August PineStraw 2014 by PineStraw Magazine

Where life just keeps getting better.

Living fully takes on a whole new meaning at Pine Knoll and Belle Meade. Our communities offer a virtual feast of opportunities to connect with cherished friends and make new ones. Delight in a past passion or learn something new. Enjoy a healthy lifestyle with just the right amount of indulgence in any of our excellent restaurants. Live secure in the knowledge the St. Joseph of the Pines continuum of care is there should you ever need it. Enjoying your retirement, your way has never been easier!

CALL TODAY – 910.246.1008

Where life just keeps getting better. Southern Pines, North Carolina • www.sjp.org • 910.246.1008 A member of the St. Joseph of the Pines Aging Services Network continuing the legacy of the Sisters of Providence.

Invite us in. We’ll bring results.

68 Abbottsford Drive, Pinewild Ideal for entertaining. No detail overlooked. Home Theatre. $895,000 Debra Serino Brenner • 910.315.9051

1 Sodbury Court, Pinehurst

One of the orginal Cotswold units! Superb craftsmanship, Unique owner’s suite with his and her baths and cloests. PCC Membership

$439,900 Patti Mahood • 910.723.8803

34 Augusta Drive, Mid-South Club

Golf front 14th fairway, custom built home, single level luxury. High ceilings, lots of hardwood.

Mid-South Club Membership $529,900 Suzanne Colmer • 910.639.9494

2 McQueen Place, Pinehurst Soaring ceilings, hardwood floors, expansive windows and a desirable open floor plan. Natural Gas and PCC Membership $550,000 Victoria Adkins • 910.315.9000

115 Graham Road, Village of Pinehurst Private one acre setting, English gardens, gourmet kitchen. PCC Membership. $598,000 Suzanne Colmer • 910.639.9494

190 Linden Road, Pinehurst Location, Location. Ivy Pines Cottage in Old Town. PCC Membership $424,900 Debra Serino Brenner • 910.315.9051

The Cottages at the Arboretum. One level, maintenance free living with Community clubhouse and pool. Granite, SS, hardwood floors. $259,000 Alex Reed • 910.603.6997

145 Edgewater Dr. , Seven Lakes North Enjoy waterfront living from your new deck overlooking beautiful Lake Echo. Home theater in walk out lower level. Open floor plan. 3 BR/2.5 Bath

$307,500 Linda Harte • 910.922.1767

46 Thunderbird Circle, Pinehurst Golf front Pinehurst #1, custom home, exquisite kitchen. PCC Membership $499,000 Debra Serino Brenner • 910.315.9051

www.WRTAC.com

Suzanne Colmer Broker 910.639.9494

Wink Kinney Broker 910.690.6568

Victoria Adkins Broker 910.315.9000

Bob Brooks Broker 910.690.1575

Linda Harte Broker 910.922.1767

Jodie Fondrie Broker 910.639.9788

www.WRTAC.com

Debra Serino Brenner Broker / Owner 910.315.9051

20 Muster Branch, Where’s that? Exquisite setting, this hidden gem crowns the 6th and 4th fairways of legendary Pinehurst No.2. PCC Membership $2,250,000 Debra Serino Brenner • 910.315.9051

140 Ridgeview Road, Southern Pines Beautiful custom built 5 bedroom, 5 full, 2 half bath home on 1.02 acres in Weymouth heights. $1,050,000 Debra Serino Brenner • 910.315.9051

15 Barrett Road East, Village of Pinehurst Totally renovated one level home on 1.29 acre private lot. Hardwood throughout, dream kitchen 3000+ SF. PCC Membership $639,000 Suzanne Colmer • 910.639.9494

102 Hastings Road, Seven Lakes South Prime golf front property, beautifully decorated. Move-in ready. $259,900 Bob Brooks • 910.690.1575

140 Longleaf Drive, Southern Pines Totally renovated, Southern colonial. Golf front. All hardwoods. Kitchen is over the top! Carolina Room. 9’ ceilings. crown moulding. $445,000. Sally Thomas • 910.215.6937

108 Triple Crown Circle, Longleaf CC Immaculate one level patio home with 2 car garage. Fenced yard. $288,000 Linda Harte • 910.922.1767

14 Village Green Circle, Southern Pines Adult 48+ years community, carefree living and manicured lawns. Beautifully remodeled kitchen. $139,900 Inge Dahl • 910.690.3531

5 Cherry lane, Pinehurst $305,000 All brick luxuriously appointed 3BR. Very sharp and perfect in every way. A must see! $305,000 Suzanne Colmer • 910.639.9494

180 North Ridge Street, Southern Pines Charming Weymouth 1930’s cottage 4 BR/2.5 BA. Walking distance to downtown. It’s a gem! $498,000 Inge Dahl • 910.690.3531

910-295-9040 • 30 Chinquapin Road, Village of Pinehurst, NC

Morgan Berkey Broker 910.691.2722

Bob Carmen Broker 910.215.3764

Patti Mahood Broker 910.723.8803

Sally Thomas Broker 910.215.6937

Alex Reed Broker 910.603.6997

Inge Dahl Broker 910.690.3531

w w w .BHHSPRG. c o m

Whispering Pines: Golf front home with 1900 sq.ft., vaulted living space with fireplace and large tranquil back yard. 3 Bedrooms, 2 Baths. Offered at $213,000

Aronimink: Golf front condo with Lake Pinehurst view! Lovely hardwood flooring, views from every room. On 10th Green of Course #3. 3BR/2BA. PCC Membership. $269,900

Debbie Darby 910.783.5193

SPCC: A home that has it all! Open plan, spacious rooms,

Southern Pines: Beautiful park-like setting, gardens everywhere, Koi pond, & gazebo all abutt the old Elks Golf Course. Custom 3BR/3BA home. Built-ins & Family Rm. $315,000 Bill Brock 910.639.1148

hardwood flooring, updated bathrooms, custom kitchen w/ granite. Trex deck for outdoor entertaining! In-law suite. 3BR/3.5BA. $339,000 Bill Brock 910.639.1148

7 Lakes West: Lake Auman water front lot! Rare find for this

caliber of lot! Spectacular 180 degree, BIG water views just waiting for your dream home to be built. Builk-head, 2-Docks with boat lift & swim ladder in place. $370,000 Linda Criswell 910.783.7374

CCNC Villa: Living well & entertaining is easy! Spacious rooms, great floor plan, lots of windows to see the stunning landscaping & Lake Watson. Watch the sunset from under the deck’s awnings. 3BR/2BA/2HB. $395,000 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

Renovated Village Home! Craftsman 4BR/2.5BA, open plan

Mid South Club: Striking Georgian style home was built by a contractor for his personal residence. Ideal family home or an entertainer’s dream! Lovely interior features! 3BR/2.5BA. $459,000 Eva Toney 910.638.0972

Cotswold: A home that defines the combination of English

Pinemere: Choice location on Lake Pinehurst overlooking beautiful expanse of the lake. Designed to capture lake views! Lovely home. PCC Membership available. Surry-top Boat included! 3BR/2BA. $528,000 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

Pinewild Country Club: Golf front home on one acre lot.

Weymouth Heights Gem: Charming 4BR/3.5BA cottage. New

wth living room, dining area, breakfast bar, stainless, granite, farmhouse sink. Fabulous master (claw foot tub too!). Beautiful yard. $449,900 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

Open & Spacious Design! Custom features throughout. Impeccable! 3 Bedrooms/2 Baths. PCC Option available. Available at $529,000 Debbie Darby 910.783.5193

style and Pinehurst charm. High ceilings, generous crown mouldings, custom cabinetry, wide hallways & handicap accessible doorways. 4BR/3BA. $485,000 Kay Beran 910.315.3322

kitchen w/granite, Thermador oven & warming drawer, cook top. Oversized fireplace w/hand-hewn beamed mantel. Wide planked hardwood floors throughout. $545,000 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

Moore Luxury homes Log on to www.BHHSPRG.com FOR OUR Easy Search OR “SNAP & SEARCH” by snapping a picture of the “TAG READER” with your smartphone. 4 August 2014 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Pinehurst . . . 910.295.5504 42 Chinquapin Road Southern Pines . . . 910.692.2635 105 W. Illinois Avenue w w w .BHHSPRG. c o m

CCNC: Spectacular golf course & pond views - 4th green

National Golf Club: Prestigious gated community. Golf front

Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

Frank Sessoms 910.639.3099

cottage. Stunning updated Colonial overlooks a large brick terrace with fountain & sweep of lawn. Wide plank floors, 10’ ceilings, deep mouldings & much more. $758,000 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

CCNC: Golf Front! Spacious home featuring: 3BR/3BA/2HB, hrdwd flrs, 2-car gar, ofc, Carolina Rm, hearth rm, dining rm, new stainless appliances! Exterior just painted! Beautiful! $794,500 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

CCNC: Private Pool! Wonderful family home with 4BR/4.5BA. Formal rooms, huge ktchn, family room w/ see-through stone frplc, 1st floor master suite. 3-Car garage! $797,500 Carolyn Hallett 910.986.2319

Old Town Pinehurst: “Edgewood Cottage” is a renovated Dutch Colonial loaded with charm and character. Heart pine floors, 4-Frplcs, Sitting Rm off Master Suite. Pool & Pool House. 4BR/4.5BA. NEW PRICE $980,000 Eva Toney 910.638.0972

Old Town Pinehust: Astonishing & masterful ground-up renovation of the former Recotry House. All new systems throughout! Gourmet kitchen, temperature controlled wine cellar. $995,000 Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

“Liscome Lodge” has everything you’re looking for a prime

Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

7 Lakes West: Magnificent panoramic views of Lake Auman tie all the rooms of this home to the lake. Updated bathrooms, ash hardwood floors, elevator & fresh paint. Stunning! 5BR/4.5BA. $1,195,000 Kay Beran 910.315.3322

CCNC: Custom designed, expansive one floor living on the 9th & 10th holes of Cardinal course. Spacious, elegant home! Stone terraces & patios, water feature & fish pond. 3BR/3.5BA. $1,250,000 Maureen Clark 910.315.1080

“Shadowlawn”: English Tudor built in 1929, on 1.5 acres of lush landscaping, is one of the finest estates in Old Town Pinehurst. Guest Cottage. Location, Quality & History define this property. Emily Hewson 910.315.3324

Horse Country: Quintessential 60 acre Horse Farm with direct Foundation access for Riding. 6-Stall Barn, Dressage Ring, 7-Paddocks with room to grow. 3BR/2BA, 3,400 sq. ft. home. $2,600,000 Debbie Darby 910.783.5193

of Cardinal Course! Renovated in 2007-2008. Hardwood, 2-Fireplaces. Selling Furnished. 3BR/2.5BA. $685,000

living at its finest! Custom built contemporary home with Asian acents. 3BR/3.5BA. $695,000

Old Town Pinehurst location. History, Charm & totally Renovated! Guest Cottage. 4Bdrms, 4Baths. $1,150,000

Weymouth Heights: “Buttonwood” circa 1930 is a landmark

www.BHHSPRG.com © 2014 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently owned and operated franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2014

August 2014 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PINEHURST

$480,000

This lovely golf front property is located on the 15th fairway of the Tom Fazio designed golf course in Pinehurst #6 and was built by Terry Michael. This light and open home offers 14’ ceilings, deep crown molding and hardwood floors. Great room ceiling is coffered. There is a separate study/media room with built-in entertainment center and wired for surround sound. 4 BR / 3 Full & 2 Half BA Code 1183 5 Shenecossett Lane

PINEHURST – FAIRWOODS ON 7

$650,000

OLD TOWN

$595,000

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

This gorgeous craftsman style cottage is less than four years old, absolutely immaculate and right in the historic district of Pinehurst, just a short walk to the Village, park and school! The interior of the home is very upscale with beautiful molding, maple hardwood floors, gourmet kitchen and a split bedroom plan. There is a separate bedroom with bath upstairs that would be perfect for guests and there is also a separate study downstairs. Property offers a huge yard with a fenced backyard. 4 BR / 3.5 BA Code 1184 155 Dundee Road

OLD TOWN

$475,000

$258.000 $179,000 Southern Pines Pinehurst $199,900 Foxfire Lovely and pristine in Longleaf CC Lovely updated golf-front home Cute cottage w/nice renovations 3 BR / 2 BA 3 BR / 2 BA 4 BR / 4.5 BA www.205HunterTrail.com www.4DogwoodCourt.com www.17ChestnutLane.com

Located on the signature 16th hole of Fairwoods on Seven, this beautiful contemporary home is bright and open and enjoys wonderful views of the golf course. A heated lap pool adds to the enjoyment of the outdoors and is screened by extensive landscaping for privacy. Lots of deck and patio areas make this a wonderful home for entertaining. 3 BR / 2 Full & 2 Half BA Code 1189 50 Braemar Road Pinehurst $75,000 Pinehurst

OLD TOWN

$469,000

Located across the road from the famous #2 course at Pinehurst Country Club, site of the 2014 US Open, this charming historic cottage was owned by Donald Ross himself from 1935 until 1941. Beautifully updated and well maintained, this lovely home has wonderful curb appeal and an impeccable location. The spacious and private back yard and patio area is the perfect setting for the full sized pool. 2 BR / 3 BA Code 1188 280 Cherokee Road

SOUTHERN PINES

$305,000

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

Quintessential Pinehurst Cottage with views of the famous #2 golf course and easy walking distance to the Village! Charming and beautifully maintained, this historic home offers high ceilings and moldings, hardwood floors, oversized windows, and lots of light! The sellers have removed the old aluminum siding, repaired all the exterior wood and replaced the siding with wood shingles consistent with the period the house was built. 2 BR / 2 BA Code 1194 105 Palmetto Road

This outstanding Craftsman style home was originally the model home for Berkshire Village in Mid South Club. It’s loaded with custom details and upgrades like 2 fireplaces, deep crown molding, wainscoting and oak floors in living areas. There’s a large gourmet kitchen with beautiful custom cabinetry and upscale appliances that opens to a family room and informal dining area. Great landscaping including sod, irrigation, brick pavers and additional trees. Wonderful location between Pinehurst and Southern Pines! 3 BR / 2.5 BA Code 1192 Deacon Palmer CCPlace $329,000 $890,000 26Longleaf

$449,000 Pinehurst $239,000 CCNC Custom Built Villa Overlooking Water Custom built all brick golf-front home Brick single story w/view of 17th green Covered porch & large fenced lot Updated Immaculate Golf View Condo 3 BR /$498,000 2 BA 4 BR / 4 Full & 2SOUTHERN Half Baths 1 BR / 1 BA PINEHURST $695,900 3 BR / 2.5 BA OLD TOWN 3 BR / 2.5 BA $849,000 PINES www.16SteeplechaseWay.com www.110HearthstoneRoad.com www.8RoyalDornoch.com www.210StAndrewsCondo.com www.1340BurningTreeRoad.com

$1,295,000 $189,000 Pinehurst $269,000 Pinehurst $475,000 Pinebluff 7 Lakes West $635,000 Pinehurst Stunning custom home in Fairwoods on 7 Charming brick ranch home GorgeoustownhomeintheheartoftheVillage Open plan, gourmet kitchen, pool & more! Stunning All Brick Water Front 4 BR / 4 BA & 2 Half BA 3 BR / 2 BA 3 BR / 2.5 BA 3 BR / 2.5 BA 3 BR / 4.5 BA Stunning golf front home located on one of the prime lots overlooking the 10th green in “Rosemary’s Lodge” Gorgeous home in the Village of Pinehurst. This home was taken down Absolutely gorgeous custom golf front home in Pinewild CC. Built by Step One, one of the www.170InverraryRoad.com www.145SugarPineDrive.com www.105MastersWay.com www.6HollyHouse.com Mid South Club. Absolutely pristine with beautiful custom details throughout! Gourmet area’s finestwww.135AndrewsDrive.com builders, this home offers elegant style and gracious amenities. The floorplan to the foundation and completely rebuilt and expanded by Joe Ussery in 2005. The very best is perfect for entertaining with a center great room with vaulted ceilings, stacked stone fireplace, built-in entertainment unit, recessed lighting and a custom step down wet bar. Wonderful golf views can be enjoyed from every room in the house! 3 BR / 3.5 BA Code 1156 27 Barons Drive

