych of snow scenes done in the 1850s by Utagawa Hiroshige is also included as an homage to a similar threesome of Hiroshige woodblock prints from the same period that lived on the wall in O’Keeffe’s New Mexico home and are now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, naturally, there is a Stieglitz print, one of his most famous, also a snow scene. “I suddenly saw the Flat-Iron Building as I had never seen it before,” Stieglitz said. “It looked, from where I stood, as if it were moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of the new America which was in the making.” This intimate exhibition does not pretend to be, nor was it intended to be, an O’Keeffe retrospective. It does not deal with her complicated relationship with Stieglitz — who never ceased to promote O’Keeffe’s work — their lengthy affair before his divorce, their subsequent marriage and, later, his affair with his gallery director,

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Dorothy Norman. It doesn’t delve into her mental and physical breakdowns in the ’30s nor does it touch on the sexuality, male and female, that is often ascribed to O’Keeffe’s work and which she steadfastly refused to acknowledge. Like Stieglitz’s photo of the Flat Iron Building, O’Keeffe saw grandeur in her subjects. “She wanted the small things in nature that she loved to be just as impressive as the new trains and new planes,” says Archer, “to stop you in your tracks like you were looking at a skyscraper.” The tightly knit exhibit, like the Ross photo, is a snapshot of the artist. “I hope people will leave with a fuller image of O’Keeffe’s engagement with the art of her time,” says Archer. “She developed a persona — helped by Stieglitz — of the remote, contemplative, detached doyenne of the desert. But she was keenly interested in her contemporaries’ work and unstinting with both praise and criticism.” PS Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Alfred Steglitz, The Flatiron (1903), photogravure on tissue, courtesy of a private collection

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Golf’s Unsung Hero How a unique hobby helped restore a historic course By Bill Case 90

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

n 2009, Bob Dedman Jr. and Don Padgett II, the gentlemen in charge at the Pinehurst resort, decided to dramatically overhaul Pinehurst course No. 2, one of America’s foremost championship golf venues. They sensed that the layout, built by Donald Ross in 1907 and periodically tweaked thereafter by the legendary architect until his death in 1948, had lost some of its character. Starting around the early 1970s, Pinehurst had adopted the popular course maintenance formula of the era: lush green grass throughout the course, not just in the fairways. The native pine barren wire grasses and awkward sandy lies that confronted off-target golfers on No. 2 during Ross’ heyday largely disappeared. In their place came acres of 3-inch-deep irrigated grass. Too often, extrication from this cabbage could only be accomplished by hacking a wedge back to the fairway. To restore No. 2 in a manner that approximated how Ross had presented the course, Dedman and Padgett called upon esteemed course designers Bill Coore and two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw. The Coore & Crenshaw website describes its design philosophy as a blending of Bill’s and Ben’s “personal experience and admiration for the classical courses of Ross, MacKenzie, Macdonald, Maxwell, and Tillinghast to create a style uniquely their own.” The architects have a special connection to Pinehurst. Having already won in his professional debut, a 21-year-old Crenshaw nearly captured his second event as a pro, too, finishing second in the 1973 World Open, three strokes behind Miller Barber. The 144-hole marathon on No. 2 “stimulated my love for Pinehurst,” says Crenshaw. Coore, who grew up in Davidson County, North Carolina, was good enough to make Wake Forest University’s golf team and played No. 2 frequently in the 1960s, usually on $5 all-day passes. “There is no doubt,” he says, “that playing No. 2 gave me an appreciation of traditional, strategic golf courses that eventually pointed me in the direction of course architecture.” While Coore & Crenshaw’s selection was applauded in golf circles, more than a few aficionados wondered about the potential impact of a drastic change. Why make major modifications to a course that only recently had held one of golf’s most dramatic major championships, the 1999 U.S. Open? What was the benefit of eliminating rough in favor of native waste areas? Didn’t the United States Golf Association prefer deep rough and narrow fairways? Could changing the character of No. 2 jeopardize its status as a championship venue? Though they didn’t say so publicly at the time, Coore and Crenshaw also harbored misgivings. Coore knew that No. 2’s fairways had once stretched to nearly 50 yards in width. Now they averaged just 24 yards across. If the more generous dimensions were restored, would the USGA find fault or, worse yet, require the fairways be narrowed again for the 2014 men’s and women’s U.S. Opens? The two architects had no interest in undertaking No. 2’s restoration if it might do more harm than good. Mike Davis, who had been in charge of setting up U.S. Open courses for years and who would become executive director of the USGA in 2011, promised that modifications resulting from the restoration would not be undone by the USGA. Indeed, Davis himself had broached the concept of restoring No. 2 in discussions with Dedman and Padgett. But there remained a gnawing concern for Coore and Crenshaw — they wanted to know the precise details, dimensions and appearance of the course during the Ross era.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Bob Farren, the man in charge of maintaining the resort’s courses, provided an invaluable first clue. He advised that during the 1980s, his crew had uncovered the entirety of the abandoned fairway irrigation line that Ross had installed in 1932. Farren flagged the path of the defunct line for the architects. Its location confirmed that No. 2’s fairways had previously been configured in a more serpentine fashion. Due to mowing patterns, the fairways gradually became straighter in the 80 years following Ross’ placement of the irrigation line. Farren’s discovery enabled the architects to replot the location and dimensions of No. 2’s fairways to match the old Ross footprint. But puzzles remained. What did the old native areas look like? Had the location and shape of greens, tees and bunkers changed any over the years? How did Ross sculpt the bunkers? To find answers, Coore and Crenshaw paid a visit to Pinehurst’s Tufts Archives and combed its remarkable collection of historic photos. Their research proved useful in providing an overview of the course’s general appearance, but photos illustrating hole-by-hole details were few. And those that did exist were snapped at ground level. Bill and Ben had hoped to find aerial photos that might provide a clearer, to scale, perspective of No. 2’s architectural details. Though intimately familiar with Ross’ design style, absent more detailed photos, they were going to have to engage in a significant amount of guesswork. How could they be sure they were accurately restoring the course to the way Ross had left it or, at least, how he would be inclined to draw it up today? “Lord knows,” reflected Coore later, “we didn’t want to be known as the people who messed up No. 2.” Unbeknownst to the architects, help would soon be coming their way, in the form of Craig Disher, a 65-year-old Washington, D.C., resident who was a decade into retirement after a 31-year career with the National Security Administration. Disher was an enthusiastic golfer, typically scoring in the low 80s at Manor Country Club in nearby Rockville, Maryland. His zest for the game ultimately steered him toward an avocation of his own creation. It happened in 2004 after Disher read Lost Links, by Daniel Wexler. According to the book, various federal agencies had photographed vast portions of America from the air, and the millions of aerial images housed at Washington’s National Archives and Records Administration included many of golf courses. The United States Geological Service, the most prolific shutterbug among the agencies, had begun the process of photographing the country in the 1930s. There were various reasons for the program, one of which was inventorying America’s arable land. Even though crops aren’t customarily grown on recreational properties like golf courses, the USGS shot them anyway in the event the land might have to be used for food production or other necessities. This had actually taken place during World War II when “Victory Gardens” were patriotically planted on the nation’s courses, and cows grazed on the formerly pristine fairways of Augusta National Golf Club. Disher thought it would make for an enjoyable project to search for aerial pics of his home course, Manor CC, designed in 1922 by noted golf architect William Flynn. Besides, the place where the USGS images were stored, NARA, was just a 15-minute drive from Disher’s home. After being directed to the cartography and map research room on the third floor, he got a crash course on the ins and outs of researching and retrieving aerial images from NARA’s vast catalog. PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