PINEHURST – FAIRWOODS ON 7

$1,095,000

of both worlds - location in the Village and up to date renovations that honor the style and period of the original. You’ll have to see this one to believe it! 4 BR / 3.5 BA Code 978 50 Orange Road

PINEHURST

$425,000

kitchen opens onto a charming keeping room with a fireplace and lovely golf views. Inviting patio area - perfect for entertaining! 4 BR / 4.5 BA Code 1098 28 Plantation Drive

MCLENDON HILLS

$565,000

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

Gorgeous French country farmhouse sits high on a private wooded hill on 3 fenced acres in McLendon This lovely one story brick home was custom built by Bonville Construction and is located Magnificent custom built home located on the 11th tee with views of the 7th, 8th and 9th Hills. Zoned for horses but incredibly appealing to anyone who loves space and privacy. This custom built on the Holly CoursePinehurst of Pinewild Country Club. Rothes Court is a quiet, heavily wooded fairways of Pinehurst courseSouth #4. This is what life $199,000 is all about! Located in a prestigious, gated Seven Lakes South $279,500 Seven Lakes West $298,000 $895,000 Pinehurst $241,000 Seven Lakes home is beautifully designed - open and inviting - with over 3800 sq ft of living area. From the gourmet cul-de-sac. The home is open and light with spacious, inviting rooms and an extended patio Pinehurst community, this 5 bedroom/5.5 bath home possesses timeless golf front beauty golf home Wonderful 2-story home home ingolf the Oldviews. Town Charming golf w/panoramic view Great family home w/private back yard areaGorgeous kitchen toon thecul-de-sac spacious master bathCompletely with heated marblerenovated floors, this home simplyfront has it all. to enjoy the wonderful course and isfront designed for grand scale entertaining. 4 BR / 3.5 BA Code31052 BR / 3.5 BA 4 BR / 3BA BA 1116 4 BR / 3 BA 35BR 2.5BA BA 3 BR / 2 BA4 BR / 3.5Code BR // 5.5 Code 1147 600 Broken Ridge Trail 12 Rothes Court 30 Spring Valley Court

www.122DevonshireAvenue.com

www.11GraysonLane.com

www.50OrangeRoad.com

www.108Rector.com

www.117OxfordCourt.com

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

www.MarthaGentry.com www.MarthaGentry.coM

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

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

August 2014 Volume 9, No. 8

Features 53 Bookends rah Salomon Poetry by Debo

Summer Shortsding issue Our annual rea

Indoors 62 The Mystes rious By Dana Sach

oon 63 Summer Aasftern By Lee Zachari

e of a Different Life 64 The Bad Old Days 54 The Fragranc y S. Abbott By Anthon

tand 55 The Grands rton By Clyde Edge

h 56 Luna Motolm an By Virginia H

57 Blasphemyith By Stephen Sm

ovels 58 Swimming N -Gardner By Angela Davis

59 The Body

By Wiley Cash

60 Back Then By Lee Smith

61 Benji’s Mother

By Drew Perry

er Close 65 Keeping Summ By Jill McCorkle

66 The Rosie Spnirit By Melissa Gosli

ront, From homefront to storef business is in the bag

e to Showplace 70 Schoolhous lomon By Deborah Sa

love of history Golf, great art and deep on Arthur defines the home of Dr. Di

77 Almanac By Noah Salt

feasts at the beach Why we need August and

By Ruth Moose

e Deborah Salomon 39 Out of the Blu s Gayvin Powers 41 Evolving Specie Departments ll irdwatch Susan Campbe B Jim Dodson 45 fe Li e pl m Si 13 ftown Journal Lee Pace ol G 47 h tc Pi ne Pi 16 Cos Barnes 78 Calendar 19 Cos and Effect ith Sm E. en ph Ste us Reader 91 SandhillSeen 21 The Omnivoro Shed ughts From the Man ho T 99 Geoff Cutler 25 Bookshelf ing dd Re ra nd Sa k oo oteb ccidental Astrologer 101 The ASte 29 N.C. Writer’s N Astrid llanova Dale Nixon 31 Hitting Home art Dickerson den Jan Leitschuh 103 PineNeedler M ar G n he itc K he T 33 rdue 4 SouthWords Ray Pa 10 es Jam n by Ro m do 37 Vine Wis

Cover Photograph by John Gessner 8

Crisp Percale, Italian Egyptian Cotton….

Opulence of Southern Pines and DUXIANA at The Mews, 280 NW Broad Street, Downtown Southern Pines, NC 910.692.2744 at Cameron Village, 400 Daniels Street, Raleigh, NC 919.467.1781 www.OpulenceOfSouthernPines.com Serving the Carolinas & More for 18 Years — Financing Available

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PineStraw M A G A Z I N E

Jim Dodson, Editor 910.693.2506 • jim@pinestrawmag.com

passion

Andie Stuart Rose, Art Director 910.693.2467 • andie@pinestrawmag.com

purpose

Kira Schoenfelder, Graphic Designer 910.693.2508 • kira@pinestrawmag.com Lauren Shumaker, Graphic Designer 910.693.2469 • lauren@pinestrawmag.com

precision

contributing Editors Deborah Salomon, Staff Writer Stephen E. Smith, Staff Writer Mary Novitsky, Proofreader Sara King, Proofreader contributing Photographers John Gessner, Laura L. Gingerich, Brandi Swarms Contributors David C. Bailey, Cos Barnes, Susan Campbell, Geoff Cutler, Al Daniels, Annette Daniels, Kimberly Daniels, Mart Dickerson, London Gessner, Melissa Goslin, Laurel Holden, Robyn James, Jan Leitschuh, Meridith Martens, Dale Nixon, Lee Pace, Jeanne Paine, Ray Pardue, Sandra Redding, Debra Regula, Noah Salt, Astrid Stellanova, Angie Tally

PS David Woronoff, Publisher Advertising Sales

Pat Taylor, Advertising Director Ginny Trigg, PineStraw Sales Coordinator 910.693.2481 • ginny@thepilot.com

Comprehensive cancer care requires a holistic team approach, access to advanced treatments and complementary therapies. You’ll find it at Cape Fear Valley’s two cancer centers – one on the main campus and one on the north side of Fayetteville. together, we can beat cancer. It takes purpose, passion and precision. We bring all that to the table. You just bring the resolve. See more at www.capefearvalley.com/cancerstories

cancer treatment and cyberknife center 10

Deborah Fernsell, 910.693.2516 Terry Hartsell, 910.693.2513 Perry Loflin, 910.693.2514 Darlene McNeil-Smith, 910.693.2519 Meagan Powell, 910.693.3569 Johnsie Tipton, 910.693.2515 Karen Triplett, 910.693.2510 Advertising Graphic Design

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

Darlene Stark, Circulation Director 910.693.2488

PineStraw Magazine

145 W. Pennsylvania Avenue Southern Pines, NC 28387 pinestraw@thepilot.com • www.pinestrawmag.com ©Copyright 2014. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. PineStraw magazine is published by The Pilot LLC

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

ÂŠ 2014 Pinehurst, LLC

Overnight packages start at $295* and include all seminars. For tickets to individual events, visit ShopPinehurst.com. 910.235.8415 â&#x20AC;˘ PinehurstWineFest.com PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2014 *Rate is per person, per night based on double occupancy. Subject to tax and resort service fee.

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simple life

Beautiful Killers

By Jim Dodson

Come the end of August, dragonflies will

Illustration by Laurel Holden

begin to disappear from the garden. Their lease, like summer’s, is far too brief. I always hate to see them go.

The other evening I was watering my parched perennial bed when a pair of iridescent blue dragonflies zoomed up out of nowhere, performing a delightful pas de deux in the gentle spray of my hose. Though I don’t know my dragonflies as well as I probably ought to, I believe these were a male (blue) and female (green) Eastern pondhawks on a dinner date. According to a recent piece in The New York Times, new research shows dragonflies may be the keenest hunters in the animal kingdom, snatching and devouring 95 percent of their prey on the wing — not bad, notes The Times writer, for a dainty insect that belongs to the short-list of insects most people like, alongside ladybugs and butterflies, resembling flying “bubble bath or costume jewelry.” Equipped with compound eyes that are believed to be the sharpest in the insect world, and dual sets of wings that flap only thirty times a second (compared to a bee’s 300) enabling a dragonfly to stop mid-flight and move in all directions at will, these ancient acrobats are believed to be the swiftest predators in the air, capable of reaching speeds of 35 mph or higher, which perhaps accounts for their voracious eating habits and need to consume up to thirty house flies or mosquitoes in an hour, all while in flight. For this simple reason alone we should honor these beautiful killers of summer, which prey on any number of stinging and annoying insects that make being outside for a lowly human on a fine summer evening sometimes more painful than it’s worth. Despite their fearsome optics, dragonflies actually can’t sting humans or animals, though in their aquatic nymph form — which takes up well over half their lives — they can indeed deliver a sharp but harmless bite. The research team that determined the dragonfly’s impressive flying and eating habits also points out that their sophisticated nervous systems can lock on and track specific targets through clouds of other flying insects with such impressive skill that a mosquito or house fly rarely sees the creature that swallowed it whole. The public clamor over the growing use of unmanned aircraft or drones by military and private commercial entities — promoting drones as an efficient way to deliver everything from intel on natural disasters to FedEx

packages but raising significant concerns about the right to privacy — takes on an interesting new level of meaning when you learn that our military studied the killing efficiency and acrobatic brilliance of dragonflies for decades in order to decipher how they operate so efficiently. A dragonfly’s brain, it turns out, may be the closest thing in the insect world to our own, the ultimate onboard computer designed for hunting and gathering — only better. Then again, as a species they predate us on this Earth by hundreds of thousands of years, dating from the carboniferous period 300 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and at least one species of dragonfly, long extinct, was two or three feet in length and weighed approximately the same amount as a medium-sized dog. Dragonflies belong to a relative small order of species called Odonata, which translates to mean “toothed ones,” a reference to the serrated mandibles that crush their prey to a pulp on the fly, with just 7,000 different species that includes their related cousins, the lesser-winged damselflies. Species of butterflies and bees, by comparison, number in the tens of thousands. The fearsome name derives from ancient lore that dragonflies were indeed the progeny of flying dragons. In some places — the bush of Australia, for instance — dragonflies were considered (incorrectly) tormentors of horses and livestock, capable of delivering poisonous stings, while in medieval Sweden some believed they were sent by evil spirits to weigh the souls of unhappy people. Most cultures welcome them, though, as signs of vibrancy and good health. In China they’ve long been regarded as symbols of spiritual harmony and prosperity; in Japan, chosen by the Samurai warriors as symbols of courage and integrity, perfect creatures balanced in nature. The Irish see them as the winged transport of fairies. They enter our dreams and our gardens displaying a curiosity that prompted some to believe they might actually be messengers or angels in insect form. One common interpretation holds that dreaming about dragonflies — symbols of beautiful movement and grace — means your life is about to change. A dragonfly’s life is a study in transformation. Most of it is spent in nymph form under the surface of the water, sucking up nutrients like mad until it achieves pupae form and eventually sheds its skin before flying away for a surprisingly brief time, rarely living more than a month or two longer.

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2014

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Simple life

Perhaps its only consolation for such brevity of life are its remarkable flying skills, intelligence and fragile beauty. Having said this, several species have been known to fly 10,000 miles across India and Africa in search of a mate — the real purpose of their glorious colorings and acrobatic skills. Dragonfly love lasts only few seconds and often takes place, impressively, on the wing. The female lays her eggs in warm freshwater shallows and the males venture off to eat and soon die, a story as old as time itself. Several years ago I was bass fishing on a lake late on a drowsy summer afternoon when a small squadron of iridescent blue dragonflies came out of nowhere and swarmed my boat, circling and whizzing by the end of my nose and the end of my casting rod, before zooming off in perfect formation. I’d never seen anything like it, a jaw-dropping airshow of synchronized flying worthy of the Blue Angels themselves. One of the performers even briefly alighted on my low-hanging fishing rod, seemingly as curious about the creature at the other end of the rod as I was about it. Just then a huge bass lurched brazenly from the water, just missing his prey, who darted away in the nick of time. Last evening, after a rain shower cooled off a very hot afternoon, I had a second chance to study a dragonfly up close and personal, stepping out near dusk in a rush to meet my wife for an early movie only to find a lone pondhawk divebombing the upper garden birdbath. I decided it must be the same courting male I’d been watching all week. But the beautiful green female was nowhere to be seen. As I watched, the blue male perched on the edge of the birdbath and let me come close enough to actually get a look into his extraordinary translucent eyes, curious what I might see there. Pride of a new dragonfly papa? Or maybe the grief of a beautiful killer who knows his duty is done, his time left on this Earth is measured only in days or weeks — perhaps even hours? Time, wrote James Thurber, is for dragonflies and angels — the former live too little and the latter live too long. If nothing else, as summer wanes and the days begin to shorten, the dragonflies of my garden remind me to pause and take note of this world’s passing beauty before it vanishes too — and takes us with it. Which may explain why, after a moment of sizing me up, the beautiful blue dragonfly zoomed away to dine on a few dozen delicious mosquitoes on the moist evening air before life, beautiful life, got away from him. PS Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@pinestrawmag.com.

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On Sunday, August 10, 3 p.m., meet ranger Nancy Williamson at Weymouth Woods for a “Nifty Nests” program held inside (ah, relief!) the Visitor Center. Drawing from the park’s magnificent collection of nests — everything from robins’ to hummingbirds’ — ranger Williamson will point out the incredible variety of birds found in our area. “Chimney swifts build their nests out of sticks,” says the ranger. You won’t believe what they use to hold them together. Free and open to the public. Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or www.ncparks.gov.

Salty Tales

Some like them hot. Some like them cold. Chef Mark Elliott likes them (tapas, that is) when they showcase the best regionally grown products in the South. On Thursday, August 14, from 6 – 9 p.m., the Women of Weymouth are hosting their annual tapas fundraiser, “Sail Around the Mediterranean,” with tasty dishes and regional wine catered by Elliott’s on Linden. You won’t leave hungry. Cost: $45. Reserve your seat by August 6. Weymouth Center, 555 East Connecticut Avenue, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-6261.

The Real Deals

The early bird gets the worm. Everybody knows that. But nobody knows what treasures await discovery at the Moore County Community Flea Market. On Saturday, August 30, from 8 a.m. – 2 p.m., forage the market for rare coins, vintage books, retro shades, handmade goods, costume jewelry, or whatever it is you’re hoping to find. Leave no stone unturned. The Fair Barn, 200 Beulah Hill Road South, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295-0166.

Plant Panache

When people decorate their smartphone covers, you can’t help but notice the way the light dances across the shimmering rhinestones as their lighteningquick fingers click-click-click across their touchscreen keyboards. Green thumbs, tech-savvy or otherwise: Your plant could use a little sparkle, too. On Saturday, August 16, from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., transform a plain ole pot into a dazzling planter during a terra cotta pot mosaic workshop held at Cape Fear Botanical Garden. Use tiles, leaf prints and other flair. Your plants will look fabulous. Cost: $40; $35/members. Two pots included. Register by August 11. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 North Eastern Boulevard, Fayetteville. Info: (910) 486-0221 or www.capefearbg.org.