FROM THE COLLECTION OF CRAIG DISHER

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Finding images taken in the USGS project wasn’t a particularly difficult task. Rolls of large 9x9 negatives kept in stored cans were indexed by state, county and date. After identifying the rolls pertaining to a particular county, a researcher would request them, then generally wait a day or two before they were made available. Once the rolls were in hand, the researcher could sift through them on a light table, hunting for particular negatives. The project was right up Disher’s alley. He enjoyed research and the patience, concentration, and persistence it required. A history major at Gettysburg College, his senior thesis (the evolution of Mao Zedong’s communist philosophy and politics) had necessitated innumerable hours wading through hundreds of magazines, newspapers and other documents at the Library of Congress. “Organizing and cross-referencing them in the era before computers was great training,” Disher says. “My research at NARA mirrored that experience.” His resourcefulness was augmented by life experiences. After college, during a stint in the U. S. Army, Disher received training in military interrogation at intelligence school and served as an interrogator during the Vietnam War. A significant portion of his employment at NSA had involved the deciphering of encrypted messages. As Disher puts it, that work, in contrast to library research, “primarily takes place in one’s head.” From NARA’s index, Disher found that rolls of negatives taken in Montgomery County, Maryland (Manor CC’s location), were available. He found aerial images of Manor taken during the years 1940, 1948 and 1951. He photographed the negatives, then used Photoshop on a computer at home. This resulted in sharp black-and-white photographs that depicted the Manor course in riveting detail. Delighted with the success of his search, Disher soon became a regular at the cartography and map research room, looking for and collecting aerial images of other golf courses in the Washington, D.C., area. It wasn’t long before his quest extended to courses that interested him around the United States. His most frustrating search involved the Lido Golf Club on Long Island, closed permanently due to wartime needs in 1942. Classic golf architecture devotees reverentially extoll this mystical links, ranking it among the finest ever built in the country. Locating aerial photos of Lido became something of a white whale for Disher, especially after he discovered USGS had not taken any photos in the area. Undeterred, Disher considered whether the Department of Defense might have photographed Lido. Before and during World War II, DOD had arranged for military installations and areas of strategic importance to be photographed from the air. NARA had materials relating to these aerial flights, but researching them could be vexing due to a lack of indexing. However, NARA did hold records showing the flight patterns of planes that had flown on aerial photography assignments. The paths were depicted by the drawing of black lines of the planes’ tracks on acetate sheets. By superimposing those sheets over a geological map, a researcher could determine the general area where photography had taken place.

Pinehurst No. 2 holes 1, 16, 17 and 18 from the 1943 Department of Defense aerial photography flight

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L-R: Ben Crenshaw, Pinehurst's Bob Farren and Bill Coore

The information on the acetate sheets had been converted to microfilm. To search for Lido, Disher “had to look at all the microfilm rolls showing tracks of aerial photography planes in Long Island prior to 1942. Each roll of microfilm had to be viewed from start to finish, stopping at each track image to see if it passed over the area of interest.” Once those track images and the associated roll of negatives were identified, Disher would order the can containing them. The wait for the cans took additional time, since DOD images were in cold storage outside of D.C. “It took me a month, but I finally found an undiscovered 1940 aerial photo of Lido,” he says. Disher shared the image with golf historians, and the highly detailed photograph subsequently appeared in several golf magazine articles, spurring an ongoing movement to someday recreate Lido’s majestic course. Slowly, people in golf became aware of Disher’s research. Given the architectural trend of restoring classic courses to their original design, old photos — especially aerials — were in high demand. Without any thought of benefitting financially from his unique hobby, Disher cheerfully shared access to his collection gratis with grateful golf clubs and course architects who asked for his help. Disher furnished them 16x20 prints of aerial photos that were used in field work. Later the same prints often found their way to clubhouse walls. In 2005, the avid golfer and his wife, Susan, acquired a vacation

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home in Pinehurst. This development, naturally, caused Disher to scope the USGS collection at NARA for images of No. 2. When he got wind of the fact that the Pinehurst resort intended to restore No. 2 to its original Donald Ross design, he thought the USGS photos might be of value to the architects. When he retrieved the images, Craig found to his frustration they lacked sufficient detail to be of much use. He wondered whether there was a possibility DOD might have also photographed the course. Pinehurst was only 26 miles from Fort Bragg, a base Disher knew well. During his ’60s hitch in the Army, his basic training had been at Bragg. Disher knew area flights involving aerial military photography likely would have departed from nearby Pope Air Force Base. He knew Pope, too. In 1968, he was deployed from there to Vietnam, where he had joined a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. Still, it was a long shot. Even if an aircraft had veered that far west, would the camera have been turned on and clicking after leaving the airspace over the base? Disher found and reviewed the track of a Christmas Day 1943 DOD flight of a plane photographing Fort Bragg. The track showed the plane had, indeed, traveled west toward Pinehurst, reaching the edge of the town before backtracking to Pope. Having identified the flight he was looking for, Disher asked to see the roll that would include the negatives. It would take a week before the roll arrived at NARA. Anxiously, Disher awaited the delivery of the Christmas Day flight photos. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Hole 7 - 1943 image (above); Hole 7 - 2011 image after restoration (below)

Hole 7 - 1943 image (above)

Restoration - after turf was removed but prior to the growth of native plants

When he finally flashed through the roll, Disher found the images of No. 2. He eyed what were, perhaps, the clearest aerial photos of a golf course he had yet encountered. While aloft over No. 2, the plane had flown lower than was customary. Who knows, maybe the pilot played golf and wanted to take an up-close look at the famous course. Regardless, the details shown of the bunker contouring, tee and green shapes, trees and native areas were strikingly vivid. The aerial camera, clicking away every few seconds, had also captured excellent images of the Pine Needles and Southern Pines courses. Through a mutual friend, Disher contacted Coore and informed the architect of his find. Arrangements were made for Coore and Crenshaw to stop by Disher’s home in Pinehurst to inspect the photos from the 1943 flight that encompassed the entirety of No. 2. Disher arranged them on his dining room table to appear as a single photograph. The architects were astonished at what they saw. The photos depicted exactly what they needed to assure themselves they were on the right track. As Crenshaw put it, “it was the confirmation we had been looking for.” With Disher’s photos serving as their guide, Coore and Crenshaw completed No. 2’s restoration in March 2011. Gone was the matted rough. In its place were the native areas that had characterized Ross’ course. Indigenous plants such as red sorrel, spiderwort and spotted beebalm now grew haphazardly off the fairways. Bunkers were reshaped with the scruffier edges that had marked their appearance in the 1943 aerials. Some bunkers were eliminated, others restored. Several tees were moved to restore the driving challenges Ross had envisioned. Based on the 1943 photograph, the 15th green was widened to its right side by one-third. With areas off the fairway no longer watered, the course looked browner and more natural. Seven hundred of No. 2’s 1,100 sprinkler heads were eliminated, trimming water use in half. Fairways were widened and shaped to approximate their dimensions during the Ross era, thus allowing for alternative routes for approaches into greens. The restoration was universally praised in golf circles, and the 2014 U.S. men’s and women’s Opens proved to be memorable successes. Fears that the changes to course No. 2 would render it too easy proved overblown. Only three men, including winner Martin Kaymer, and one woman, Michelle Wie, broke par. “Craig was so instrumental in our work at No. 2,” says Coore of Disher. “I’m not sure we could have accomplished what we did without him.” Disher became the go-to source for aerial photos of historic courses and has been called upon by architects like Ron Forse, Gil Hanse, Kyle Franz, Jim Urbina and Davis Love Jr. Now 76, Disher is gratified that what began as a pleasant diversion ended up contributing so much to golf. “My research introduced me to some of the nicest people I’ve ever met and taken me to golf courses I never dreamed I would see,” he says. “If you are searching for something you think can’t be found, it probably can be.” PS Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.

Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw - early stages of No. 2's restoration The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PineStraw

A Haven Mistletoe Farm — a sanctuary for creatures great and small

of a Place

By Claudia Watson Photographs by L aura Gingerich

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

dreamy fog lifts from the pond below, softening the profiles of the distant trees as a chorus of field crickets, grasshoppers and late summer cicadas offer a prelude to the day’s soundtrack. It wasn’t long before we saw them, several tiny heads peering from the water on the far side of the pond. Lookouts. When her sneakers hit the dock, and they hear the call, a flotilla of three dozen pond sliders and one giant snapping turtle rush in, grabbing the fish food she tosses. The day begins and ends with this routine at Mistletoe Farm, the 11-acre Southern Pines farm of Drs. Jeff and Lynda Acker, where even the farm’s name suggests the couple’s gentleness for all living things. Mistletoe, Lynda’s Belgian-cross horse, was rescued from a ski resort, where she pulled a sleigh. The Ackers brought her to this farm when they relocated from Asheville. “She was a 2,000-pound golden retriever. She’d come up behind me and lick me on the head and follow me everywhere,” Lynda recalls while tossing more food to the turtles. “We encourage everything here.” Then, prompted by the honking of a skein of Canada geese, she points to the pasture. “There’s a straggler Muscovy duck over there, a bit of a loner. We have at least one beaver family, green and blue herons, snowy egrets, kingfishers and killdeer. Little nuthatches nest in the post,” she says, showing the spot on the dock. Soon, her husband, Jeff, arrives, and they grapple with the rowboat set ajar. “It’s got water in the bottom from the storm. We need to drain it,” she says. Though the sun’s up and there are chores to be done, they settle instead into weathered Adirondack chairs at the pond’s edge to enjoy morning coffee together. When Lynda isn’t busy with farm chores, she’s often tending to serene spaces for healing and restoration. Her work includes the Healing Garden at the Clara McLean House and the Hospice Gardens at FirstHealth Hospice and Palliative Care. In addition, she’s been instrumental in developing the Native Pollinator Garden at the Village Arboretum in Pinehurst, and pollinator and ornamental gardens at The O’Neal School. Now, she’s working with a team to select the plants for two healing gardens at FirstHealth’s new cancer center in Pinehurst. Her efforts are more than a hobbyist’s interest; she joyfully immerses herself in her endeavors. Most assume Lynda’s a botanist or etymologist because of her broad knowledge of plants and insects, specifically pollinators, but she is, at heart, a self-taught naturalist. “I’m a biology nerd,” she says. “Sponge-like for certain topics, and my ears perk up when it’s an interesting subject.”