The Bees Knees

Children see magic because, well, they believe it exists. Certainly an enchanted garden is a good place to look for it. On Saturday, August 23, from 9 a.m. until noon, a children’s treasure trail adventure will be held at the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens. Receive a treasure map and explore eight areas of discovery. Activities include caring for bees and playing with worms; live music from the Army Ground Forces Band, the Loose Cannons; refreshments provided. Free and open to the public. All ages welcome, although event is geared toward children ages 5–12. Sandhills Community College Horticultural Gardens, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Registration: Tricia Mabe at (910) 695-3882.

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

I Spy . . .

That sweater. Those glasses. The side-swept bangs. He’s one of a kind, all right. But the original hipster is not always easy to spot . . . which is why finding him continues to be such a thrill. This month, The Country Bookshop will host its third annual Where’s Waldo? scavenger hunt in downtown Southern Pines. The inaugural hunt was inspired by a national “shop local” event held in tandem with the celebration of Waldo’s twentyfifth anniversary in 2012. Ready or not, August 1–11, the dude in stripes will be hiding out, again, inside over twenty downtown shops. Here’s how to play: 1. Pick up an official scavenger hunt list (consider this your passport) from The Country Bookshop; 2. Spot Waldo and receive a stamp from each participating venue; 3. Return to the bookshop with your full passport and enter for a chance to win various prizes. The Country Bookshop, 140 North West Broad Street, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6923211 or www.thecountrybookshop.biz.

The Golden Years

Some mornings, when our editor is busy working on his “Simple Life” column, you can hear 60s-era music streaming from the tiny speakers of his laptop. Sometimes it’s the Beatles. Or Peter, Paul and Mary. Or Simon and Garfunkel. And when it’s the latter, even if it’s not that song, someone always winds up humming koo-koo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson before the day’s end, and we all get brilliant flashes of a young Dustin Hoffman sprinting across the landscape of our minds. See Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock on Thursday, August 7, when the Sunrise Summer Classic Series presents The Graduate (1967) at 7:30 p.m., and you’ll go home singing the soundtrack. The following week (Thursday, August 14, same time), take a trip down memory lane with The Dude, aka Jeff Bridges, during the screening of the 1998 cult classic, The Big Lebowski. You’ll recall: That rug really tied the room together. Tickets: $5. Sunrise Theater, 250 Northwest Broad Street, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8501 or www. sunrisetheater.com.

The Color Purple

Aside from being a centuries-old remedy for various ailments (including acne, colic, headaches, insomnia, minor burns and stress), lavender is, quite simply, a lovely looking shrub. And darned if its purplish flowers don’t smell like heaven. On Wednesday, August 6, from 10–11:30 a.m., Norma Burns of Bluebird Hill Lavender Farm will conduct a workshop on growing and using this fragrant healing herb. Come, breathe deeply, and leave inspired. Space is limited. Call for reservations. Sandhills Comunity College, Ball Visitors Center, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 695-3882 or www.sandhillshorticulturalgardens.com.

Ring of Fire

Saturday, August 2, and again on Sunday, August 3, history repeats itself at the House in the Horseshoe, former home of Whig Col. Philip Alston. Re-enactments of the Revolutionary War skirmish between Col. Alston’s Patriot militia and the Loyalists of Col. David Fanning will take place at 4 p.m. on Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Wander through Colonial militia encampments and marvel at various crafts and demos from the era. Military drills (such as musket firing) will be held throughout the day. House in the Horseshoe, 288 Alston House Road, Sanford. Info: (910) 947-2051 or www.nchistoricsites.org/horsesho/horsesho.htm.

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It was serious business but a lot of fun,

too, when volunteers of the Sunrise met at the theater on May 28 with Capt. John Stone of the Southern Pines Fire and Rescue Department and Assistant Fire Marshall Louis Blanchard.

Fortified by the staff of the theater with popcorn and Cokes, forty people listened intently when told they must have a plan and know what is expected of them in case of fire or other emergencies. Knowing how to evacuate has become much more pertinent in the last ten years, said the captain. He said any public place must have two ways out, and the fire code specifies an emergency code must be in place. Each person should know what to do when the smoke detectors go out and must be able to open the windows, he said, and know where the exits are. Following the indoor lecture, all participants went outside to practice using the fire extinguishers. There is a refrain: pull, aim, squeeze and sweep. The firemen urged all to take the same steps at home, to check the fire extinguishers and emergency lighting once a month. PS Cos Barnes is a longtime contributor to PineStraw magazine. She can be contacted at cosbarnes@nc.rr.com.

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Get your hands on “The Right Stuff”

Pick up your copy of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” at The Country Bookshop to participate in the community read starting on September 4th.

August 1 through August 11

Where’s Waldo? is back in Southern Pines!

Come by The Country Bookshop to get your list of participating stores! He will be hidden all over our town! Best of luck to all and great thanks to our local stores!

Friday, August 1, 2014 FIRST FRIDAY - Extended Hours Monday, August 4 at 4pm David Foster Wallace (author of Big Fish) THE KING AND QUEENS OF ROAM Thursday, August 7 at 5pm Ellen Rogers DEADLY TRUST (mystery with local setting) Wednesday, August 20 at 5pm Mary Ann Claud DANCIN’ MAN (Converse graduate’s debut novel)

The Country Bookshop 140 NW Broad St., Southern Pines 910.692.3211 www.thecountrybookshop.biz

The Omnivorous Reader

Bohemian Tales

Mark Twain, Bret Harte and the writers who reinvented American literature

By Stephen E. Smith

No writer has insinuated

himself into American popular culture with the force and resilience of Mark Twain. He worked at being famous, and since his death in 1910, literary critics and popular scholars have continued to reinforce his efforts by turning out a steady stream of books and articles on every aspect of his life and writing. Ben Tarnoff’s The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature is the latest and certainly one of the more readable popular studies to have appeared in recent years.

Tarnoff’s premise is simple enough: The writer we know as Mark Twain didn’t evolve in a vacuum; he was the product of a fortuitous convergence of likeminded writers — Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard — who matured as artists in a particular time and place. They called themselves the Bohemians, and they lived and wrote in San Francisco in the 1860s. As a young writer, Twain was a frequent visitor to the city. With his wild shock of red hair, disheveled appearance, and his proclivity for overindulgence, he seemed the least likely of the Bohemians to achieve lasting fame. Nattily attired Bret Harte, whose impeccably crafted prose beguiled readers, was the rising star of the group, and it was he who gave the movement its name: “It [the Bohemians] came to represent a creative alternative to the mundane and mercenary in American life,” Tarnoff writes, “a way to overcome California’s crude materialism.”

Both Twain and Harte began their careers as newspaper reporters who churned out poems and occasional human interest stories that catered to Western tastes. Harte, who’s remembered today for his stories “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” was the first to attract national attention with his reporting on the 1860 massacre of Wiyots in the village of Tuluwat. His graphic editorial — “Old women, wrinkled and decrepit, lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long gray hair . . .” — first appeared in the Northern Californian and was then reprinted throughout the country, attracting death threats. In fear of his life, Harte fled south to San Francisco, where he found work as a writer and editor in the city’s booming newspaper business. Twain, an erstwhile riverboat pilot, literary freelancer and failed silver miner, arrived in the city to find it brimming with inspiration. “The birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen and the winds, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy, are present in San Francisco to-day,” he wrote. While walking the streets he heard brogues, drawls, a jumble of languages, and tall tales, all of which he filed away for future reference. His “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a story he’d appropriated from oral tradition, would thrust him into the national limelight and signal the beginning of the end for the strain in American literature that drew its inspiration from genteel European writers. In the rhythms of frontier speech, Twain discovered the makings of an authentic American art. The courageous Ina Coolbrith was born a Mormon, the niece of Joseph Smith, but left Illinois and the Latter Day Saints to strike out on her own. She settled in San Francisco in early 1862 and proved herself a poet of considerable talent (she’d later become California’s first poet laureate). Her home on Russian Hill provided a salon for the young writers who’d flocked to the city for work. Charles Warren Stoddard was a native New Yorker. He was an introverted, venerable, gay writer, whose formal verse found acceptance in San Francisco’s newspapers and magazines. He was also a devout Catholic whose strong belief in the church’s doctrine of forgiveness allowed him

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The Omnivorous Reader

to rationalize his “temperament,” a term he employed because the expression “homosexual” had not yet been coined. Harte nurtured the writing careers of Stoddard and Coolbrith, and he generously employed his editing skills to soften Twain’s rough prose. Under Harte’s direction, the three writers joined with him to form a literary coterie not unlike the Algonquin Round Table and Beat Generation, and their work was widely read in a frontier hungry for low humor laced with an occasional touch of refinement. Stoddard and Coolbrith aside — both rate as also-rans in the literary canon — Tarnoff’s study focuses on the relationship between Twain and Harte. Their friendship, tempered by Twain’s competitive nature and Harte’s waning literary reputation, was a rocky one. Twain valued loyalty above all else, and he remained Harte’s friend as their literary fortunes began to diverge. He lent Harte money, took him into the Twain household, and recommended him for various editorial jobs. But Harte’s idiosyncrasies eventually overwhelmed their friendship and the two writers became enemies. Huck Finn may have refused to betray Jim, but when Harte applied for a cushy government job, Twain spoke out against his former friend. He wrote to William Dean Howells: “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward.” Beyond the obligatory detailing of literary spats, gossipy infighting and personality quirks, Tarnoff excels at capturing the vitality of postGold Rush San Francisco and the burgeoning Western expansion. “Its citizens spent lavishly,” he writes, “on feasts of oysters and terrapin, on imported fashions and furnishings. They drank seven bottles of champagne for every one drunk in Boston” and “To the first generations of settlers, the country beyond the Rocky Mountains was truly another world. Its strange weather, its monumental scale, the coloring of the sky and soil — all these were alien.” The degree to which readers will appreciate The Bohemians depends on their familiarity with the biographical materials already available on the writers whose careers Tarnoff scrutinizes. For well-read Twain and Harte aficionados, there’s little to intrigue. But the story of the Bohemians as a literary movement is a compelling one, and Tarnoff is a superb writer whose descriptive and narrative skills will appeal to the most discerning readers. PS Stephen E. Smith’s most recent book of poems is A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths. He can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com

August 2014 P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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August 2014 P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

B oo k s h e l f

August Books Book Excerpt “A good book, Marcus, is judged not by its last words but by the cumulative effect of all the words that have preceded them. About half a second after finishing your book. After reading the very last word, the reader should be overwhelmed by a particular feeling. For a moment he should think only of what he has just read; he should look at the jacket and smile a little sadly because he is already missing all the characters. A good book, Marcus, is a book you are sorry has ended.” — Joël Dicker, The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair

By Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally Small Blessings, by Martha Woodroof This is a gem — a feel good hope-filled love story that is a joy to read. Martha Woodroof is an NPR producer and weaves an optimistic tale with depth about Tom, an English professor in a sleepy college town, his wife, Marjory, Rose, the new hire at the bookshop, and the 10-year-old son Tom never knew he had. The Invention of Exile, by Vanessa Manko This book is a powerful story told with simplicity and elegance across borders and decades. It reminds me of another great novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. But this book is better . . . and has a foreword by Salman Rushdie. Bittersweet, by Colleen McCullough McCullough returns with another epic romantic novel about two sets of twins heading into adulthood in 1920s and ’30s Australia. All the women are trained as nurses but they are all wildly different people with vastly divergent ambitions. As the girls become women the story carries us through the bittersweet moments of their lives that are both exotic and not very different from our own.

Encyclopedia of Me: My Life from A-Z, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal This is a journal with prompts to help you record memories and stories and give them a sense of order. It is a nice package, designed to look and feel like a reference book with thumb-cut tabs. This book is included here as a suggestion for family memories, a gift to record stories and recollections of family members and start a conversation between generations. Season of the Dragonflies, by Sarah Creech This is our next Sarah Addison Allen: Appalachian tale with a touch of magic. This story is about a hidden perfumery in the Blue Ridge Mountains with one signature perfume that is sold for millions across the world. The Lenore family matriarch, her two daughters, one with a “nose” and talent and another who does not want to be involved in the company, are all affected when the unique flowers used in the signature scent begin to die, and problems surface at every turn. Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch This is a book that is a meditation on the many different forms of religious silence in our increasingly noisy world. MacCulloch looks at Jesus’ strategic use of silence and also the more sinister forms of institutional silence. Overall, a compelling book by one of the world’s great

B oo k s h e l f

historians that illuminates the deep mysteries of faith. CHILDREN’S BOOKS Let’s Get Lost, by Adi Alsaid (Harlequin). An old car with a deep red interior. A million miles of blacktop. A girl with a mission to see the Northern lights. Four strangers who wander into caring, adventurous, seer-like Leila’s life and emerge altogether changed. Let’s Get Lost is an amazing book that grabs you from the first page and stays with you long after you close the cover.

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The Boundless, by Kenneth Oppel (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers). A boy on the most magnificent train in the world, a girl who dreams of becoming an escape artist, and a crazy ringmaster lead readers on an adventure they will not soon forget. Will, age 11, says: “Readers who enjoyed Maile Meloy’s Apothecary or Jaleigh Jensen’s Mark of the Dragonfly will love the adventure, mystery and fantastic characters revealed in The Boundless.” Ages 9-13. The Scoop on Ice Cream, by Bonnie Williams. Did you know immigrants to Ellis Island were served ice cream as part of their first meal in America? Did you know George Washington spent $200 on ice cream during the summer of 1790? Beginning readers (and inquiring adults) can learn tons of interesting facts about the history of ice cream in this ready-to-read title that is just perfect for a hot summer day. Ages 4-7. Where’s Waldo? For more than twenty-five years, seekers both young and old have scanned page after page for the elusive red and white striped bespectacled Waldo. And once again Waldo can be found hiding in shops and restaurants in Southern Pines. Stop by The Country Bookshop August 1—11 to check out the great selection of Where’s Waldo titles and to pick up a passport which will direct seekers on a “Where’s Waldo Local” scavenger hunt. PS

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August 2014 P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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August 2014 P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Congratulatory Notes By Sandra Redding

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer . . . like the highest seat of the Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. — Natalie Babbitt

August Book Events

August 7 (Thursday, 7 p.m.) Scuppernong Books, Greensboro. A celebration of Fred Chappell’s newest book of poems, Familiars, with readings by Fred and National Book Award finalist Sarah Lindsay, author of Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower. scuppernongbooks@gmail.com August 14 (Thursday, 6:30–8:30 p.m.) Benjamin Vineyards and Winery, Saxapahaw. Join 2014 Piedmont Laureate Carrie Knowles for a free writing workshop. Buy a glass of wine and enjoy the sunset as you write. To sign up, email cjknowles@earthlink.net. August 17 (Sunday, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.). Fourth Annual Carolina Writers Networking Lunch, Charlotte, sponsored by the North Carolina Triad Chapter of Murder We Write. Meet authors, editors, publishers, librarians and agents. Limited to sixty, so register ASAP by email: info@murderwewrite.org. September 5–6 (Friday & Saturday). Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, Burnsville. A gathering of writers, readers, listeners and learners. Barbara Bates Smith adapts and performs off-Broadway productions; Cathy Larson Sky of Spruce Pine is an Irish fiddler who combines oral verse with old-time tunes; Terry Roberts, a lifetime educator, writes about family. Plus, Press 53 Publisher Kevin Morgan Watson of Winston-Salem and Kathy Pories, senior editor at Algonquin Books in Chapel Hill, will be on hand to offer editing and publishing advice. Tickets: cmlitfest.org September 6 (Saturday). Annual Bookmarks Festival of Books and Authors, Winston-Salem. Over fifty award-winning authors will gather at the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts. A panel on the “Future of the Book” will be led by Robin Miura, co-director of Carolina Wren Press, and Carolyn Sakowski, president of John F. Blair, Publisher. Robert Morgan will sit on the Southern Identity panel and Frances Mayes of Hillsborough will provide her views on how to adapt a book for film, television and video games. bookmarksnc.org.

Peggy Payne’s most recent book, Cobalt Blue, set in Pinehurst, won a medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) in the Visionary Fiction Category. IPPY awards honor superior literary works by publishers other than the five major New York houses. Ecotone, the press at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, won an IPPY in the anthology category for Astoria to Zion, Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade. And John F. Blair of Winston-Salem published Long Gone Daddies, by David Wesley Williams, which garnered an IPPY for fiction. Movie land has smiled on Ron Rash, who lives in the North Carolina mountains. His haunting novel Serena has been adapted to a film which will be released later this year. The leading roles of a lumber baron and his determined wife will be played by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. At 92, prolific Chapel Hill fiction writer Elizabeth Spencer has been awarded the $30,000 Rhea Award for lifetime achievement in short stories. Her past achievements include five consecutive O.Henry Awards.

Writing Lessons

Maya Angelou died May 28, 2014. The most quoted of all North Carolina’s authors, she left behind a bounty of words to inspire, teach and enrich lives. How should we put words to paper? “The idea is to write it so that it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart,” she once advised.

The value of surprising readers is the lesson learned from reading Buccaneer: The Provocative Odyssey. This nonfiction page-turner, a collaboration of adventurer Jack Reed and Winston-Salem TV personality Maycay Beeler, will surely keep you on the edge of your armchair. First Jack chronicles his misdeeds: smuggling cocaine in his plane, becoming involved with the infamous Medellín Cartel and living in a tropical paradise with a girl young enough to be his daughter. These escapades take place before Jack is thrown into prison (no surprise). Then Maycay, an accomplished pilot, surprise, surprise, flies in to help the aging pirate complete his book and get out of the pokey. More surprises: pictures of Jack’s paintings, handwritten notes to Maycay and after-death visitations. Definitely takes one’s breath away. Thanks for sending your literary news. Keep me updated at sanredd@ earthlink.com. PS Greensboro writer Sandra Redding’s novel, Naomi Wise: A Cautionary Tale, is a riveting story about heartbreak and hope in a Quaker community. Email her at sanredd@earthlink.net.

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August 2014 P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

h itti n g h o m e

Alone, Together It was our first vacation as a couple in years

By Dale Nixon

It was not important where we

went or how long we stayed. The important part was that we were going away — just Bob and me — on a summer vacation.

Let’s see now . . . in 39 years of marriage we had been on a honeymoon and had gone on several weekend trips (mostly with other couples). We had taken family vacations, and we had taken vacations with other families. But it had been quite a while since we had spent time just being together. And I was worried. We were companions in life, but were we companions in travel? Would I drive Bob to distraction on this trip, or would he send me over the brink? The morning we left for the trip, I don’t know which one of us I would have placed odds on. As I tried to dress and finish packing, Bob followed my every step reading out loud from the sports page of the newspaper. I wasn’t interested. Then when he realized I was running a teensy bit late on dressing and packing (because of his babbling about sports), he followed on my heels, yammering, “Hurry, hurry. You’re going to make us late. We’re going to miss the plane if you don’t come on.” But we smiled at each other a lot and kept other thoughts and arguments to ourselves. We kept our thoughts and arguments to ourselves so well that we didn’t speak to one another all the way to the airport. Once at the airport, we made a mad dash to our gate number, knocking everything and everybody down who got in our way. After we had boarded and settled breathlessly into our seats, I turned to Bob and said, “Now, see, I didn’t make us miss the plane.” He responded by glowering at me. We didn’t speak to one another for the rest of the flight. When we arrived at our destination, he insisted on toting all of the luggage by himself. Now I am the little woman who has moved every piece of furniture in her house at least ten times by herself. I am the little woman who lugs hundreds of pounds of groceries into her kitchen each week. But he refused my help. Which would have been kind and sweet on his part, except that he complained as he struggled and strained with the luggage. “Dale, did you bring everything you own?” “Are you sure you packed enough . . . to stay for a lifetime?” And my favorite: As he hoisted my makeup case on his shoulder, he said, “This must be the one with the kitchen sink.” We didn’t speak to one another all the way to the hotel. When we did begin to speak, we talked about the children. When we tired of

talking about the children, we talked about the weather. “This is a beautiful day isn’t it?” “It is nice.” “Do you think it’s going to rain?” “It doesn’t look like it.” Eventually the time we spent together gave us the opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with one another. We found that I liked to shop and Bob likes to sightsee. He wants to walk. I want to hail cabs. I prefer Italian food. He prefers Chinese. I love crowds. He hates them. Bob devours a big breakfast each morning. I sip on a cup of coffee. I enjoy getting dressed up at night. He likes to go casual. But as one day led to the next, we did what all traveling companions must do. We compromised. I found myself nibbling on a stack of pancakes, and he lingered over a cup of coffee. He took a little more interest in shopping and helped select gifts for the family. I learned to lean against walls, fire hydrants and parked cars as he explored the area. We walked during the day and hailed taxis at night. And we dressed appropriately for each. We tasted food in crowded Italian restaurants and sampled Chinese in quiet solitude. It rained, and neither one of us made a comment on the weather. Because of all of this compromising going on, we were too busy to notice, and there were more important things to talk about. Like our shared thoughts and ambitions. Discussions of our compatibility. Talk of our future, and humorous stories from the past. We were having fun. On the day of our departure, I dressed and packed in record time. We arrived at the airport an hour before our scheduled flight. When I volunteered to carry part of the luggage, Bob grinned sheepishly and said, “It would help if you’d take your makeup case.” The minute the wheels of the airplane touched the ground, we started to talk about the children. And then one of us — I don’t know which — made mention of the weather. We were home. But that was OK. The important part was that we had gone away — just Bob and me — on an extended trip. And we had come back as friends and compatible traveling companions. PS No word yet on where she and Bob have gone on vacation in August. Columnist Dale Nixon can be reached at dalenixon@ carolina.nc.rr.com.

September

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August 2014 P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

T h e k it c h e n g a r d e n

The New Normal

What farm life should be in a broken food system

By Jan Leitschuh

From farmer Joel

Salatin’s point of view, life in the twenty-first century just ain’t normal. So tempts the jacket copy of Salatin’s 2011 book called, curiously enough, Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

I gave up reading books about gardening a while ago. Which is not to say I’ve given up reading. Or gardening, for that matter. Part of the reason is the way we research these days. A quick search on the Internet brings pages of specific info to our compost-stained fingertips. If you want to push the zonal boundaries and grow, say, artichokes or chia seeds, pages upon pages will generously instruct. What did we ever do before Google? Another reason I’ve stopped reading garden books is that, after a while, the plants begin to tell you what they need. I don’t mean that in any “woo” way, but more in “the eye of the master fatteneth the calf” manner. By paying close attention, we begin to notice that tiny sucker that needs pinching off, or the first stirrings of a blight or the slightest leaf curl of simple dry soil. We see that rolling the ripe blueberries off with our thumb creates less damage than pulling at the half-ripe cluster. If we miss the mark the first year — and we will — and there is willingness to learn, we may find ourselves muttering the ever-optimistic vow of all true gardeners: “I’ll get it right next year.” I do enjoy reading deeply about sensible systems though, especially food systems. Recently, I found myself engrossed in a no-holds-barred copy of Salatin’s above-named work, and found a kindred spirit, a fellow anachronism. Salatin is a Virginia farmer who converted a worn-out piece of Shenandoah hillside into a lush Eden of native grasses and herbs. “In a very practical sense,” he writes, “grasslands are the lungs of the Earth.” His family’s Polyface Farm produces truckloads of healthy grass-fed beef, pastured poultry and pork, rabbit, fresh eggs, produce and more, and the farm has become famous throughout the land. He’s been called by The New York Times “the high priest of pasture” and “Virginia’s most multifaceted

agrarial since Thomas Jefferson”. Articulate Salatin could lay waste to large sectors of Congress, I feel sure. He is an equal-opportunity offender, though he takes pains not to give offense. He calls himself a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist tree-hugger lunatic.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it. He well understands that something he says somewhere will go against someone’s grain. He also urges readers to read something every day they know they will disagree with, for greater understanding. “Stay with me,” he’s known to say. “This could be a teachable moment.” Salatin’s remarkable gift of verbal expression and quick mind give lie to a stereotype of sluggish rural dwellers I’ve always found insulting. Salatin attempts, fairly effectively, to jolt readers into stepping back and viewing the insanity of many aspects of our world — particularly food — that we take for granted, concluding with his drumbeat phrase “Folks, this ain’t normal.” In what might be a tedious book of opinionated diarrhea in less skillful hands becomes a powerful exploration of the results of flouting natural law — a process that has accelerated in our lifetimes. This self-described “grass farmer” has thought “broadly and deeply about how to restore normalcy.” And readers finds themselves nodding along with him. At the end of each entertaining chapter, he offers several steps to facilitate this Salatin-envisioned return to normalcy. He tackles children, chores, humility, health, lawns, compost, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, GMOs, food packaging, our litigious culture, peak oil, poop and wildebeest on the Serengeti. For starters. Salatin says that when people come to him asking what they can do — one person — about a broken food system, he tells them straight out: “Get back in the kitchen and learn to cook.” Preparing and eating whole foods not long from the Earth solves a myriad of health, economic, energy and environmental problems, he argues. He writes, “Have you tried reading the labels on industrial supermarket food lately? You have to be a chemist and love multisyllabic science-speak to even decipher the labels. Folks, this ain’t normal.” He tells of an intern they had on their farm one summer who had a four-year dietetic degree from a prestigious university yet had never cooked

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anything in her life. “Not one thing. That summer she ventured into this great unknown and supplemented her dietetic degree with something real: culinary experience. If this isn’t an example of disassociated learning, I don’t know what is.” He laments the decline of the once-commonplace home garden, and of the methods for preservation of the bounty. Half the produce grown in the U.S. in the 1940s came from patriotisminspired, self-reliant victory gardens, he notes. “That stage is now practically vacant,” he writes. “Witness the panic that sets in with impending snow . . . without being cocky, I’m confident our family could eat for months with what we have stored in our larder.” A whole chapter is devoted to energy. “The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, formerly embedded in the village, were summarily removed from the community because, with cheap energy, their businesses could grow beyond local energy-carrying capacity . . . I’m not opposed to big business per se. But it seems to me when a number of people lived where they worked and were dependent on local resources for their crafts. . . such close bioregional dependency created reasonable boundaries to size.” He goes after water. “The number one use of potable water, after lawn irrigation, is to flush toilets.” Salatin challenges the wisdom of mixing human excrement into such an increasingly scarce resource. He writes: “Our culture’s fixation on flushing everything away just ain’t normal.” He goes on to describe a mouldering toilet system designed to handle 30,000 students per year in Massachusetts. “No odor. Waterless. Wonderful.” “Ours is certainly not an old culture,” he writes. “Yet in recent decades we’ve used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity, mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all of the cultures before us — combined. I love the United States, but I’m not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean I think everything we’re doing should be done or can be maintained.” He concludes, “I started this book with the idea that I’ve become an anachronism.” He speaks of his deep, almost spiritual connection to the land, and the multiple generations living on it. “I believe this is historically normal, and I covet that for others.” His closing summation is his challenge: “Now, go be a normal person.” PS

Village of Pinehurst Rentals & Golf Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, avid eater of fresh produce and co-founder of the Sandhills Farm to Table Cooperative.

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

V i n e W is d o m

Green with Envy

Bring on the vinho verde, Portugal’s signature summertime wine

By Robyn James

When August’s temperatures are soar-

Photograph by Brandi Swarms

ing there is truly one wine that comes to mind to pack in the cooler for the beach: vinho verde, the only white wine justifiably offered at the Fourth of July poolside cookout I attended.

This wine, which has become increasingly popular in the U.S., is Portugal’s signature white. Best drunk young, this is the gin and tonic of the wine world. Very crisp with a light effervescence, it has a mineral quality and bracing, lemony acidity. Think of your first sip of ginger ale, giving you that prickle on your palate that is fun but still makes you wince. Low in alcohol, it is the “green wine” because the grapes are picked very young to ensure the striking acidity and popped with a little CO2 at bottling for fresh fizziness. During the summer months I have recommended this to people who claimed they didn’t like any kind of wine and they loved it! Situated near the searing hot Atlantic coast, growers have cleverly designed a unique trellising system called enforcado. The grapes are trained high onto pergolas to separate them from the scorching ground and cover crops are planted overhead as insulation. Harvesting is a little more challenging on ladders! Since most vineyards are less than three acres, growers form large cooperatives to produce the wine that is released three to six months after harvest. Because of the sturdiness of the grapes, the early release and the absence of any oak aging, these wines are phenomenal bargains. Some of the

very finest examples of vinho verde are priced under $10, and you can find a decent quaffer for under $7. There are dozens of native Portuguese grapes that go into vinho verde, but the main grapes are alvarhino (known in Spain as albariño), which imparts a lemony acid quality, loureiro, the most aromatic floral grape, and trajadura, with scents of apple and grapefruit. This is a great cocktail wine on its own but pairs very well with salads, fish, shellfish and Asian cuisine. You won’t get a hankering for it on a January night in front of the fire, but do not let the summer pass without quaffing a few. Here are some of our favorites:

Quinta Da Aveleda Estate Bottled Vinho Verde, approx. $9

“Aveleda’s estate wine continues to evolve. A textbook vinho verde with plenty of acidity tied to its grapefruit flavors, this will brighten any summer party, especially if there’s grilled fish on the menu.” RATED 91 POINTS, WINE AND SPIRITS MAGAZINE

Casal Garcia Vinho Verde, approx. $8

“Clean and bright, this juicy white follows a simple line of flavor. The acidity is lively-mouthwatering coastal refreshment for anything from the raw bar, particularly clams on the half shell.” RATED A BEST BUY, 87 POINTS, WINE AND SPIRITS MAGAZINE

Octave Vinho Verde, approx. $8

The wine exhibits a light straw color and citrus aromas. Tangerines and lemons ride in on a frame of crisp acidity and light effervescence. Try it with a gratin of scallops. Great value. PS Robyn James is proprietor of The Wine Cellar and Tasting Room in Southern Pines. Contact her at winecellar@pinehurst.net.

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Out of the Blue

Dawns of the Dead Catching up on some summer zzzz’s

By Deborah Salomon

WARNING: THIS SPACE CONTAINS

MATERIAL NOT SUITABLE FOR ALL AUDIENCES. READER DISCRETION ADVISED.

Zombies frightened me even before I knew what they were, what they represented. Now, after a modicum of research, I am absolutely out-of-my-mind terrified. August in the Sandhills, like January in Siberia, promotes cabin fever. This midsummer ailment responds to cold drinks, drippy peaches and TV — new shows and catch-up. After all, if art reflects life and television is a sometimes art, I’d better keep abreast. Therefore, after noting awards won by The Walking Dead, I stopped surfing past the blood and gore accompanying vivisection/cannibalism to look beneath the hyper-Halloween makeup — a daring plan for someone who couldn’t define zombie. A z-loving friend suggested, for openers, Shaun of the Dead, a 2004 British zomedy promising some, uh, belly laughs. How bad could it be with Penelope Wilton, Downton Abbey’s Isabel Crawley, on the roster? Revolting, that’s how bad. Wilton starts off a normal, fussy mom before being bitten by a zombie, which turns her into one, given zombies pass on the affliction vampire-style. Then poor Isabel is shot dead by her son just before a fellow-zombie disembowels and chows down a companion. Gross. Yet the genre literally devours the competition. Worse, people take zombieism seriously, hence university courses intellectualizing the far-from-new phenomenon. One such lecture was held in at UNC last February. I tracked down the professor, zombie authority Dr. Jeffrey Mantz of George Mason University, also associated with the National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology Program. Before reaching Dr. Mantz, I did some independent analysis. Perhaps when the economy tanks, tornadoes rip through the heartland, school and workplace shootings abound, children die in hot cars — when reality becomes unbearable the culture vultures invent something more gruesome to skew perspective. At least, they reason, the zombies aren’t at our doors. Dr. Mantz — a horror fan since childhood — did not disagree. His zombie definition: “Depends on who you’re asking,” followed by phrases like reverence of the corpse that comes back to life and cult practices from Haiti and the Congo. Zombie ascendancy relates to the end of days, a post-humanism era when populations are being decomposed, literally. “What’s so terrifying is the absence of limits. Unlike other supernatural themes (vampires and werewolves), zombies have no sense of control. Their carnal desire is to eat other human beings — hordes of them.” Mantz even invoked the name of dear departed Sigmund Freud, who identified the bad-ass id lurking in every psyche.