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

After obtaining a bachelor’s and master’s in biology and a Ph.D. in molecular physiology, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University. Then, she was off to the corporate world with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, finally founding and running a clinical documentation firm. Though she spent years in business suits and high heels or a lab coat, Lynda says the most authentic time is when she’s out with either a shovel or fishing pole in her hand. “My love of nature was planted, excuse the pun, very organically,” she says. Her father was a conservation officer at Chautauqua Lake, a 17-mile-long lake in western New York famous for its muskellunge (muskie), one of the largest freshwater fish native to North America. She grew up with a rescued deer fawn in their garage and a fishing pole in her hand by the age of 3. As a youngster, she ice-fished in huts on the lake with her father, along with “a bunch of Swedish men eating pickled herring and telling stories.” She had her muskie tags at 8 and, to this day, loves pickled herring. But it’s always been the curiosities of nature that captured her attention. “I’d line up buckets in the backyard and monitor live experiments with minnows and mosquitoes,” she recalls. Her first job featured worms. “At night, I’d go out with my white cat, Zucchini, and a flashlight to pull nightcrawlers out of the ground. I’d get two cents apiece, and Dad would steer all the fisherman my way,” she says. “I had a big box full and loved to watch them crawl.” The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

She also spent hours exploring the fields around their home in Chautauqua, often tunneling through the tall grasses, observing insects, then matting down a spot in the cool grass to sit, think and dream about someday going head-first into nature. The Ackers return to Chautauqua often and spend several weeks there during the summer. Now, Lynda is a lecturer on native gardens, monarch butterflies and pollinators at Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education center.

ike an alarm clock, when the sun’s rays hit the beehive, warming it, the honeybees fly. At every turn, there’s a delight. Vividly colored flowers provide nectar for the native bees and honeybees. Plump red raspberries cling to their canes, begging to drop into your mouth. And a single, peachy pink “Lady Ashe” rose, given to Lynda by the Healing Garden’s original rosarian, Bill Shore, joyfully opens to the sun. The quiet is broken by Lynda’s high-pitched call, “Come on, chickees.” A parade of eager chickens, including Prairie Bluebells, Asian Blacks, Silkies and hefty Brahma hens, emerge from all corners. The chickens’ clucking oddly melds with the soft rock music coming from a rusty radio strapped to the fence. “It keeps the raccoons away and helps calm the chickens,” she explains while sprinkling dried mealworms as a treat for the chickens. “The beach music on Sunday mornings is their favorite.” PineStraw

The chicken enclosure and multiple hoop houses are wrapped with hardware cloth to protect them from predators. Netting stretches across the top. It keeps the hawks away from the chickens but lets the songbirds and pollinators inside. Snakes are another issue. “They freak me,” says Lynda, wincing as she turns to husband Jeff, a radiation oncologist affiliated with Moore Regional Hospital. He handles the oft-required repairs to the enclosure and deals with predator issues, among other tasks. “We have a lot of black snakes. When the egg count dwindles, I’ll search for it and relocate it to the other side of the pond,” he says. “Of course, it’ll find its way back.” A tasty abundance fills the vegetable and fruit hoop houses. Tomatoes, peppers, garlic, root vegetables, beans, 20 types of herbs, and a beautiful row of celery fill the space. Organic parsley is everywhere and covered in eastern swallowtail caterpillars that favor it. It’s planted in the hoop houses to protect the caterpillars from the chickens. “Oh, there’s an egg,” exclaims Lynda with delight, pointing to a tiny white ball on the top of a leaf. Evidence of the butterfly’s visit. Dozens of southern highbush (Vaccinium formosum) and rabbiteye blueberry bushes (Vaccinium virgatum) flourish in two blueberry houses. When the berries ripen, walk-by grazing is encouraged. Later, Lynda’s up on a ladder, attaching stiff mesh Japanese fruit bags to protect clusters of Concord grapes, other varieties of bunch-

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ing grapes, and the regional favorite, muscadines. Though she prefers Concords, they don’t do well in our climate. “The Chautauqua Lake area is home to Welch’s grape juice and jam. I grew up on the Concord grapes grown in the region, and they remain my favorite. The grapes in these bags are the good ones for our table,” she says. “The chickens and mockingbirds get the rest.” Fig trees complete the garden. Both a single Brown Turkey (Ficus carica ‘Brown Turkey’) and two Celeste (Ficus carica ‘Celeste’) trees provide a sweet snack. Unfortunately, not for her. “My bees eat them before I can,” she says while warily picking one. “Once they crack open, you don’t want to pick it. The honeybees will be in it.” Figs, she explains, are a food source for bees, and the sweet fruit significantly pumps up the bees’ honey yields. It’s a short walk up the hill where an elegant lanceleaf Japanese maple (Acer palmatum var. dissectum) graces the entry to the iron and glass greenhouse. When the Ackers built the greenhouse, they, like most, wanted a place where they could grow plants that wouldn’t normally grow here and also to extend their growing season. For many years, it was a hub of activity. Boston ferns overwintered. They adopted massive staghorn ferns (Platycerium spp.) from friends who migrated here from Florida. An enormous schefflera made this home after starting life as a bonsai in Hawaii. And that rubber tree? “It was a houseplant, and for some reason, it ended up in here,” The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

explains Lynda as she looks up through the plant’s canopy, which touches the greenhouse’s ceiling. “It grew through the table and took root in the ground. We’ve cut it back several times, but it owns the place now.” When the greenhouse was humming, Lynda added praying mantises and green lacewings to the mix to keep the pest insects down. “I’d find baby praying mantises everywhere, and it was so magical,” she recalls. Today, the greenhouse gives the couple a quiet place to repot plants over the winter months. “There are days I’ll come out here for a dose of sunshine and peace,” says Lynda, who found it a haven during the pandemic. “I don’t know what I’d do without nature. It makes me tick. It’s always been the underpinning of my life.” The climate in the greenhouse is perfect for Jeff to start hundreds of milkweed seedlings each winter. Most seedlings are destined for the Village Heritage Foundation’s annual spring plant sale to benefit the Native Pollinator Garden. But the pièce de resistance is the monarch waystation habitat. The waystation provides food and habitat for the struggling monarch butterfly population. Unfortunately, the monarch and other pollinators, like native bees and honeybees, are in a stunning decline. Scientists say it’s due to the loss of the insects’ habitat, the increased use of pesticides and herbicides, and environmental change. Jeff’s domain is the waystation, located on the steep slope of the dam at the edge of the big pond. “I handle the planting, weeding and maintenance of this area. We don’t use any herbicides or pesticides, so it’s all done the old-fashioned way, by hand,” he says. “Planting is a process, and there aren’t shortcuts.” His shovel hits the hard ground with a thwack. “It’s solid clay, so every time I plant, I dig a big hole and fill it with good dirt. That’s why there’s a big compost pile over there.” Though a layer of pine straw helps hold the soil moisture and keeps the weeds down, the recent addition of irrigation gives young plants a better chance to get established. “It’s also very welcome, since Jeff spent many a late afternoon roasting in nearly 100-degree heat watering the area,” adds Lynda. The Ackers’ goal is to keep planting nectar plants and milkweed.