Zombie popularity, Mantz continued, is fueled by video games where the player can retaliate by killing hordes of zombies. “Or maybe (zombistas) are just people too uncoordinated for Zumba.” Whew. At least the guy is human. I’m still not clear. Are zombies dead, undead, risen dead or simply staggering bodies in desperate need of surgical repair? Why are they so hungry? And how can aficionados be ordinary folks who eat pizza, wear designer jeans and vote Republican? Observe moviegoers leaving the theater after a zombie flick; not a cultural anthropologist among them. Mantz, warming to the subject, provided a bibliography should I desire further research. He spoke of cult creator/filmmaker George Romero, whose low-budget Night of the Living Dead (1968) chronicling a zombie apocalypse got the juices flowing, sopped up by Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Well, if I couldn’t stomach Shaun, for sure I’m not going there. I also avoided AMC’s The Walking Dead marathon, despite its showing during a 95-degree weekend. Then a demure, pretty, soft-spoken UNC sophomore who had taken a course in sci-fi lit with a section on zombies recommended Warm Bodies, billed as a love story and subtitled “Who says romance is dead?” This time, before bothering Netflix, I read the synopsis: Post-zombie apocalypse, a guy named R falls in love with human survivor Julie, kills her boyfriend Perry and eats his brains, whose contents feeds his attraction. Not even the “happy” ending — happier than Romeo and Juliet, anyway — where R sheds his zombie form and returns to humanity convinced me. In all fairness, the zombie philosophy takes a stance against consumerism, hate and the inability to love without “devouring” the beloved, writes Stant Litore in The Zombie Bible. No thanks. I have enough trouble defending vegetarianism. Hyperbole or not, human brains over easy just aren’t my cuppa z. On a lighter note, ABC’s Resurrection has the dead reappearing unaged and in pristine condition, to devastate their families, emotionally. In the HBO series Leftovers 2 percent of world population simply vanishes, leaving their dear ones speechless (except for four-letter words), white-clad and chain-smoking. ABCFamily offers Chasing Life about a cute 20-something career gal with leukemia. Coming this fall from Fox and Steven Spielberg: The Red Band Society, about seriously ill teenagers who cross paths in the pediatric ward. So if art really does imitate life check your insurance . . . and watch out. Because rugby players aren’t the only ones who eat their dead. PS Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

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August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Ev o l vi n g S p e c i e s

A Room of Their Own

In the stately Writer’s Room at Weymouth, home to the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame, words and history are still alive and flowing

By Gayvin Powers

Words

It begins with the word, With word following word Music is made Words make music all their own, And sometimes there is nothing More beautiful than words Marching down a page, . . . Words marching

Photograph by John Gessner

Sometimes they dance. — Sam Ragan, Listening for the Wind The soul of a writer longs for a sacred space. A space where it can imagine heroic battles in ancient Egypt. Or can overcome a life of being bought and sold in slavery. Perhaps even weave childhood tales of fishing along reed-filled riverbanks. Such a space exists. With a history suited for a Southern retelling of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, is known by locals as the “writer’s room” and has a soul of its own. When visiting a historical site, one may wonder about the conversations and personalities that shaped a residence or simple room over the decades. Serenity prevails when stepping inside the writer’s room at Weymouth. Built in the mid-1920s, the study welcomes writers: Dark bookcases are filled with publications and couches flank a large Oriental rug that undoubtedly carries countless writers’ secrets. In the window, the mid-morning sun streams across Glen Rounds’ typewriter and hovers nearby on a bronze bust of Sam Ragan, North Carolina’s poet laureate. Photos of the fifty-three Literary Hall of Fame

award-winning writers cover the walls, including Maya Angelou, John Ehle and O.Henry; their encouraging eyes watch, cocooning a writer in their space. The space of writing. Prior to becoming a sanctuary for writers, Weymouth Center was the residence of James Boyd and Katharine Lamont Boyd, his wife. James Boyd, who sought refuge in the pines for his health and writing, wrote his first book, Drums (1925), at Weymouth and received praise from the New York Evening Post, saying that the book was “the finest novel of the American Revolution which has yet been written.” Boyd’s later novels, Marching On (1927), Long Hunt (1930), Roll River (1935) and Bitter Creek (1939), which were met with mixed reviews, were written in his study, which now houses the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame. During the 1920s and 1930s, James and Katharine Boyd frequently entertained literary friends, some of whom included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green and Sherwood Anderson. The Boyds and their guest authors indulged in Weymouth’s pine walks, lending inspiration to the works they were writing at the time. From 1940-1941, James Boyd spent days writing a series of radio plays along with Paul Green, Thomas Wolfe, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Struthers Burt and John Galsworthy for the Free Company of Players, a group of American writers dedicated to presenting what they perceived as more positive democratic attitudes toward the war in Europe. That came to an end when James Boyd bought The Pilot in 1941, becoming publisher and editor. After his death in 1944, Katharine Lamont Boyd succeeded him as publisher and editor of the newspaper until she sold it in 1968 to Sam Ragan. After the passing of Katharine Boyd, special emphasis was put in place to ensure the long literary tradition was maintained at Weymouth. In 1974, Weymouth was gifted to Sandhills Community College, which continues the writing tradition, expanding it to include writer’s conferences, the Sam Ragan series and providing temporary writers-in-residency appointments. In 1996, Ragan succeeded in championing North Carolina to become the first state to create a Literary Hall of Fame, honoring the rich tradition of the state’s writers. Ragan was not only a son of North Carolina, whom locals cherish as their own, but he was also a journalist, author, teacher, publisher and editor of The Pilot, board member of Weymouth, poet laureate, father and husband. Ragan understood the importance of routine, ritual and space, and the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame recognizes all of the solitary work that each award recipient

Ev o l vi n g S p e c i e s

dedicated to the craft. Ragan was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997, and Talmadge Ragan, his daughter, recently talked of her father’s commitment to the written word and his personal writing space. “He wrote in his study, a small room lined with bookshelves stuffed with a variety of books, with his typewriter on a very old desk — it was actually made by my mother’s grandfather. The desk always faced a window, and my mother said she always knew my father was working when he sat quietly looking out the window,” she says. “In the three houses we lived in, all overlooked trees.” It was common, Talmadge Ragan says, that “having worked all day at the newspaper, my father would come home, eat dinner, take about a half-hour nap and then go to his study to write . . . He generally wrote his column Southern Accent on Monday nights after dinner and his editorials, I think, on Sunday afternoons. I remember somehow he’d always be able to write whatever he needed to make it downstairs in time to watch The Rockford Files.” There were two meaningful writing rituals that Talmadge Ragan also remembers about her father. “When I was a little kid, starting about 7 or so, he used to take me down to his office at The Raleigh News and Observer on the weekends, so I’d see him work there, checking in with people. Then [he’d be] at his typewriter for a while, and I’d amuse myself reading or talking to people at the paper,” she says. Thinking back even further, she adds, “My first memory of him writing, I think, is probably a poem for my mother. He always wrote a poem for her for her birthday.” It’s easy to imagine Sam Ragan writing when viewing his bronze bust near Glen Rounds’ typewriter resting in the sunny window of Boyd’s study — the typewriter keys beg for fingers to tap them as the mind strolls through the trees outside. Sam Ragan passed away one week prior to the opening of the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame and was honored in a tribute, including a special video by David Brinkley, who got his first reporting job from the elder Ragan at the Wilmington Star. Sam Ragan may not have been present at the ceremony, but people, including Talmadge Ragan, agree that they could feel him there that day. The same is true about the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame writer’s room which now graces visits from authors such as Mary Kay Andrews, Alexandra Sokoloff and Diane Chamberlain. Almost every writer claims to feel a welcoming presence. Perhaps it’s Sam Ragan or James Boyd. Perhaps it’s the history of the room. Perhaps it’s the spirit of all the writers that have come before and are now honored there. In any case, it’s enough to call it sacred, enough to capture the soul of a writer. PS

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Gayvin Powers teaches writing and is a frequent contributor to PineStraw.

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B I RD WA T CH

Red-Headed Woodpeckers

The beloved and colorful “spark” bird that helped inspire a nation of bird watchers

By Susan Campbell

Photograph by Debra Regula

As people learn

that I am a bird lover, they frequently ask, “So, what is your favorite bird?” I have to admit that red-headed woodpeckers have a special place in my heart. They are easily one of the most striking birds on the planet. In fact, they have been known as “shirttail” or “half-a-shirt” birds, as well as “flying checkerboards.” With an extensive patch of white flight feathers in the middle of each wing, their white “flash” always catches my eye as they whiz by. Then there’s that distinctive adult red head for which they are named. All of the woodpeckers found in the Piedmont (the males, at least) have at least some red on their heads. Unlike most of our familiar woodpeckers that are “ladderbacked,” a red-headed’s back is solid black, with the chest and belly white. Not surprisingly, the bill is chiselshaped, sharply pointed and blue-gray in color.

For many bird lovers, the red-headed woodpecker is the so-called spark bird, the species that initiates their interest in bird watching. That includes the famous ornithologist Alexander Wilson back in the late 1700s. Redheadeds are, without a doubt, very noticeable and handsome birds, and the only woodpecker species that breeds in our midst and then migrates to states farther south for the winter months. If the acorn crop is especially good in our area, some birds hang around into the fall. They are also readily attracted to feeders, especially suet. As luck would have it, an individual

found my suet mix here in Whispering Pines for the very first time this summer! This species is unique among our woodpeckers given that males and females are identical. Although you’re more likey to hear a male red-headed woodpecker making its raspy, repeated “tchur” sound, the female will use a variety of chirps, rattles and cackles to communicate with her family. Male, female and their offspring will stay together until late winter/early spring of the following year so vocalization is very important for family bonding. As with all woodpeckers, red-headeds rely upon cavities, mainly in dead trees, for roosting and nesting. Females produce one and sometimes two clutches of three to ten white eggs. Hatching occurs after about two weeks. And, like many cavity nesting birds, the male shares incubation duties and even develops a brood patch, although it is not quite as noticeable as the female’s. The young will remain in the cavity for three to four weeks, being fed large insects and fruits, as well as seeds and sometimes other birds’ eggs or even nestlings. Unfortunately, red-headed woodpeckers have experienced significant population declines as both their food sources and large wooded tracts have been lost to development in the eastern United States. They also depend upon abundant seed- and/or nut-producing trees, such as oaks, as well as habitat with a variety and abundance of insects. And to adequately provision their families, they require wooded areas at least a half-mile or more in size with lots of larger dead or dying trees to house their nesting cavities. Competition from other cavity dwellers and habitat alteration has affected populations across their range, including here in the Sandhills area. So if your neighborhood is home to this beautiful bird, consider leaving a snag or two uncut on your property. Furthermore, forego any broad scale pesticide applications. The red-headed woodpeckers will thank you! PS Susan Campbell would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted at susan@ncaves.com or (910) 949-3207.

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G o l ft o w n J o u r n a l

Putting for Dough — and Honor A unique putting contest brings the generations together to raise money for disabled and struggling military veterans

Steve O’Brien, Jim Lynch, Putting Challenge individual winner, and Steve Robinson By Lee Pace

Two passions throughout many of Edwin

Photographs by Al and Annette Daniels

Cottrell’s 92 years have been the military and the game of golf.

With the former he was a pilot in the Army Air Force, flying sixty-five combat missions for the 48th Fighter Group against the Germans as World War II played out around Paris in 1944-45. To commemorate his 90th birthday in 2012, he leapt from 10,500 feet above Moore County and dedicated his skydive to his fallen military compatriots. “I learned to fly just out of high school,” he says of his youth in western Pennsylvania. “I loved it from the beginning. It was fun to be up there by yourself. You look down and see the beautiful countryside. I flew by the seat of my pants — I would just look down and follow the roads to get where I was going. It made sense when I was drafted that I fly an airplane.” With the latter he gravitated toward the game after a typical boyhood of team and ball sports and as a young man when he saw the potential for a lifetime of enjoyment — after all, there aren’t many venues for a 30-yearold in tackle football. He went on to a career as golf coach at West Chester University and was named to the Golf Coaches Association of America Hall of Fame in 1991. “I liked golf because it was you playing against the course,” says Cottrell, a

The winning putting team – Gary Southard, Bill Hipple, and Jason Jones Pinehurst resident since retirement. “Tennis to me had become boring and I quit playing. Tennis changed because of the ‘big serve.’ Whoever had the best serve won. I knew golf was a sport you could play as long you wanted to, and it was a test of your skills against the course.” Thus it was quite natural in 2013 that Cottrell blended golf, a putting green and the camaraderie and shared experience of wartime military service into a unique fundraising event for disabled and disadvantaged veterans. The Veterans Putting Challenge raised nearly $10,000 on Veterans Day in 2013 and is scheduled again this November 11 at Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club. “Coach Cottrell is a man of honor,” says Veronica Karaman, a former Futures Tour player whose work taking golf to area nursing homes sparked Cottrell’s idea for the Veterans Putting Challenge. “In our younger generation I think sometimes we have lost the concept not only of national honor but personal honor. Every single aspect of that event came from a place of honor. On that day you saw the concept of honor, of teamwork, of fun. You can create the same atmosphere of competition but do it all on the putting green. It was a beautiful day.” Cottrell played football, basketball and tennis at Slippery Rock State College, graduating in 1943. After military service, he taught and coached at several schools near Pittsburgh and then did graduate work at Penn State. He joined the faculty at West Chester in 1954 as tennis coach and assistant swimming coach and became golf coach in 1958, a job he held for twenty-two years. Much of his swing and teaching philosophy emanated from noted instruc-

THE EVOLUTION OF DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE AND CONTROL

G o l ft o w n J o u r n a l

tors of the early 1970s like Jim Flick, Bob Toski and Gary Wiren, all of whom he met and got to know at National Golf Foundation seminars. “All three had the same philosophy — you don’t change golf swings, you teach fundamentals,” Cottrell says. “Every individual’s swing is different. You teach how to hold the club, how to set up to the ball, how to aim to the target. Even today, Butch Harmon does the same thing. He’s a fundamentals teacher — grip, setup and aim. Learning from those great instructors influenced my teaching career from the beginning.”