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Milkweed is the only plant on which monarchs lay their eggs, and their caterpillars feed. Last year, unfortunately, the Ackers ran out. “Toward the end of the season, we had so many caterpillars that we had to leave many of them on the plants,” explains Jeff. If hand-raised, monarchs’ survival rate is likely to reach 80-95 percent, far exceeding the meager 2-10 percent of monarchs that survive to become butterflies in the wild. They’ve had spotty results with common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), the plant most people associate with the word “milkweed.” It blooms from late April until mid-May, which is suitable for the first generation of monarchs, those offspring of monarchs from Mexico hatched in the south and migrating north to lay eggs. “The milkweed is finally getting established and running,” he says. It spreads by underground rhizomes and is better suited for large fields and pastures. Plus, the butterflies don’t favor it when there’s butterfly weed nearby. “Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) stays small, and it will selfseed an area, so it is great in the garden,” he says. It’s also the variety he raises from seed each winter. Showy pink swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) prefers mucky or very moist soil, so they’ve planted it near the water’s edge. In addition, there are many other types of host and nectar plants to attract a wide range of pollinator species. Some favorites include dog-toothed daisy (Helenium autumale), which puts on quite a show in late August. The heat and drought-tolerant lanceleaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata) brings a big splash of yellow. And the sweet vanilla scent of Joe-pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) is irresistible to pollinators. Dragonflies prefer the long-blooming purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and spiky prairie blazing star (Liatris spicata) for landing sites. Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis) and boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) attract native bees. Lynda also plants the seeds of the fluffy-plumed purple celosia (Celosia argentea), which grows tall and needs the support of the fence near the hoop houses. Delicate, poppy-like windflowers, commonly called anemones, and a bed of colorful mixed coreopsis

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

sway in the breeze, attracting different species. But Lynda’s favorite is the brightly colored Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia). Though it’s non-native, it’s striking and non-invasive. Its orange, zinnia-type flower is the “hands-down best bee and butterfly magnet,” she says. But it’s gangly, growing 4-to-6-feet, so best suited for the back of a border. Mistletoe Farm is a living laboratory. Lynda’s excitement for nature is contagious, and before you know it, you’re walking softly and looking at the details. “Oh, look,” she says and points. “Here’s a native bee asleep on the goldenrod (Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks’). It has a drop of dew on it — they are so tiny and beautiful. There are over 4,000 types of native bees. About half are in serious trouble, and many are extinct. Since all are solitary, there is not a hive to go back to, so they curl up, like this little guy, and sleep on a plant.” Lynda explains that native bees often lay their eggs in tunnels they make in riverbanks, barren slopes, a root ball or the edge of a forest. “Those are the places people often tag as unsightly, and it is bye-bye bee habitat. Or they see a bee and spray it,” she says. “Over there is a gorgeous dragonfly, and all the little skippers flitting around, and a moth — all so beautiful. It just makes me nuts when I see someone spraying pesticides. Look at what they’re missing. What The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

are they thinking? Oh, I saw a bug I don’t like, so let’s kill everything.” Lynda encourages everyone to visit a waystation for a rich learning experience. Then, plant one. “It can be a small garden planted with some milkweed and nectar plants. Or plant fields of it. It all helps the monarchs on their journey north then back again to overwinter in Mexico,” she says. “Pollinator gardens in our backyards, parks and school gardens will help end habitat fragmentation and the loss of our pollinators. Then, we’ll have a far more viable and vibrant natural community.” Lynda readily admits she enjoys seeing visitors in the area’s pollinator gardens. “When I see them with their grandchildren, and they are pointing out the native plants and pollinators by name, it’s so gratifying,” she says. “They’re passing along the knowledge to our future generations, and those generations are our best hope for our planet.” Mistletoe Farm feeds the senses with its extraordinary and complex beauty. It is not just a meadow, a pond, a vegetable garden or a waystation, but the sum of the whole — a sanctuary for all creatures, great and small.” PS Claudia Watson is a regular contributor to PineStraw and The Pilot. If there’s a garden that you’d like her to visit, email cwatson87@nc.rr.com. PineStraw

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The Other White House Retirement leaps out of the rocking chair, into the barn By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Gessner

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heir go-to color is a non-color, white. For Elizabeth “Boo” DeVane and her husband, Ron Gibson, this preference starts at home, where a white wooden porch swing hangs from an ancient pin oak centering the circular driveway, flanked by white gateposts. Their white brick house on a sculpted five acres near the PinehurstAberdeen line explores other possibilities: white, barely touched with green for most interior walls; hardwood floors painted glossy white; white area rugs and white upholstery. Gradually, in rooms off a “spine” hallway that runs the width of the house, pure (but never stark) white melts into vanilla, cloud, sand, latte, putty, ash and, finally, cocoa. Even the English bulldog, Bella, continues the palette. Beyond the white-out, in the sunroom bay stands a gleaming black baby grand, which Ron plays. Off the living room, a darkened alcove holds two 180-gallon tanks, one run by a computer, both protected from power outages by a designated generator, containing an aquarium-worthy array of tropical fish and live coral. Their plumage and movements — calming, mesmerizing. They are Ron’s babies. Boo’s babies decorate the landscape visible through arched, elaborately framed oversized windows — two quarter horses (one white, one tan) and young donkey twin sisters (grayishbeige and very friendly) who live in a white barn adjoining the pasture. Bella has her own grassy enclosure surrounded by a white picket fence. However, Boo — born on Halloween, nicknamed by her brother — and Ron have not forsaken all color. They collect art . . . bold, exciting canvases in primary hues selected by Boo’s educated eye. A room at the Fayetteville Museum of Art was dedicated to her parents, collectors Jim and Betty DeVane. Ron and Boo, handsome retirees oozing energy, lived previously in Fayetteville and Topsail Beach. He was a school psychologist and military consultant specializing in autism. Boo left North Carolina at 18, attended New York University and worked in Manhattan managing arts-related nonprofits before returning to the family business. Along the way she accumulated interior design experience implemented by friend, designer and fellow horsewoman Cathy Maready. In retirement, Ron’s tan comes from gardening, not golf. Boo works with rescued horses. How they met and accidentally eloped to Costa Rica after a 12-week courtship resembles

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a 1990s date flick starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. The equestrian community drew them to Moore County, first on an isolated farm, then a too-small house in Pinehurst. Let’s reverse the retirement trend and upsize, they decided. “While Ron was away, I checked around to see what was out there,” Boo recalls. Tinker Bell couldn’t have found anything more perfect. Twin Oaks Farm, as they named it, was built in 1997 by Robert Clarke, a California “architect to the stars,” for his own family. This usually bodes well for materials and originality. Clarke’s home, however, presented a mixed bag, with those top-dollar windows sited for maximum natural light but Pergo laminate floors and a small unimaginative kitchen. Fixable, Boo decided. The five overgrown acres beckoned gardener Ron. Boo envisioned two pastures and a barn, which they built after moving in. Both were fascinated with the ceilings: vaulted, angled, slanted, mansard, one with a clerestory which draws light into the white living room, another supported by a trapezoidal beam — anything but flat. They grabbed the house in 2019 and went to work. Up came the Pergo, down went hardwood covered with layers of glossy white paint. The story-and-a-half floorplan remained intact except for the kitchen, which Boo gutted and replaced with something from a magazine. The result, definitely not white, stands apart from Pinehurst glamour kitchens. It’s a moderately-sized galley with a worktable, no island, earth tones, clean lines and natural

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materials that impart an Asian aura. Countertops are marble but not tombstone white. Instead, they have a brown-grey toned leather finish, the same coloration appearing on wood cabinetry, dishwasher and refrigerator fronts. Cupboards are textured metal and frosted glass. A small coffee bar faces a smaller wine rack. No fauxfarm sink, no visible breakfast bar until Ron, with a wicked smile, draws a folded flat surface from beneath the countertop, opens it out and pulls up two chairs. Just as original is a small gas fireplace sealed waist-high into a brick column — instant comfort on a chilly morning. There’s no formal dining room, either, just a large sunroom adjacent to the kitchen, with a round hammered copper table seating eight. Woven area rugs, upholstery and linens in the main floor master suite and guest bedroom combine pale earth tones with tiny geometrics. Several family antiques — including a secretary and drop-leaf table Boo grew up with and a guitar from Ron’s father — blend nicely with metal headboards and a reupholstered slipper chair from Ron’s mother. Fearlessly, in the hallway and master bedroom Boo added massive tables and benches fashioned from tree-trunks. Their heavily glossed knots and grains contrast to more delicate patterns and colors used throughout, including shimmering drapes in the guest bedroom, the only window with a fabric covering. Stairs to the second floor rise from near the end of that spine hallway. Here, Boo has an office-sitting room furnished with less white and more brown, although her desk is assembled from a distressed white antique door, its frame serving as legs. She repeats the wall-enclosed gas fireplace for thermal and decorative purposes. The upstairs bedroom, prettier than a coastal B&B, accommodates Boo’s adult children when they visit. Boo really lets loose in the bath-

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rooms, perhaps to compensate for original white tiles outlined in black, which she disliked. However, instead of ripping them out, she let the geometrics set a tone. One wallpaper is made from shredded newspaper while another is black curls splashed against a white background. Whimsy rules the upstairs bathroom, where black stick figures in colorful garb imitate the drawings of Paul Klee or, perhaps, Wassily Kandinsky. As for art, all bets are off. Pale earth tones don’t apply. Brightlyhued animal subjects include a folk art pig in one bathroom, a fanciful horse head by local artist Meridith Martens in the hallway, and upstairs, a bright, cartoonish guinea hen with a story. They saw it, liked it, but it was gone when they returned to purchase it, expense be damned. Years later, guess what showed up in another gallery? Their favorite painting is an abstract in warm Southwestern colors by Dan Namingha, a Hopi artist from New Mexico featured at the Smithsonian Institution and British Royal Collection in London. The grounds satisfy Ron’s near-metaphysical connection to nature, developed as a backpacker in Colorado. Not only did he remove overgrown crape myrtles and Japanese pears, he grew weed-free grass from seed, which he crops closely on his riding mower. “I’m like a kid, riding along with my headphones on,” he says. Flowers are absent, The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

except for a few perennials, always in what Ron calls “calm colors, no yellows except for daffodils.” Boxwoods are trimmed into curves, not flat-tops or angles or topiary. A small Tuscan-style garden with fountain and pergola located just outside the dining room brings greenery up close. Ron and Boo are busy retirees who miraculously report agreement on all decisions concerning the house. Ron admits he’s happiest with a project. Next up: an aquarium store in Wilmington. Boo mucks her own barn. She wants to rehab needy racehorses. For now, she feeds the menagerie, spends time in the heated, air-conditioned gazeboturned-tack room adjoining the barn, a veritable girl-cave filled with equestrian equipment and memorabilia that sometimes doubles as a meeting place for their Bible study group. What’s missing? Enormous TVs plastered on multiple walls and laptops galore. “The world was a better place” before electronics took over, Ron believes. He and Boo have other toys: two horses, two donkeys, one dog, one barn cat, two aquariums, five acres, plenty to do and the strength to do it. “This is a place of peace,” Ron says. Boo adds, “We’re going to try to keep everything standing and moving forward, including ourselves. We are blessed.” PS PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

A L M A N A C

September n

The goldenrod is yellow; The corn is turning brown; The trees in apple orchards With fruit are bending down. — Helen Hunt Jackson, “September”

By Ashley Wahl

eptember is deliciously subtle. Like a sly smile in a moment of silent recognition. The last wave of swallowtails graces the garden. Dinner plate dahlias resemble colorful mandalas and sun-dappled muscadines spill from the vine. Life hums along. Hummingbirds drink from red spider lilies. The air, too, is like nectar — sweet as it’s been all summer — but something is different. Something not yet palpable. The trees know, leaves whispering ancient incantations to merge with root and earth. The first to surrender glow with radiant splendor. They cling to nothing, unattached to their green summer glory or the luminous journey to come. Weeks from now, tree swallows will gather by the hundreds at dusk, swirling across the sky like cryptic, flickering apparitions. But today, sunlight kisses goldenrod. Robins dip and shimmy in warm, shallow water. Plump bees float in endless circles. By evening, the air is slightly cooler, or so it seems. And at twilight, when shadows dance in the periphery, a mourning dove cries out. Coo-OO-oo. Beyond a wild tangle of late summer flowers and grasses, a red fox flashes past, here and gone with the last whisper of golden light. As darkness falls, all at once it’s clear: Elusive autumn has returned, creeping into consciousness like an impish melody — a dark, playful secret on the tip of your tongue.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Harvest Season

The Autumnal Equinox occurs on Wednesday, September 22. The days are growing shorter. As for the glorious bounty of summer? It’s harvest time. Praise for the apples, pears and figs. Cucumbers, peppers and eggplant. As the garden gives and gives, offer thanks for the tender young salad greens; the last plump tomatoes; the earliest pumpkins and winter squashes. And don’t forget the edible flowers. Like lavender (sweet and minty), marigold (transform your stir fries) and snapdragons (bitter, perhaps, but they sure are gorgeous).

The Meadow Queen

If you’re wondering where that faint yet lingering vanilla fragrance is coming from, stop and smell the purple joe-pye weed — unless you’re allergic. As the story goes, Eupatorium purpureum received its common name — joe-pye — after a gentleman of the same name presumably used the wild plant to cure typhoid fever. An herbaceous perennial of the sunflower family, joe-pye is a native species that blooms in later summer and attracts a host of bees, butterflies and moths. Also known as kidneyroot, feverweed and Queen of the Meadow, when this towering beauty begins to bloom — clusters of pinkish-purple flowers exploding from 7-foot stalks — watch and listen closely: Summer’s swan song is nigh. PineStraw

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Arts Entertainment C A L E N DA R

Cabin Tours 9/

Although conscientious effort is made to provide accurate and up-to-date information, all events are subject to change and errors can occur! Please call to verify times, costs, status and location before planning or attending an event. JOY OF ART STUDIO. Summer Celebrate Your Creativity. For all ages. Painting, drawing and mixed media. Offering both private and small groups with safe distance. Classes are held at Joy of Art Studio, 139 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Suite B, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 528-7283 or www. joyof-art.com or www.facebook.com/Joyscreativespace/. RENT THE SUNRISE. 10 a.m. - 9 p.m. Rent the Sunrise Theater for your private event. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Email MaryBeth@sunrisetheater. com to help you plan your special night out at the Sunrise. SCAVENGER HUNT. Pick up scavenger hunts at the Given Book Shop, Given Memorial Library or online at www.giventufts.org/program-and-events. The scavenger hunt will take you through the Village of Pinehurst, and there will be multiple themes such as science, shapes, historic buildings and more. Given Book Shop, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. BOOK SALE. Stop by and check out the “welcome back” sale. This month’s sale is buy one, get one on animals, gardening, science, sports and travel books. Given Book Shop, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: (910) 295-3642. Friday, September 3 BBQ FESTIVAL. 5 p.m. The Pinehurst Barbecue Festival celebrates “All Things Barbecue” in North Carolina. The event continues through Sept. 5. 6 Chinquapin Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. OPENING RECEPTION. 5 - 7 p.m. This exhibit is titled “Species . . . from the Minds of Sanderson & Conrad.” The exhibit will be on display through Sept. 23. Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-3979. FIRST FRIDAY. 5 - 8 p.m. This free concert to support the Sunrise Theater features live music provided by the bluegrass band Fireside Collective. Food trucks, sponsors, refreshments and beer from Southern Pines Brewery will be available. No outside alcohol, rolling coolers or dogs permitted. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3611 or www.sunrisetheater.com. THEATER SHOW. 7:30 p.m. Sandhills Repertory Theatre presents America’s Sweethearts. There will be two more shows on Sept. 4 at 7:30 p.m. and Sept. 5 at 2 p.m. Bradshaw

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Performing Arts Center, Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. ART SHOW. View the art exhibit featuring work from members of the Sandhills Photography Club and glassblower Wayne Manning. The exhibit will be open through Sept. 24. Campbell House Galleries, 482 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2787 or www.mooreart.org. Saturday, September 4 DROP-IN CRAFTS. All day. Children and teens are invited to Drop-In Craft Days at the library to work on crafts at their own pace. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net. DOCUMENTARY. 2 and 6 p.m. On Broadway. As audiences prepare for the return of live theater after an unprecedented absence of 18 months, an all-star cast tells the inside story of the last time Broadway came back from the brink. Tickets are $10 per person. There will be more showings on Sept. 5 at 2 p.m. and Sept. 6 at 7 p.m. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3611 or www.sunrisetheater.com. Tuesday, September 7 ADULT STORY TIME. 12 p.m. Take a break from your busy day and join us for a story time designed for adults. Bring a lunch and listen to Audrey Moriarty read some of her favorites. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: 910-295-3642. CREATIVITY CLUB. 4 p.m. Creativity Club celebrates the many ways to be creative, such as drawing, crafting and writing. This month, participants will learn about watercolors and practice different painting techniques. For grades K - 5. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net. Wednesday, September 8 VIRTUAL BOOK EVENT. 12 - 1 p.m. Join us for a virtual author event with Chef Bai (Bailey Ruskus), author of the cookbook Cook. Heal. Go Vegan! Registration required. Organized by The Country Bookshop. Tickets and info: www.ticketmesandhills.com. WOMAN’S EXCHANGE OPENING. 10 a.m. The Sandhills Woman’s Exchange opens for the fall season and the beginning of its 100th year celebration. Stop by for lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. or shop in the gift shop from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sandhills Woman’s Exchange, 15 Azalea Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-4677 or www. sandhillswe.org.