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Ed Cottrell Throughout his teaching and coaching career, Cottrell spent nearly three decades in the Air Force Reserve and in recent years had the thought of a fundraising enterprise to benefit veterans through the platform of golf. “My wife’s father was a World War I veteran,” he says. “I served. The military has been part of our lives. We wanted to do something to help veterans, but we weren’t sure what to do. I did a little research and learned there are 1,400 veterans in Moore County living below the poverty line. If there was ever a group needing help, that was it.” Cottrell spent many summers working the Duke Golf Camp in Durham, and there in the late 1970s he met Karaman, a member of the Duke women’s team. Years later they reconnected in the Sandhills, and Karaman invited Cottrell to one of the nine-hole putting tournaments she conducted at area nursing homes. Those were an off-shoot of an earlier idea to organize the “very first Nursing Home U.S. Open” at Manor Care in Pinehurst and subsequent putting competitions between nursing homes in the area. “We found it so remarkable that these people who looked like they had no mental capacity or physical capacity were getting up out of

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wheelchairs, making holes-in-one, carrying their trophies to bed with them,” Karaman says. “We saw the fresh life that came out of that. One man was 94 years old and was mad at his family for putting him in a nursing home. He entered one of our putting tournaments and it changed his entire outlook.” Cottrell didn’t want to organize a full-fledged golf tournament, but the idea of a nine-hole putting tournament quickly resonated. He joined forces with the Sandhills Chapter of the Military Officers Association of America and recruited nine teams of four veterans each — one per team from World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Iraq/Afghanistan. He and his co-organizers raised donations and sponsorships from local businesses and individuals, and the proceeds from 2013’s tournament have gone to help more than a dozen veterans who have needed help paying utility, medical bills or food bills. One vet got a new handicapped access to his home via the program. “You take the combination of people being veterans, regardless of rank or time spent in service, having that in common and their love of golf and the fact we were raising funds to help disadvantaged and disabled veterans — it all sort of came together,” says Gary Marlar, president of the Sandhills Chapter of the MOAA. “It was a resounding success and we look forward to November and having the second Putting Challenge.” Putting is the perfect vehicle for individuals of all ages, skills and golf experience. It takes little technique beyond gripping a short club and making a stroke to get the hang of it — witness the popularity over nearly a century of English putting courses, “Tom Thumb” courses from the 1920s, franchised “Putt Putt” courses from Fayetteville in the 1950s and most recently Pinehurst Resort & Country Club’s addition of its Thistle Dhu putting course to its golf offering. “At least six veterans had never touched a club in their lives,” Cottrell says. “A putting tournament was the perfect way to introduce them to golf. We had two 96-year-olds, we had guys 30 to 35 years old. To see an Iraq/Afghanistan vet talking with a World War I vet was quite exhilarating. It was the best event we could have imagined.” Karaman thinks of something Bonnie Bell McGowan said at one of the senior citizens putting competitions held not long ago at Pine Needles: “She said something so profound — that in golf there is no generational gap,” Karaman says. “What other game can you take a 96-year-old and a 30-year-old and an 8-year-old and put them in the same space and create a connection?” PS Lee Pace’s book, The Golden Age of Pinehurst — The Story of the Rebirth of No. 2, is available onsite and online at Pinehurst Resort & Country Club.

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Bookends

August 2014

The book lies in my lap, a solid piece Of flesh and blood that no electronic blip Can whisk away. I found it in a box of cast-off things Of stretchy belts and picture frames and silver earrings bought to match a dress of silk — A bridesmaid’s frock where purple lilacs bloomed. The silk in shreds, the marriage broke, The silver black — The book survives. I know now why I hid this book amongst outdated treasures; No kid should read such trash, the adults yapped Obscene! Yet passed around from palm to sweaty palm And giggled over at our slumber parties, Was destined as a classic. “I, the Jury” . . . Spillane, a foil for Dickens, Fielding and the lot On summer reading lists. Like, really, who takes Trollope to the beach? Instead, I hid a racy paperback of Southern damsels in distress, Their bosoms heave beneath Frank Yerby’s pen. Beyond that yummy trash my Hailey, Wouk and Roth Collected sand in turned-down corners. I could go on and on From Mary Poppins flying through my lonely childhood hours To Styron’s Sophie — her choice more powerful in words Upon the page than any moving picture. The sacred page, like dry tobacco leaves now crumbles at a touch; The spine that binds them comes unglued. The body is the book which decomposes leaving only thought — and pleasure, Constants that remain on screens that shield the sun And make the letters large for fading eyes — yet not the same. Soon, when books are gone, as sooth the sayers warn When words run jumbled through the cloud A search in vain for plot and sense and order When stories spring from plastic, chips and wire, Bright and smart and stone-cold to the touch, When Gutenberg and all who followed weep . . . Tell me, Then will bookshelves join the empty ashtrays? — Deborah Salomon

Summer

S h o r ts

The Fragrance of a Different Life By Anthony S. Abbott

It begins,

of course, with the ocean — the Jersey Shore, the Grand Strand, Big Sur, Malibu and the thousands of less famous beaches where we all went and continue to go for a week or month as the case may be. It begins with the waves coming in and us as children or adults riding the waves, churning through the foam to the gravelly sand on the shore. How I loved the beach as a boy, loved riding those waves. How I loved making sand castles and watching the waves come in, bit by bit, inch by inch, until they swallowed up our best handiwork. I made these works of art first of all for myself and then for my niece and nephew and later for my children and later still for my grandchildren. Sometimes we waited to watch the waves wash over them, and sometimes we left when we finished our work so that we wouldn’t have to see the destruction. For me, the summer was the most complex time of year. I started boarding school in the fourth grade, and often would go to the beach for a few days with my grandparents or a school friend before settling in for the vast reaches of June, July and August. The question was where? And with whom? I just went where I was sent. At 12 I flew across the country by myself, braving summer thunderstorms in a series of D-6s, to spend the summer with my father and his second family in California. It was not particularly successful, and the following summer I begged my godmother, Marion Lowe, to let me stay with her at her ranch in Santa Cruz, California. She consented, and this time I crossed the country by train rather than risking the terrors of the sky. The train was wonderful. Closed in the Pullman car’s lower berth, I could raise the shade and watch the mysterious mountains and rivers, cities and towns, slide past in the starlit darkness of the night. Two summers later I went back to California to work as a camp counselor, this time on the Greyhound bus, because I had to pay for the trip myself, and I remember arriving in San Francisco, pale and thin like Banquo’s ghost, because I had not saved enough money to feed myself properly on the way. One of my favorite summers was the one after my senior year in prep school, when I worked for the Pennsylvania State Highway Department and stayed in the home of a friend, who taught me how to drive and how to smoke. How we all smoked then, and how we loved it, cradling the cigarettes between our index and middle fingers, trying to take the tip of the cigarette into our mouths with the casualness of Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart. As teachers we mark our calendars by the school year, which begins in September and ends in June, and so when we came to Davidson, North Carolina, in 1964, as a family of five, the question still remained — what will you do this summer? Our solution was to buy property on nearby Lake Norman, a huge artificial lake built by the Duke Power Co. And so every summer, when school was out, we moved the family from Davidson all of eleven miles to Lake Norman, where we swam and fished and waterskied and lived side by side with two other families whose children were the same age. Now, fifty years later, we live in our local retirement community, The Pines at Davidson, but when school is out we still move back to the lake for the summer and continue to enjoy our dear friends on either side of us. The children and grandchildren come back to visit, and the neighbor across the cove, who taught some of us to waterski in the 1960s, is now teaching the grandchildren. Summer has always been special — a time to smell the fragrance of a different life. And my three sons seem to have inherited that feeling. Two of them are teachers, and we all savor that moment when the last class is over, the last exam taken or graded, the last faculty meeting attended — a moment when we can stop and breathe and feel the lake or the ocean or the mountain air, something entirely different from the classroom and the college campus. And after Labor Day, when a few yellow maple leaves begin to fall, we come back to our teaching and our studies refreshed and renewed by the magic of one more summer. I am thankful for that. Anthony S. Abbott served as president of the North Carolina Poetry Society from 2009–2011. His newest book of poems, The Angel Dialogues, was released in March 2014.

August 2014

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Summer

S h o r ts

The Grandstand By Clyde Edgerton

When I think of childhood summers, I see the

baseball field and grandstand on the school near my boyhood home. No fence stood around the field. My friends and I used it at will. I remember fences around nothing but dog pens, chicken pens and pastures. But there were plenty of invisible fences. No black child would have dared walk through the invisible fence around that ball field or the one around our church or school. But we — my four or five main buddies and I — were carefree. (Mind you, I’m not writing here about a romantic, hazy-lazy summer boyhood thing: one friend’s daddy regularly beat him with a belt; another was often hungry and sometimes uncared for — his parents were bad to drink.) But back to baseball. I recall ball field sweat, sunburn, dirt and game suspense — with brief spells sitting in the shade of the ancient, covered, wooden grandstand that stood behind home plate. I recall no regulation bases (we used boards, cardboard or discarded shirts), no adult supervision and no uniforms. We did have a pitcher’s mound with a rubber (“pitcher’s plate”) that was occasionally replaced after almost wearing away (high school ball was played on the field until 1958 when a consolidated high school was built in a nearby community). Left field was relatively shallow. You could hit a home run over the left fielder’s head and into a deep gully that ran from left to center. If you hit the ball over the right fielder’s head, the ball would roll eternally — and on until it came up behind you. I remember regularly driving a car across the outfield once I was about 12 (there was a dirt road and a cart path from my house to the ball field). In the open car trunk would be a barrel of trash for me to empty in the community trash dump. It was in that left-field gully. Surely my mother saw the unbridled glee in my eyes when she handed me the car keys. Crafton Mitchell and I, setting off fireworks, once caught the dump on fire. The grandstand served as our backstop — since we never had enough players for a catcher. It was a wooden structure about a story high, maybe four car-widths wide and just as deep. Chicken wire extended across the open front. If you could have looked down from the sky, you’d see that the entire infield appeared to be placed in a deep horse-hoof print in the sand. The highest bank stood behind home plate — slanting upward under the grandstand floor — the grandstand having been built up the slant of the high bank. The floor of the grandstand was composed of giant wooden “steps,” each

wide enough to sit on comfortably and tall enough to lean back against — not “open” like today’s bleacher stands. The character of our spot on earth, the soul of the enterprise, rested in that grandstand, the structure. When I was 7, Crafton Mitchell and I, exploring the neighborhood, found a half pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes on one of those big steps. We were old enough to know what we shouldn’t do — but, alone, at the grandstand, we looked at each other and realized . . . realized what we had to do. Crafton walked home for matches while I stood guard. We lost our clear-lung virginity that afternoon. At the grandstand. What all else was gained and lost inside, beneath, and behind that grandstand — from glasses to coats to other treasures — I will never know nor measure. (I only heard stories, of course.) I do know it was cool under the grandstand, especially if a breeze blew across the shaded red clay. I remember cheering from the grandstand during high school baseball games and church softball games. I remember watching field events, a donkey baseball game, hobby airplane flying, pickup football games in the outfield. One day at a church field-day footrace, Gideon Powers, a church elder, stood at the end of a makeshift racetrack (a group of us 6-year-old boys started on the third base line and raced to a chalk line drawn between first and second base). At the race’s end, he grabbed the winner, me (the only race I ever won), lifted me onto his shoulders and paraded me around the bases and along the grandstand walk-through aisle that was behind the grandstand screen. Spectators cheered. I was on top of the world — in the grandstand. I remember Cecil Overcash, during a church softball game, turning, standing, and charging backward from his catcher position (eyes to the heavens — on a fouled pop softball), running full speed into a tall corner post of the grandstand — so hard he was knocked unconscious. They lay him on one of the big wooden steps and waited. He finally came around. The game started up again. I’m guessing that the grandstand was a place like some of those places you remember. Pick up a pen. Talk into your cell phone recorder, if you must, but, please, see that your grandstands and swimming holes stay alive in the stories and memories of those who love you, that they stay alive after your mind — their current keeper — is no more. Clyde Edgerton is the author of ten novels, a memoir, and a new work, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW.

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Luna Moth By Virginia Holman

The shadow of the Milky Way is the best path. You’ll know you’re close when you hear the mockingbird

that’s switched day for night. He’ll call from atop the starlit juniper: I’m a shrike, a jay, a hawk, a frog. Past the paved road, past the shell-lined lane, past the lit kitchen of the widow woman find a creek and beside it a blank-faced silvered tree. Follow the grassy lane beside the garden planted from last year’s harvest: tasseled Country Gentleman, pole beans coiling web thin tendrils, ripening Hanovers, okra and cucumbers for pickling. Move the box turtles from the strawberries before the man with a bucket arrives near dawn. The wood steps are now concrete, but step light just the same. Press your face against the sour screen. The old ship’s table is there, a thick scar down its center, the bolts long removed from the heavy brass base. A magnolia darkens in a hand-painted tureen. The table’s set for breakfast, all the dishes turned upside down. Beyond that lies the unseen parlor, farther still, the bed where your family was made and born. The door’s not locked, it never is, but the rusting hook is set, and what better place is there than this side of the threshold, where, if you wait long enough, the day will arrive and with it your man, and the hinge in your heart will unfold as he rocks the old cane chair up on two legs, and points out — there, right in front of you — what you’ve missed? Virginia Holman is the author of Rescuing Patty Hearst (Simon & Schuster), a memoir of her late mother’s untreated schizophrenia. An avid kayaker and outdoorsy type, she writes the monthly “Excursions” column for Salt magazine. She teaches in the department of creative writing at UNC Wilmington.

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Blasphemy By Stephen E. Smith

The Reverend

Aldridge Chandler hunkered in the airless vestry, his black velvet robe billowing about him, and placed his hands on the shoulders of my newly altered seersucker jacket. “Well,” he said, “your mother’s not much of a seamstress, is she?” I didn’t respond. Language had lost all meaning an hour earlier as I stood before the bedroom mirror to examine Mother’s handiwork. Somehow she’d transformed the two dollar thrift shop jacket she’d purchased for me the day before into a sagging circus tent. The puckered shoulder seams fell an inch below where the upper joint of my humerus joined the scapula and sent the crooked sleeves distending downward to catch me just below my elbows. She’d managed to shorten the sleeves a full three inches more than necessary so that the cuffs of my starched dress shirt extended like stovepipes into my clammy palms. My cuff links provided the crowning touch. Embedded in opaque amber were Caribbean sunsets pieced together from butterfly wings. My grandparents had given me the cuff links for my birthday, and until that moment I’d thought them the height of fashion. As I studied my funhouse reflection, those two twilights dangled like cheap souvenir ashtrays at the ends of my wilted arms. I was as mortified as an 8-year-old could be. “It’s OK,” Reverend Chandler said. “I think you’ll make an excellent acolyte.” He produced a Zippo, snapped it open, touched fire to the wick and handed me the brass candle lighter, the flame flickering tenuously as the first booming notes from the Möller pipe organ reverberated in the rafters. Then he spun me around, opened the door to the sanctuary and gave me an emphatic shove. And there I was in front of the congregation at Saint Mark’s United Methodist Church, my brain overloading on sensory stimuli — the dust motes suspended in the light funneling through the stained-glass windows, the high altar’s brass cross and collection plates, the plush red carpet, the purple altar drapes — and the eyes of every member of the church focused on me. I was utterly stupefied. What the heck was I supposed to do? I cast a side glance at the congregation and spied Mother, her face crimson — whether from the August heat or embarrassment, I wasn’t sure — grimacing in the front pew. She nodded toward the altar. Oh, yeah, I had to light the candles! Stepping off solemnly on my right foot, I halted momentarily when I noticed that my left shoelace

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

had come untied. I considered pausing to retie it, but what would I have done with the brass lighter? Instead, I shuffled cautiously to the first candle holder, touched the flame to the brass-capped wick and watched it flicker to life. As Reverend Chandler had instructed, I performed an abbreviated genuflection in front of the cross and paused before attempting to light the second candle. That’s when I noticed that the flame on the lighter had gone out. How in heaven’s name was I going to light the second candle? The answer came in a burst of divine inspiration, a voice whispering in my brain: “Hey stupid, walk back to the first candle and relight the candle lighter.” Of course! I staggered in front of the cross a second time, pausing to offer a cursory bow, and carefully touched the wick of the lighted candle. Nothing. I tried a second time. No flame. I spotted the problem: The lighter wick had burned down. I pushed the extender up with my thumb, forcing the wick out to its full length — at least six inches — and touched it to the lighted candle. A flame shot heavenward like a bottle rocket, and a palpable gasp issued from the congregation. I retracted the wick, brought the conflagration under control, and strolled back to the second candle, which, praise God, lighted without incident. All I had to do was make a clean getaway. I stepped off toward the vestry door, successfully completing four respectful strides before my shoelace twisted around my left shoe and sent me sprawling, the brass candle lighter clattering across the floor. I instantly rose to a crouched position, one foot extended, the other bent beneath me as if I were on the starting blocks for the fifty yard dash, and lurched forward just as a hand reached from the vestry to grab me by the arm. A loud tearing of cloth reverberated through the sanctuary as my newly tailored jacket ripped loose at the left shoulder seam. For a moment, I lay flat on the vestry floor, perspiration running in rivulets down my arms, my breath coming in short shuddery jolts. And then I did it — I looked the Reverend Aldridge Chandler full in the face and blurted an involuntary profanity. “It’s well,” he said, “that Jesus loves the little children.” Stephen E. Smith, our Omnivorous Reader, is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, including Selected New and Old Poems: A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths.