Sip and Savor 9/

Thursday, September 9 SENIOR TRIP. 7:30 a.m. - 4 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to travel with Southern Pines Recreation & Parks to Midland, N.C., to tour the Reed’s Gold Mine. Explore underground tunnels and learn the history behind the mine. Afterward enjoy shopping at the Owl’s Antique Mall before heading to lunch. Cost to participate is $17 for residents of Southern Pines and $34 for non-residents. To register visit Catalog - Southern Pines Recreation & Parks (rec1.com). Bus will depart from Campbell House playground parking lot, 450 E. New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines, at 7:30 a.m. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376 or https://secure. rec1.com/NC/southern-pines-nc/catalog. GATHERING AT GIVEN. 3:30 p.m. Dolores Muller, writer and master gardener, will talk about things you need to attract birds to your yard. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: (910) 295-3642. Friday, September 10 THEATER SHOW. 7:30 p.m. The Encore Center will be performing Steel Magnolias. There are more performances on Sept. 11 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., Sept. 12 at 2 p.m., Sept. 17 at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 18 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and Sept. 19 at 2 p.m. Info and tickets: (910) 725-0603 or www.tix.com/ ticket-sales/encorecenter/6154. OUTDOOR MOVIE. 8 p.m. The Princess Bride. The movie will play outside the Sunrise Theater but will be moved indoors in the event of inclement weather. There will be a second showing on Sept. 11 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 per person. Bring a chair or blanket. No outside food or pets. Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3611 or www.sunrisetheater.com. Saturday, September 11 SATURDAY KIDS PROGRAM. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Join us to explore fall activities and crafts throughout the library. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: (910) 295-3642. COVERED WAGON PHOTO. 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Take a picture with our historic covered wagon. Wagon master Robert Hussey of Robbins will be at the Sandhills Woman’s Exchange with his wagon from days gone by. Sandhills Woman’s Exchange, 15 Azalea Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-4677 or www.sandhillswe.org. MARKETPLACE ON THE SUNRISE SQUARE. 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. An outdoor market provides shoppers access to numerous artisans, small businesses and organizations in a safe, fresh air environment. Pop-up shops are scattered

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CA L E N DA R around the Sunrise Square park. Dogs are not permitted. Sunrise Square, 260 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3611 or www.sunrisetheater.com. CONCERT ON THE GREEN. 6:30 - 9:30 p.m. Singer/ songwriter Abigail Dowd performs. No outside food or drink allowed. Food and beer trucks will be on-site. BPAC’s McNeill-Woodward Green, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. Sunday, September 12 POP UP IN THE PINES. The Mini Market Series, organized by Marie & Marcele Boutique. Hatchet Brewing Co., 490 S.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: mariemarcele@ gmail.com. WRITING GROUP. 3 p.m. Interested in creating fiction, nonfiction, poetry or comics? Connect with other writers and artists, chat about your craft and get feedback on your work. All levels are welcome. The session will meet at the library. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: lholden@sppl.net. CABIN TOURS. 2 - 4 p.m. Come tour the Bryant House and McLendon Cabin and learn about the historical and cultural significance of these structures. There will be a second tour on Sept. 26. Bryant House, 3361 Mt. Carmel Road, Carthage. Info: (910) 692-2051 or www.moorehistory.com. Monday, September 13 LITWITS BOOK CLUB. 4 p.m. This club is perfect for third- through sixth-graders who enjoy talking about books and meeting new friends. Each month, multiple copies of the chosen book will be available for checkout at the library. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or email: kstockdale@ sppl.net. Thursday, September 16 LUNCH ‘N’ LEARN. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Our first Lunch ‘n’ Learn for the fall season features “The Hope Diamond.” Dorothy Gibson will help the Sandhills Women’s Exchange

celebrate its centennial diamond year with her talk, which will be limited to 32 participants. Cost is $25 per person and includes a delicious lunch from Chef Katrina Taylor. Sandhills Woman’s Exchange, 15 Azalea Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-4677 or www.sandhillswe.org. AUTHOR EVENT. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. Join an in-person author event with Gervais Hagerty talking about his book, In Polite Company. The event is free but registration is required. CCNC, 1600 Morganton Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. READ BETWEEN THE PINES. 5:30 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. CIVIL WAR ROUND TABLE. 6:30 p.m. The speaker for this meeting will be retired Lt. Col. Harold Knudsen, with a presentation on “The Confederacy’s Most Modern General: James Longstreet and the Civil War.” Meeting starts at 7 p.m. Open to the public. Civic Club, corner of Pennsylvania and Ashe St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 2460452 or mafarina@aol.com. Friday, September 17 MOVIES IN THE PARK. 7:30 p.m. Frozen 2. Join Southern Pines Recreation & Parks for an outdoor movie. Downtown Park, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376. Saturday, September 18 DROP-IN CRAFTS. All day. Children and teens are invited to Drop-In Craft Days at the library to work on crafts at their own pace. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net. BLUEGRASS MUSIC. 3 - 8 p.m. Come hear the music of Nefesh Mountain at Laurelyn Dossett’s music barn, The Ramble on Big Creek, 2741 Lynchburg Road, Westfield, N.C. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. BOOK EVENT. 4 - 5 p.m. Nathaniel Philbrick joins The Country Bookshop to discuss his book, Travels with George:

In Search of Washington and His Legacy. Hannah Center Theater, 3300 Airport Road, Southern Pines. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. SOCIAL DANCE. 6 p.m. Carolina Pines Dance Club invites you for an evening of fun, music and dancing. Dance lessons begin at 6:30 p.m. Dancing until 9:30 p.m. Swing, shag, ballroom, Latin and line dancing. Beginning and experienced dancers, couples and singles all welcome. Cost is $15 cash at door. National Athletic Village, 201 Air Tool Drive, Southern Pines. Info: 724-816-1170. Sunday, September 19 COMPUTER PROGRAM. 2 - 3 p.m. Stop by the library for “Computers: How Do They Work?” This program is intended for absolute beginners and will teach the basics of using a computer, like navigating a keyboard and mouse. Bring your questions and get answers in a welcoming environment. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net. Tuesday, September 21 BINGO. 1 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to come play 10 games of bingo. Prizes given to the winners. Cost is $2 for Southern Pines residents and $4 for non-residents. Space is limited to 24 participants. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376. CREATIVITY CLUB. 4 p.m. Creativity Club celebrates the many ways to be creative, such as drawing, crafting and writing. This month, participants will learn about watercolors and practice different painting techniques. For grades K - 5. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net. Friday, September 24 STUFFED ANIMAL SLEEPOVER. 4 p.m. Have you ever wondered what happens in the library when it’s closed? Drop off your stuffed animal for a sleepover at the library. Participants and their stuffed animal friends are invited to join us at 4 p.m. for story time and a craft. Then, pick up

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September 3-5

2021 Pinehurst Barbecue Festival

Village of Pinehurst September 4, 5, & 6

America’s Sweethearts in “History Through Harmony”

Owen’s Auditorium September 8

Chef Bailey Ruskus Cook. Heal. Go Vegan

The Country Bookshop (online) September 11

A Climb to Remember 20th Anniversary of 9/11

New York Ave. in Southern Pines September 11

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Concert on the Green Abigail Dowd’s “Beautiful Day”

BPAC’s McNeill Woodward Green September 18

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the Ramble on Big Creek, feat. Nefesh Mountain

The Ramble on Big Creek September 24

“Shall We Gather” feat. Lucas Meachum

Owens Auditorium September 25

Run for Recovery

Moore Re-Creations September 25

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Wiley Cash Author Event

The Country Bookshop September 26

“Come Sunday” Jazz Brunch

Weymouth Center September 26

Gathering for the Pines Sip & Savor

Sandy Woods Farm September 29

Supper on the Grounds Weymouth Center

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CA L E N DA R your friend Saturday, Sept. 25 from 10 - 11 a.m. and enjoy a special breakfast treat. This event is open to children ages 3 - 9. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

terflies and other pollinators with a day of family fun and educational activities. There will be arts and crafts, tours, live music and more. Village Arboretum, Pinehurst. Info: www.villageheritagefoundation.org.

Saturday, September 25 RUN FOR RECOVERY. 8:30 a.m. - 12 p.m. Join Drug Free Moore County in celebration of those who are living in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and help to raise awareness of the obstacles that stand in the way of recovery. The Run for Recovery is a 5K fun run/walk event. Moore Re-Creations - Community Recovery Center, 105 E. Barrett St., Carthage. Info: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

BOOK EVENT. 12 - 1 p.m. Join us for an author event with Wiley Cash and his book When Ghosts Come Home. Free event. Registration required. The Country Bookshop, 140 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Tickets and info: www. ticketmesandhills.com.