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Swimming Novels By Angela Davis-Gardner

A girl and boy,

each dressed in a black tank suit, mount writers’ blocks at the end of a regulation length pool. The water is blue and flat, a tabula rasa of a pool. It’s the swimming of novels event, no ties allowed. The stands are hushed. Editors line the front row, craning forward with binoculars. The girl tries out her racing dive position, curling her toes over the edge of the block and flexing her strong brown knees. A recent M.F.A. graduate, she is a tall, well-made young woman with long smooth muscles and a calm exterior. She is aware that she looks formidable, but this weakens rather than strengthens her, for she is acutely conscious of the chasm between seeming and being. Furthermore, too great a show of strength may put the crowd on her brother’s side. She glances up, looking at the far end of the pool where her father is typing, coaching by example. He has lectured her on the perils of vacillation. The boy hikes up his suit. Still ringing in his ears is the locker room pep talk, a tape of Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance. He will not only survive but endure. He already has some brilliant metaphors; all he needs is a conflict. He casts a glance at his sister. She tried suicide once; he might use that. “On your marks, get set . . .” The swimmers crouch. The gun sounds. The boy leaps in, holding his nose. The girl stares out at a wisp of fog moving over the water’s surface: pistol smoke? Miasma? In the distance there is what might be the roar of a crowd. She stares down at her own reflection, then out at her brother. He is dog-paddling back toward her, his hair plastered to his skull, a look of terror on his face. “Go on,” she shouts at him. “Get going.” He tilts backward and flails his arms, his eyes still fixed on her, beseeching. She dives, glides beneath the surface. There’s a fine silence underwater. She executes a strong frog kick, pulls her arms down her sides. Maybe she’ll go the whole distance like this. A pelagic habitat: She likes the sound of it. Other liquid sounding words come to mind: nesslerize, plaice. She comes even with the boy’s flutter kick. Words begin to teem around her, a soup of vowels, consonants. She breaks the surface, sidestrokes beside her brother. He turns toward

August 2014

her and they swim together, moving dreamily toward the end. Both coaches are at the pool’s edge now, typing against each other and shouting their protégées forward. The boy’s coach is trumpeting reviews of his first lap: heartrending, original. The girl’s coach growls to get serious, she’s behind for her age. She does a flip turn and pushes off hard. Behind her he’s reciting names, Eudora, Flannery, all the early learners. She kicks harder, moving out into the silence, then turns on her back and drifts. There’s no hurry. Her coach has already written out the first chapter for her; all she has to do is swim it. The boy churns past doing the Great American Crawl. He gives her a gleeful smile as he turns his head to breathe. He’s in water wings now, and flippers. Treading water, the girl looks back over her shoulder. He’s younger, their mother shouts, it’s only fair. Her coach shouts at her through a bullhorn: the advantages she’s had, all the money spent, orthodontia, violin. They are even on the turn, then swim side-by-side, stroke-forstroke, in comfortable rhythm. They go on, lap after lap, sentences trailing after them. The coaches shout page counts on the turns and sieve out the words in nets. The words are dried, strained, formed into chapters, set in type. Slim volumes appear on the blocks along with publicity photographs. The girl develops a foot cramp, her pace slows. She and the boy pass going opposite directions. It’s hard to tell who’s ahead or behind. They seem to be in a different pool now, kidney shaped, like the pool at a cheap motel. The girl watches her right hand as she swims; it’s wrinkling, shriveling. Her heart is shriveling; a small stone in her chest. It is growing dark. Her brother is no longer in sight. She discovers that it is impossible to cry underwater. In the distance her father is urging her to hurry, bring the story to a climax. She’s been published but remaindered, he says, there’s very little time. The water begins to pick up a chop; it tastes of brine. The bottom lines are no longer visible. The bleachers have emptied, and the coaches have vanished. No one is keeping score, yet as night falls the boy and girl keep swimming, striking out into open sea. Novelist Angela Davis-Gardner was in the first graduating class of UNC Greensboro’s MFA program. In her youth, she swam thousands of miles as part of Bob Jamieson’s Greensboro girls’ swimming team.

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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The Body By Wiley Cash

Close your eyes

for a moment and find yourself standing in the yard of the house you grew up in. It’s early summer and not quite hot this late in the day. The soft light of fireflies has begun to lift from the high grass around the porch. There are things you can hear in the distance: the muffled bounce of a basketball on the pavement up the street; the piercing but somehow comforting whine of an electric saw that echoes from a neighbor’s garage. A sprinkler runs in the yard next door, the soft spray of water carrying itself across the grass; the smell of freshly cut blades mingles with that of the damp earth beneath. The sprinkler mists the road, and there is the smell of sun-warmed cement being cooled. You’re not quite old enough to have a job, but you’re old enough to be at home alone. Because of this there is a range of possibilities that seem limitless; you’re confined only by your imagination or how long you’re willing to wait for something — anything — to happen. But then you hear it: the crunch of bike tires on the road behind you; the squeal of brakes before a foot comes off the pedal; the voice that calls your name. John Warner’s 15, too old to be sitting on his bike in front of your house, calling your name and staring at you. You’re not so much afraid of him as you are wary of him. He’s alone, which is good, because you’re more afraid of his friend: Jerry Kistler. There was the time you left your skateboard near the mailbox and went inside for a drink, and when you came back out Jerry

Kistler was sitting on his bike with your skateboard tucked under his arm. John Warner sat on his own bike beside him. It seemed as if Kistler were waiting for you so you could see him with your skateboard, and then the two of them rode away. John Warner had looked back at you and smiled. You’re thinking about that smile now as John calls your name again. “What do you want?” you ask, your voice higher and tighter than it would be if John were one of your friends. “I want to show you something,” he says. “What?” “I can’t tell you.” He spits something out and rubs it into the asphalt with his shoe. “You have to come see it.” “My parents aren’t home,” you say. “I can’t leave the yard.” He laughs at this, and you feel your face turning red, your ears growing warm. “It won’t take but a second,” he says. He turns his bike to face down the street. Your garage door is open, and your bike leans against the wall inside. John nods toward your bike. “Follow me.” Before you know it you’re on your bike following John Warner through your neighborhood, praying that he doesn’t cross Union Road, the only place where you know for certain you’re not allowed to go. But he turns right just before the road dead-ends at the elementary school, and you follow him down the nature trail behind the baseball field. When you catch up to him you find he’s left his bike lying on its side, and he’s standing atop a culvert at the edge of the trail. “Look,” he says, pointing into the culvert. You leave your bike beside his and walk over to him, fearing what you’re about to see or what he could do with the two of you out here alone, the sun sinking behind the trees, the light fading. “Look,” he says again. In the culvert, just a few yards below, are the bones of some small animal. Little tufts of orange-brown fur are caught in the dry, dead leaves around it. “What do you think it was?” John asks. At first you think it was a cat, but it seems that John is asking you a question to which he already knows the answer, and you’re afraid of being wrong. “I don’t know,” you say. “I think it might be my cat,” he says. “I’ve been looking for her.” And something about how he says it makes you believe it is. “Jerry told me cats go off to die alone when they’re sick, and that I’d probably never find her.” It’s grown darker while the two of you have been standing there, making the bones even harder to see. “I don’t think it’s a cat,” you say. “Really?” John says. “It’s too small.” “You think we should bury it?” But he turns away before you can answer, and you hear him pick up his bike and push it up the trail. “I’m going to get a shovel,” he says. “Wait here.” And it’s not until he’s gone that you realize he was crying. Wiley Cash is a New York Times best-selling author whose second novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, was released in January 2014. He lives in Wilmington.

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

August 2014

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Back Then By Lee Smith

Back then, summer stretched out before us like another country, ours to plunder and explore. “Summertime” was lit-

erally different, another kind of time — longer, larger. It belonged to us alone. In that rough remote corner of southwest Virginia where I grew up, the landscape was pretty much perpendicular and the roads were pretty scarce. But I always felt comforted by the ring of mountains which nestled our little town “like a play-pretty cotched in the hand of God,” as my Aunt Kate always described it. Once school was out, we threw down our books and ran those mountains ridge to ridge like little animals, me and my cousins and the other kids in Cowtown, as our stretch of Route 460 was called, enjoying a kind of freedom which would be hard to imagine today — climbing trees and cliffs, playing in caves, swinging on grapevines, catching salamanders, damming up the creek, building lean-tos and lookouts, playing Indians and settlers with our homemade slingshots or the occasional Christmas bow-and-arrow set. We formed dozens of clubs, each with its own secret handshake and code words and initiation. We’d stay up in the mountains until they rang the big bell to call us home. Back then I ate supper with everybody. Martha Sue Owens was my best friend and her mother made the best cream gravy and cornbread, my favorite, but the sophisticated Trivetts ate the most exotic things, such as lasagna and chop suey, which the rest of us had never heard of. I learned to swim in their backyard pool. Back then we didn’t have camps or lessons or any organized activities except a week of Vacation Bible School, where we made lanyards and drank red Kool-Aid and ate Lorna Doone cookies and sang “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world,” though we had never seen any of those other ones. Back then I spent a lot of time in my own backyard sitting under a giant cluster of forsythia bushes that I called the “dogbushes” because

Salt • August 2014

I took an endless series of family dogs under there with me — my Pekingese Missy and our boxer, Queenie, come to mind — along with an entire town filled with imaginary friends. My two best friends in that dogbush town were Sylvia and Vienna. Vienna was named for my favorite food, the Vienna sausages in the nice flat cans that I used to take under there to eat, along with some of those little cellophane packets of saltine crackers. My friend Vienna was very beautiful, with long curly red hair. But my friend Sylvia could fly, something I aspired to. I often took the steep path down the riverbank to my “wading house,” the understory of a willow tree half in and half out of the water. The wading house was home to many animal friends such as a young lizard named Jerry (because I couldn’t tell if it was a boy lizard or a girl lizard, and Jerrys can go either way), old Grandfather Turtle and his three silly granddaughters, a baby watersnake named Oliver, and a huge family of busy brown bugs. We weren’t supposed to wade or swim when the river ran black with the coal they were washing upstream. But once Martha Sue and I made rafts out of boards tied onto innertubes and floated away to Kentucky, where we planned to become racehorse riders. We floated down the river around the bend and under the Hoot Owl bridge, past the hospital and the depot, all the way to town where our trip was cut short behind my daddy’s dimestore. Here we were greeted by a sizable crowd including my daddy himself, alerted by enemy spies. We were quickly returned dripping wet to our worried mothers for a spanking. I think I was lucky to grow up back then in those long lazy summertimes that stretched our souls and our imaginations, with mountains and trees and animals for friends, back then when the word “twitter” meant only birdsong. Lee Smith has published thirteen novels and four collections of short stories. She is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the N.C. Award for Literature. Her newest novel is Guests on Earth.

The Art & Soul of Wilmington

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Benji’s Mother By Ruth Moose

The first and only

time I ever met Benji’s mother she accused me of murder. Her eyes black onyx, her hair loose and wild, she screamed, “You tried to kill my child.” Stunned, I just stood there, shaking. For the last six weeks, Benji, her son, had come every day to play with my son. Benji would appear at my back door as soon as Captain Kangaroo went off the TV, asking if Lyle, my 5-year-old, could come out to play. The two boys played well together, never arguing, not even mock wrestling or fighting. They played in our backyard on swings, a sandbox, the treehouse/ fort my husband had built. In and out, they had Kool-Aid, graham crackers, cheese, snack kinds of things. Sometimes I fed Benji lunch if he lingered long after I called Lyle in. One of my house rules was Quiet Time. After lunch every day, my son had to go to his room to read or nap or play quietly. Alone. Two peaceful, quiet hours. No playmates. Often he napped. And so did I. Survival mode. After lunch, I explained to Benji about Quiet Time and that he had to go home. He seemed to accept this and, head down, slowly left. For some reason I felt a bit guilty. Especially after the day I found him sitting on our front steps where he’d been the whole time. Waiting. Two quiet hours. Always in clean jeans or camp shorts and T-shirts, though rumpled and scruffy, Benji wore an air of sadness. I don’t remember ever seeing him smile. He was a good kid, shared, never raised his voice nor asked for anything, not even a drink of water. Busy with a new baby, I’d been grateful for Lyle to have a pleasant playmate and Benji seemed a sweet child, absolutely no trouble. Once when I had some errand and Benji was there, I drove him home. I was also a bit curious. Two streets up, the house was like others in the development, brick, front porch stoop, back screen porch, large, but bare, lawns, front and back. Good level playing areas but no swings, no trampoline, nothing. The grass was mowed, but shrubbery, straggly, untrimmed, reached the tightly shuttered windows. I’d asked neighbors about Benji when he first came to play. No one knew much. Only that his mother sent him and his older sister out to play, locked her doors. They weren’t allowed back in until dark. Or maybe a thunderstorm. What did she do all day in that locked house? No one knew. Alcohol? That was a guess. Hooked on soaps? Another guess. Few had ever seen “hide nor hair of her,” they said. The father? Word was he traveled, gone weeks at a time. The day I met Benji’s mother was one of those rare, rainy days in summer. Not hard rain, but enough so kids had to play inside. Benji had been there, as he was most mornings. He and my son had played board games, done puzzles and I’d brought out some coloring books, magic paint books, brushes, a toy teacup of water. The boys played until lunch time, then Benji went home. I hadn’t gotten the peanut butter sandwiches on the table when PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

someone blam, blam, blammed my back screen door, barged in my kitchen. Barged in! Scared me. Startled, I turned around, saw Benji being held by the scruff of his T-shirt and a woman wild with rage, screaming “What have you done to my son?” “Nothing.” The boys had played well. Peaceful. “What did you feed him? You tried to poison him,” she screamed, still holding the hapless child like a small, scared animal. Benji looked pale, helpless. “Nothing,” I repeated. Tried to think what they’d had for snacks. Maybe a cereal bar. Did it have nuts? He was allergic to nuts? “Look at his mouth,” she jerked Benji around, yanked open his mouth. “Stick out your tongue.” Benji’s tongue was black. “Look,” she said. “It’s black. His tongue is black. You tried to kill him.” I was puzzled. Nothing I’d fed him would have caused his tongue to go black. I called my son into the room. “Let me see your tongue.” Lyle looked puzzled but poked out his tongue, his eyes asking if I was going to take his temperature or was he going to the doctor. His tongue was pink, normal. Really puzzled now I said, “Let’s go to your room.” Benji’s mother followed, having finally let go the scuff of his T-shirt. “Show me what you were playing, ” I said. The play table with two chairs had puzzles and games and on top them, open, lay the two Magic Paint books, pages damp and limp. I picked up one of the brushes. Wet, too. “We painted,” my son said. “Lots of pages.” “Show me,” I said. He picked up a brush, dipped it in the water, flipped to a new page and began to paint. Colors appeared. Red, blue, purple. No black. Benji picked up a brush, put it in his mouth to wet it, started toward the page. “Wait,” I said. “Is this how you did all your pages?” He nodded. His mother stepped back from looking over his shoulder, hands still on her hips.“Is it poison?” Her voice was lower now, but still had an edge. “I bet it’s poison.” I picked up one of the books, read on the back cover in very small print, “Safe. Only water required to make the colors appear.” I pointed, showed her, watched her read it. Mystery solved. She took her hands off her hips and we went back to the kitchen. Benji followed her out the door. I never saw either of them again. Ruth Moose, author of three books of short stories and six collections of poetry, taught creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill for fifteen years. Her first novel, Doing it at the Dixie Dew, won the Malice Domestic Prize and was published by St. Martin’s Press in May, 2014. August 2014