COMMUNITY CLEANUP. 9 a.m. The nonprofit group Sustainable Sandhills will be doing a volunteer litter sweep with Keep Moore County Beautiful. Location to be determined. Info: (910) 484-9098. FLUTTERBY FESTIVAL. 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. Celebrate but-

Sunday, September 26 JAZZ BRUNCH. 11:30 a.m. Join us outdoors on the Weymouth grounds for live jazz and a boxed brunch. The first performance is at 11:30 a.m. and the second performance is at 1 p.m. Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info and tickets: www.weymouthcenter.org or www.ticketmesandhills.com.

SIP AND SAVOR. 1 - 5 p.m. Join in for an afternoon of wine tasting and small bites from local chefs. There will also be live music and a silent auction to benefit local charities. Sandy Woods Farm, 540 Sandy Woods Farm, Aberdeen. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. STEAM. 2 p.m. Learn about topics in science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Elementary aged children and caregivers are invited to participate in STEAM projects and activities. This program will be held outdoors and advance registration is encouraged. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net. WRITERS AWARDS. 3 - 5 p.m. Certificates and prizes will be awarded during the Moore County Writers’ Competition Awards Ceremony. Free admission. Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www.weymouthcenter.org.

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CA L E N DA R Monday, September 27 TEEN WRITING CLUB. 5:30 p.m. Are you a teen writer interested in creative writing and storytelling? Ready to share your work, hone your craft, or just hang out and get inspired with other young writers? Join us for the first interest meeting of Teen Creative Writing Club. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or email: bdavis@sppl.net. Wednesday, September 29 SUPPER ON THE GROUNDS. 5 - 7 p.m. Enjoy an evening in the gardens of Weymouth Center, featuring a farm to table menu catered by Scott’s Table of Southern Pines, beers from Southern Pines Brewing Company and music by Stone Dolls. Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: www. weymouthcenter.org or www.ticketmesandhills.com. Thursday, September 30 DOUGLASS CENTER BOOK CLUB. 10:30 a.m. Multiple copies of the selected book for the month are available for checkout at the library. Douglass Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or email: mmiller@sppl.net. CREATIVITY FOR WELLNESS. 5:30 p.m. Learn more about how an artistic practice can benefit your mental health at the Creativity for Wellness series this fall. The first session will feature a guest speaker. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or email: lholden@sppl.net. ZOOM TALK. 7 p.m. The League of Women Voters of Moore County presents a Zoom call on “Reproductive Rights in the United States and North Carolina Today.” The talk is presented by Dr. Carrie Baker, professor at Smith College. To join the meeting go to https://us02web. zoom.us/j/87360476422. UPCOMING EVENTS Saturday, October 2 MUSIC SERIES. 6:30 - 9:30 p.m. Join BPAC’s Troubadour Series with this month’s band, The Contenders, and opening act, Aaron Burdett. Bradshaw Performing Arts Center, Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com. Tuesday, October 5 FRIEND TO FRIEND EVENT. 7 p.m. Friend to Friend is hosting their annual “Take Back the Night” candlelight vigil to bring awareness to domestic violence and honor those who have lost their lives to violence. There will be guest speakers, music and refreshments. Downtown Park, 145 S.E. Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 947-1703. Thursday, October 7 SALE AND RAFFLE. 2 - 6 p.m. Come shop the annual White Elephant Sale and Raffle for gently used furniture, art, jewelry, baked goods and more. The sale will continue Oct. 8 from 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. and Oct. 9 from 8 - 11 a.m. Proceeds benefit Moore County organizations. Sponsored by Women of Sacred Heart and the Knights of Columbus. Founders Hall, next to Sacred Heart Church, N.C. 211 and Dundee Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-0704. Saturday, October 9 FAIR. 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Come to the 13th Annual Shaw House Heritage Fair & Moore Treasures Sale. This free all-day event is a fundraiser for the nonprofit Moore County Historical Association. The Shaw House museum will be closed for September. Shaw House, 110 Morganton Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2051 or www.moorehistory. com. GARDEN PARTY. 4 - 6 p.m. The League of Women Voters of Moore County will host a Weymouth Center Garden Party. This will be a 1920s theme party celebrating the voting rights of women. Enjoy live music and great food. Info and tickets: (910) 692-8839 or email: moorecelebrate100@gmail.com.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

WEEKLY EVENTS Mondays WORKOUTS. 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Adults 55 and older are invited to get their workout on. Open Monday through Friday. Cost for six months: $15/resident; $30/non-resident. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376. Info: (910) 692-7376. INDOOR WALKING. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Improve balance, blood pressure and maintain healthy bones with one of the best methods of exercise. Classes are held at the same time Monday through Friday. Ages 55 and up. Cost for six months: $15/resident; $30/non-resident. Southern Pines Recreation Center, 210 Memorial Park Ct., 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 and registration: (910) 692-7376. Tuesdays BABY RYHMES. 10:30 a.m. Baby Rhymes is specially designed for the youngest learners (birth- 2) and their caregivers. Dates this month will be Sept. 7, 14, 21 and 28. There will be a duplicate session at 11 a.m. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net. GAME DAY. 12 p.m. Enjoy Bid Whist and other cool games in the company of great friends. For adults 55 and older. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376. SPARK STORYTIME. 2:30 p.m. This Spark Storytime at Fire Station 82 is for ages birth through 2 and the kids will have a chance to see fire trucks. Dates this month will be Sept. 7, 14, 21 and 28. Fire Station 82, 500 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net. TABLE TENNIS. 7 - 9 p.m. Enjoy playing this exciting

game every Tuesday. Cost for six months is $15 for residents of Southern Pines and $30 for non-residents. For adults 55 and older. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7376. Wednesdays FARM TO TABLE. Join Sandhills Farm to Table Co-op by ordering a subscription of local produce to support our local farmers. Info: (910) 722-1623 or www.sandhillsfarm2table. com. TODDLER TUNES. 10:30 a.m. Does your toddler like to move and groove? Join us for Toddler Tunes to get those wiggles out. Dates this month will be Sept. 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29. There will be a duplicate session at 11 a.m. on Sept. 11. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net CHAIR VOLLEYBALL. 1 - 2 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Get fit while having fun. Free to participate. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376. BRIDGE. 1:30 - 4:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Enjoy games of bridge with friends. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376. SANDHILLS FARMERS MARKET IN PINEHURST. 3 6 p.m. The market will feature local farmers, bakers, crafters and a N.C. fishmonger so locals can purchase fresh fish that is 24-48 hours from wave to plate. Fishmonger only comes on Wednesday. Tufts Park, Pinehurst. 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. Market is located at the Armory Sports Complex, 604 W. Morganton Road, Southern Pines.

2021 MOORE COUNTY FARMER’S MARKET Producer only Fresh and locally grown

TWO DAYS A WEEK! THURSDAYS

604 W. Morganton Rd (Armory Sports Complex) Southern Pines, NC 28387 9am - 1pm ~ Year Round (Thanksgiving Week, Wed. Nov. 24)

Facility Courtesy of Town of Southern Pines

SATURDAYS

Downtown Southern Pines SE Broad & NY Ave. So Pines, NC 28388 8am - Noon ~ April 17 - October 30, 2021 (No Market on Oct. 2nd due to Autumnfest) Facility Courtesy of Town of Southern Pines

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CA L E N DA R GIVEN STORY TIME. 10 a.m. Wonderful volunteers share their love of reading. CDC masking guidelines will be followed. Stop by and join the fun. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: (910) 295-3642. CHESS AND MAHJONG. 1 p.m. For adults 55 and older. All levels welcome. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

~ Cider with a Sense of Place ~

PRESCHOOL STORIES. 3:30 p.m. Ages 3 - 5 and their families can enjoy a session with literacy-building skills to help them prepare for kindergarten. This session is for your big kid who is ready to stretch, dance, listen and play. Dates will be Sept. 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net or email lib@sppl.net. Fridays 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 and registration: (910) 692-7376. BRIDGE. 1:30 - 4:30 p.m. For adults 55 and older. Enjoy games of bridge with friends. Douglass Community Center, 1185 W. Pennsylvania Ave., Southern Pines. Info and registration: (910) 692-7376.

There’s no better place to experience our artisanal craft ciders made from Southern heirloom apple varieties than our cider garden and bottle shop.

172 US-1 N, Bus, Cameron, NC 910.245.9901• jamescreekciderhouse.com Thurs 4-9pm, Fri & Sat 1-9pm, Sun 1-7pm

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. Market is in downtown Southern Pines at S.E. Broad Street and New York Ave. and runs weekly until the end of October. SANDHILLS FARMERS MARKET IN PINEHURST. 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. The market will feature local farmers, bakers and crafters. Regularly featuring 20 or more farms plus entertainment and opportunities for kids. Tufts Park, Pinehurst. Sundays GENTLE STORYTIME. 3:30 p.m. This is a sensory story time for families with children on the autism spectrum or with multi-sensory needs. The program is for children ages 3 - 8 and will combine books, songs, movement, and integrative activities. Dates this month will be Sept. 5 and 9. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net PS

Arts & Culture

HEATRE PLESHOWS.ORG TEM

T TEMPLE

919.774.41

presented by

Sunday, September 12th Tee times beginning at 4:15 • Last tee time at 6:30 The Cradle Course at Pinehurst Resort

and my

$125 per player, entry fee includes 2 drink tickets For more information & to register, visit: sandhillsbgc.org/cradle

6, 2021

9-2 SEPTEMBER 138

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To benefit The Boys & Girls Club of the Sandhills

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

910-944-3979

Arts & Culture

The performing arts series

is here!

Gallery • Studios • Classes

Species…From the Minds of Sanderson & Conrad Opening Reception Friday, September 3, 5:00-7:00 Artists donating 10% of commissions to the Moore County Humane Society Gallery Hours: Monday - Saturday 12-3pm Oil & Acrylic: Introduction to Oils for Beginners - Linda Bruening - Monday and Tuesday, September 20, 21 Next Step-Oil Painting - Linda Bruening – Monday and Tuesday, September 27, 28, 9:30-3:30 Landscape Painting - Harry Neely – Mondays, October 4, 11, 18, and 25, 9:30-12:00 Oil Painting with Courtney – Tuesday, and Wednesday, October 5, 6, 10:00-3:30 Drawing: Calligraphy – Cathy Brown, Tuesday and Wednesday, October 12 and 13 Other Mediums: Altered Book (Art Journaling) – Pat Halligan – Wednesday, September 8, 10:00-1:00 InkTastic/Intermediate Alcohol Ink - Pam Griner – Wednesday, September 22, 11:30-2:30

Ask Us About Becoming a Member • 129 Exchange Street in Aberdeen, NC www.artistleague.org • artistleague@windstream.net

Ben Vereen OCT. 28, 7:30pm $32-$47

Schoolhouse Rock Live! NOV. 14, 3:00pm $15-$25

Parmalee NOV. 18, 7:30pm $32-$47

““A A Very Electric Christmas” DEC. 4, 2:00pm & 7:00pm $15-$25

Catapult: Magic Shadows MAR. 1, 7:30pm $20-$40

“The Greatest Piano Men”

GlassPumpkinPatch In Person October 2 - 23 · RSVP required for Saturdays Shop online beginning October 4 3,000 handblown pumpkins in all colors available 100 Russell Drive, Star, NC 910.428.9001 • www.STARworksNC.org The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

MAR. 24, 7:30pm $32-$47

get your tickets today Cole Auditorium 1042 W. Hamlet Avenue | Hamlet, NC | 910-410-1691 PineStraw

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SandhillSeen Fine Arts Festival

Arts Council of Moore County Friday, August 6, 2021 Photographs by Diane McKay

Frank Pierce

Sue Byrd, Glenn Bradley

Darrell Jeffries, Artist Kelly Martin

Jerry & Rene Parker

Gene Fletcher

Yana Slutskaya

Caitlin Greene

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Jeff Morgan

Jenay Jarvis, Frank Pierce, Ayla Young

Tess Gillespie, Margie Lavoie

Maggie, Dennis & Lyn Brophy

Jeanne Zimmerman

Katherine McWilliams

Meridith Martens, Howard Schubert

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Chris Grimes, Mike Williams

SandhillSeen Living History Day

House in the Horseshoe Saturday, August 7, 2021

Photographs by Diane McKay

Tyler Mink, Julianne Herczeg, Th‎eo Mink Ian & Nia Laton, Carley Sutton, Phillip Laton

Jacob Whitaker, Frank McMahon, Lynn Bull Sam Powell, Fred Learned, Don Somers

Hanna Ramey, Anna Neill

Michelle Lanier, Sarah Koonts, Sarah Leonard

Jill Bonacci, Vickie Fesperman D A F T E R

Lynn Bull

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

William Loeser, Vic McMurry

A L L U R E

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When it comes to local, take our word for it. No, really.

the

Your Insider’s Guide to The Pines

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Beside The Fresh Market

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1650 Valley View Road• Southern Pines, NC Adjacent to Hyland Golf Course on US 1

910-692-0855 • www.WindridgeGardens.com Hours: Wed.-Sat. 10AM-5PM and Sun. 1PM-5PM

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

September PineNeedler Trivia FOOTBALLFootball TRIVIA By Mart Dickerson

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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8 9 2 PineStraw

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SOUTHWORDS

How We Wallpapered Fool’s Hill Hint: One roll at a time

By Ruth Moose

husband and myself, our friends and family called “going over Fool’s Hill.” They shook their heads as we sold our life in Charlotte to go live in the wild woods of the Uwharrie Mountains. And they were wild woods.

We bought three acres of the 900-acre Stony Mountain, an area known locally for its rocks and rattlesnakes. There was one other house a mile away that overlooked the Uwharrie River and Morrow Mountain. Our lot was graced by a mammoth beech tree and a tiny tumbling creek. We planned to use the money from our city house to build a smaller home in our wild country, doing much of the work ourselves. Our sons, 11 and 16, agreed with friends and family: We’d lost our minds. Nonetheless, they rolled up their sleeves and pitched in. My husband drew our house plans. As a DO (diversified occupations) student in high school, he took a drafting class that likely influenced his decision to pursue a degree in art rather than becoming a pharmacist. We began by clearing, cutting, hauling and burning brush. Then we hired someone to cut only enough trees to allow a road, driveway and space for a house. We hired a contractor to frame the house, then we took over, opting to install paneling over dry wall so we wouldn’t end up having to spackle, sand and paint it. Paneling was a breeze: once it was up, you were done with it. My husband liked paneling. And he liked wallpaper for the same reason. Once it was up, you were done. I not only like wallpaper. I love it. I love everything about it: the patterns, the instant effect, the burst of color. And I had always said that if I ever built a house of my own, I’d wallpaper the closets. It helped that I found a place where you could buy returned rolls of wallpaper for just one dollar a pop. Did you know that a standard closet

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requires just two rolls? One son’s closet got a western pattern, brown calico for the other. My husband’s closet was decked in faux denim while my walk-in was covered in blue birds and apple blossoms. Again, friends and family shook their heads. Fools. We were doing great, the house was taking shape, then our money ran out. We needed a loan to finish. I went to a mortgage broker. OK, I went to four of them. One should have requested a loan before one began, I was told repeatedly. Not in the middle of building. Clearly it was a no deal. Finally, a friend at church suggested that a small local bank might be able to help. So I rolled up my husband’s drawings, made an appointment, dressed my best — heels and everything — and crossed my fingers. The banker asked to see our blueprints. When I unrolled my husband’s drawings, he looked totally puzzled. “Who did these?” He asked. “My husband,” I said. “OK,” the banker said, rolling them up before handing them back. He crossed his arms, leaned toward the wall in his chair. “Tell me about your house.” I explained that the house was planned for low maintenance. It would have some solar features, triple paned windows — and we were wallpapering the closets. He laughed, doodling figures on his desk pad. “How much do you need?” I said, “But you haven’t checked our credit.” “I don’t need to,” he said. “Anybody who wallpapers closets is a good credit risk.” We got the loan, finished the house and lived there 17 years. PS After living in Stony Mountain, the Mooses moved to Fearrington Village when Ruth joined the creative writing faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her husband, Talmadge, died in 2003. After Ruth retired from teaching, she shocked all who know her by moving back to Albemarle. The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

ILLUSTRATION BY MERIDITH MARTENS

What felt like a midlife crisis to my

MANIFEST YOUR BEST SELF AT THE NEWEST BOUTIQUE ON BROAD

HERE’S TO STRONG WOMEN. MAY WE KNOW THEM. MAY WE BE THEM. MAY WE RAISE THEM. WE CARRY: Michael Stars Lanston Sport Lanston Jens Pirate Booty Paige Denim Just Black Denim Thread and Supply

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Buyer, Purveyor & Appraiser of Fine and Estate Jewellery 229 NE Broad Street • Southern Pines, NC • (910) 692-0551 Mother and Daughter Leann and Whitney Parker Look Forward to Welcoming You to WhitLauter. @whitlauter_jewelers

September PineStraw 2021

Articles inside

A r ts & Enter t ainment Ca lenda r

PineNeed ler By Mar t Dickerson

Spor ting L ife By Tom Br yant

T he Creators of N.C. By Wiley Cash

Birdwatch By Susan Campbell

Book shelf

Out of t he Blue By Debora h Sa lomon

PinePitch

Home By Desig n By Cy nthia Adams

T he Hot L ist By Jason Oliver Ni xon and John L oecke