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The Mysterious Indoors By Dana Sachs

It was August 1979 and the Memphis heat was a monster. My friends Laura and Kathy and I didn’t emerge from the air

conditioning until 10 at night, when the city turned soft and amiable, easy on the skin and full of promise. For three or four hours, we would roam the bars of Midtown, listening to the bands we loved, dancing until our hair clumped with sweat behind our ears, until our bare feet turned black from dirty floors, subsisting on Tic Tacs and water. When the lights came on after a show, we dug around under tables to find the tortuous pumps that we had bought — optimistically and at fifty cents a pair — from St. Vincent de Paul or Salvation Army. We had known each other all our lives. Laura and I were about to start our senior year of high school; Kathy was heading off to college. Insatiable and fearless, they refused to go home until dawn. I was the sleepy, shy one. I trailed them in the crucial experiences of life (love and sex, namely), but felt too meek to catch up. Usually, they dropped me off at home at 2 a.m. before dashing off to a new adventure. Many nights, “adventure” meant using the Howard’s Donuts pay phone to call Randy and try to get into his house. Randy played bass in our favorite band, the Randy Band (I still don’t know if it was named for him or for the British term for “lusty”). Quirky and elusive, Randy was 26 or 27, long-haired and bespectacled, big-grinned but often silent, part John Lennon, part Cheshire Cat. He lived alone in a ranch house, his mother having died, his father having decamped to a girlfriend’s place in the suburbs. He had converted a spare bedroom into a recording studio and he and his guy friends hung out there all night. He made that humdrum neighborhood as cool as New York City. Randy was gracious with invitations but only rarely followed through. Phoning Laura in the afternoons, he would purr, “Call me later and come over.” But when she dialed his number at 2 a.m., he mostly didn’t answer. That was the game they played: Sometimes he let them in; sometimes he didn’t. That summer, I decided that seeing inside Randy’s house was a necessary step toward growing up. One night, then, I stayed in the car when they drove over. We parked Laura’s brother’s yellow Beetle at the curb and went around to the

August 2014

carport. Kathy knocked on the back door. No answer. “Randy!” Laura hissed, loud enough for him to hear but not loud enough to wake the neighbors. Kathy returned to the front of the house and tossed pebbles at his music studio window. I lay down on the front lawn, slightly fearful that the door would open. What did people do in that house? Unlike the mysterious indoors, nothing scared me in the yard and I stretched out like a sunbather while Kathy and Laura prowled near the shrubbery, eyeing the windows for movement in the Venetian blinds. Memphis is a city of fine trees, and on that summer night the canopy above my head formed a lacy screen across the sky. I could have stayed there for hours. Then the blinds moved. The door opened. I followed them inside. What happened in that house? Well, Laura and Kathy became domestic. Randy’s mom had decorated years before, and my friends seemed determined to restore the femininity that was lost when Randy turned the place into a bachelor pad. They replaced the toilet paper in the bathroom, rearranged knickknacks on the coffee tables, made faux canapés out of the Triscuits and Cheez Whiz they found in the pantry. Eventually, we entered the studio, where Randy hovered over synthesizers with guys we barely knew. For the next few hours, we perched on barstools, listening. Instead of whole songs, they played notes and chords, tunes that changed and matured through the process of creation. They were actually making music there. Laura passed around another plate of Triscuits. Kathy straightened a pillow. I ended up by the window, looking out through the blinds. Near me, Randy and his nameless friends tweaked at knobs and levers, filled the air with sound. Outside, through the branches of those big Memphis oaks, the stars watched over all of us. I was not quite 17 years old, in love with night and summer and sweat and music — in love with love, too, though I hadn’t experienced it yet. Was that dark sky more spectacular when I observed it through Randy’s window? More than anything, I wanted to believe in the wonder of the world. So, I thought, Yes. Novelist Dana Sachs has lived in North Carolina, Connecticut, California, Scotland, Vietnam and Hungary, but her heart retains its Memphis beat. Her latest novel is The Secret of Nightingale Palace. PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Summer

S h o r ts

Summer Afternoon By Lee Zacharias

Henry

James once said that the most beautiful words in the English language are “summer afternoon,” though it seems unlikely that for him those words summoned the sweltering humidity of a Piedmont August. Rather, they imply something deliciously lazy, a luxurious indolence that exists outside of time, just as memories of childhood summers do: backyard kiddie pools, Kool-Aid mustaches, the melody of the ice cream truck and feel of cool evening grass on bare feet, most of all the pursuit of fireflies at dusk, a time not driven by school bells or minutes counted till recess. Not until we are teens do our music, hairdos and clothes return us to the world of calendar and clock, transforming us into relics of this generation or that. Summer is a magic trick lost for most adults, who scramble to cram a season’s worth of indolence into a week or two at the beach. Even for teachers, with their famous “summers off” — and for thirty-five years I was one — the trick doesn’t quite work. Oh, I experienced the magic briefly during the very first days after school adjourned, days that were technically not summer at all but late spring, when months of writing time, laps at the outdoor pool and the promise of a newly planted garden seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. Fresh mulch hid the weeds waiting just beneath the soil, the water was refreshingly cold and the shimmering ideal of all those words not yet set to paper seemed to float miraculously in the air. But even before June could slip into July, the pool would grow tepid, the wild morning glories and poke would launch their invasion, and few were the mornings I could walk the dog, swim or pull weeds before sweat stung my eyes and soaked my shirt. Worse: As the words piled up on the pages they somehow had less shimmer, less resonance and more thunk. How I used to hate to see the crape myrtles bloom, those omens, reminders that summer would come to an unseasonable end when school began again in August. It is probably no coincidence that I could not grow crape myrtles myself. Invariably they got powdery mildew and had to be dug out. The first house I bought in Greensboro had a screened porch. This was a bonus I had not learned to covet in the years I spent growing up in the Midwest (like the sunroof that came with the first used car I purchased, a sunroof I didn’t want and wouldn’t pay for because all they did was leak, PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

I insisted to the salesman, the same sunroof that led me to swear a week later I would never buy another car without one). I acquired some second-hand wicker furniture, sprayed it white, and hung plants. Because I wrote at an electric typewriter I ran an extension cord. Much of my first novel was typed at a little table on that screened porch, long before the days of word-processing, when the rainless afternoon thunder of July and August would force me to unplug. In the evenings my husband and I often sat out in the dark, listening to the tree frogs and cicadas as the hum of traffic slowed for the night. Sometimes we even moved our little black and white TV to the side door and watched Masterpiece Theatre and Hill Street Blues from the porch. When it was time for a bigger house, a screened porch topped the list of must-haves. We got a grand one, running the width of the house with a roof held up by white pillars. I no longer wrote there but could have entertained an army. These days the porch is much smaller. My late mother-inlaw’s wicker settee and chairs, now grown somewhat shabby, are all that fit. There’s no room to entertain — for if the dog so much as moves, his tail sweeps every wineglass to the floor. But it is a wonderful place to sit in the dark and listen to a soft rain, and most summer afternoons you will find me there, reading, dog snoozing nearby on the settee. Let the crape myrtles bloom, for a few years ago I retired, and the book in my lap is not a text I plan to teach or a manuscript from someone’s portfolio for promotion and tenure, but an untasted world taken from the tottering stacks of such worlds atop the file cabinets in my study. Summer no longer ends abominably early, and if the August humidity oppresses, there’s a breeze from the overhead fan. I will linger until the light fails before dinner, the weather chills, and it’s time to turn on the gas logs. But for now it is summer, and when I look up from my book there is another world going on just outside, leaves blow, children play, a package is delivered, a dog strolls past, somewhere down the block someone is mowing a lawn, and for that one eternal moment I know exactly what Henry James meant. Lee Zacharias is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories. Her latest book, The Only Sounds We Make, a collection of personal essays, is published by Hub City Press. August 2014

Summer

S h o r ts

The Bad Old Days By Drew Perry

You probably won’t

even need an air conditioner, somebody said. Summer, 1997. Put a box fan on one end blowing out. Put another on the other end blowing in. I’d just moved to Greensboro from Boston. My ex-girlfriend and I had spent the better part of the previous year proving to each other that we ought to stay ex-ed. I had a brand-new pound dog. I’d come for the MFA program, to try to learn how to write. This was my first time living alone. I’d found a one-bedroom shotgun apartment in a hundred-year-old Victorian. I was in a delicate place, is what I’m wanting to say. I lasted maybe a week. But it turns out nobody else could live AC-free, either. Most of us grad students were living in the same kinds of places, all these apartments cut into all these houses in the same few mainly historical blocks. No one could afford more than one air conditioner, and no fuse box could survive it, anyway, so the question was this: Do I want to live comfortably, or sleep at night? Everyone I knew opted for sleep. Set up a window unit in your bedroom, close the door a couple of hours before you intend to go in there, suffer through the rest of your apartment growing stiller, smaller — or crank up that box fan — and there is no joy truer than walking in and feeling the refrigerator rush of cold air, the growing suspicion that if you work at it hard enough, you might achieve a small thunderstorm in the hallway where the two air masses meet. Except for sleeping, we lived on front porches. It was like this for two or three summers. Or six. It’s all a wash. We call them the bad old days now. We were poor. We were happy. Mornings we wrote, or worked odd jobs. We survived until the afternoon. We had baby pools in the front yards. One fairly sodden string of weeks, I am ashamed to admit, we bleached them to keep mold from growing — it was hard work, the dumping and refilling, and the water bills grew expensive. I had a buddy who dug a full pond, waist-deep, into the backyard behind his apartment.

August 2014

Another who hung a junker window unit off his porch railing, extension cord running around the side of the house, coolish air blowing out the front, blast furnace out the back. We kept what beer we could afford — so off-brand we had to special-order it from the grocery store — on ice in broken coolers. We had plans to affix lawnmower wheels to one of the dead refrigerators in somebody’s basement and make a sort of soapbox derby car, but no one could figure out a suitable braking system. When it rained — if it ever rained — we’d set up two-liter soda bottles in the street, pull an actual bowling ball from a tractor-tire flowerbed and bowl, mid-storm, right down the middle of the road. Three separate people had to serve as backstops — we were worried the ball would roll through the intersection and maim somebody, or worse. The neighborhood association loved us. Summer is for children, and that’s what we were. We were too old for it, and knew it. Or we knew that we were almost too old, and were spending those years trying everything we could to hang on. To keep whatever was coming at bay. And now it’s here. We’re grown. We’re married. We have jobs, functioning automobiles, clean laundry, central air — some of us may, even though I shudder to think of it, be members of neighborhood associations. I have two boys. A bunch of us have children. Those of us who are still here get together on summer weekends, cook out in the backyard, let the kids chase each other through sprinklers. And while that’s summer through and through — fireflies, watermelon, kids right up against the edge of injury — we try not to forget the old summers altogether. Last year a friend down the street, a veteran of those bad old days, rock-salted a cooler, froze everything inside. He was thrilled. We all were. And while the kids played, while we watched them, we set in right away trying to improve his system, trying to figure out how to do it right. Drew Perry is the author of the novels Kids These Days and This is Exactly Like You. He teaches writing at Elon University.

PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Summer

S h o r ts

Keeping Summer Close By Jill McCorkle

My earliest childhood

memories of summer are anchored at one end by my grandmother’s garden — the adjoining lot she single-handedly manned, producing enough bounty to keep everyone filled with field peas and tomatoes and corn all through the year — and the other by my family’s annual pilgrimage for a week at the beach. As is often the case, a large part of the trip was the getting ready and anticipation of it all to come. My mother always had baked a big ham and my grandmother sent us off with pound cake and vegetables. There were always new coloring books and comics (later novels and needlework projects that may or may not get done) spread there on the back seat where my sister and I sat for what seemed the endless drive that would get us there. I have now, at times, spent as long commuting to work, but then the journey seemed long and the week was an endless stretch of sun and sand, fishing and collecting shells. There was the quest to be the first to see the ocean; we rolled down the windows and could smell it long before we crossed over the bridge and could see dunes and sea oats and, finally, a sliver of green. The years all run together in my mind. Sunburns and mini-golf and sparklers lit and twirled most nights. There was always one night spent at the Myrtle Beach pavilion: riding The Swamp Fox or wanting to ride the Swamp Fox but chickening out and watching from the sidelines; the bells and calls of those throwing darts or baseballs to win the large stuffed bears dangling from booths; and homemade ice cream from a place called Painters. But the bulk of the time was just spent on the beach, long lazy days. I was an adult before I saw any beach other than those of the Carolinas and I think the first word in my mind was, really? Had I really spent a lifetime taking for granted what was just an hour and a half down the road? The wide white sandy beaches, often sparsely populated, the large dunes and sea oats, water just the right temperature. From a kid’s point of view, it was a week of heaven, even though in those earliest years, most houses didn’t have air conditioning and so windows were left wide open, everything PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

glazed in a fine coat of sand and salt. We had to take our own drinking water and so by the end of the week, that final jug was often reserved for brushing teeth. There usually wasn’t a washer and dryer and so by Friday, my mother was starting to gather up everything and talking about how good it was going to feel to get home to clean cool sheets and no sand. And sure enough, as much as I hated to leave, I was always amazed to get home and see how green our yard looked, how different the air smelled, how good it did feel to stretch out on clean sand-less sheets. And I would find my grandmother just where we had left her, picking and cooking and canning and freezing the vegetables that would keep summer close all through the year. In choosing memories to anchor summer, I would put my grandmother in her side yard in a chair I still own, a big colander on her lap as she shelled endless amounts of butter beans and field peas, the lull of the adult conversation and cars passing on the street in front of her house, as soothing as the rhythmic sounds of the ocean I was already missing. When I think of summer, I immediately do go back to childhood and the enormous sense of freedom that came with that last day of school. And before my mind is able to fully fill in the blanks of all other aspects of life — difficulties and hardships of a particular time — I can conjure the adults around me — alive and engaged with daily life in a way that is all too easy to overlook. My dad would often sit on the beach in a sand chair, his fishing pole anchored in a holder so all he had to do was sip a beer, puff on his pipe and watch the line for action, and he would say: “It just doesn’t get any better than this.” I would have to agree. Jill McCorkle, a native of Lumberton, North Carolina, is the author of four story collections and six novels, among them, Life After Life, Ferris Beach, and Carolina Moon. She lives in Hillsborough with her husband. August 2014

R.Rieter co-founder Cameron Cruse 66

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The Rosie Spirit

From home front to storefront, the women of R. Riveter are making big waves — and a future for military spouses — in their custom-made bag business By Melissa Goslin • Photographs by L aura L. Gingerich

hristina Knoernschild checks a clipboard hung on the wall of the sewing room for the day’s orders — twelve Doyles. She heads into the adjacent stockroom for supplies. First, she pulls canvas shells from stacks on metal shelving. Next, Knoernschild turns her attention to the red bins in the corner, where each liner has been pre-made with three open pockets, a zipper pocket and a zigzag-stitched R. Riveter tag. For today’s order, the liners have been sewn from special fabric. The bags will be corporate gifts, using custom material showcasing the client’s logo. Knoernschild’s final pull is from the rack of leatherwork, where she grabs a panel for the bag’s bottom and two matching straps for the top. Materials in hand, she makes her way back to the heavy metal of a fifty-year-old industrial sewing machine. Nine weeks ago, Knoernschild couldn’t sew a straight line. Now, in the back room of R. Riveter’s Southern Pines storefront, she is assembling a one-of-a-kind, high-end purse. “This is definitely not the Singer I have at home,” Knoernschild said. She presses the outside of her thigh against a metal plate and the needle

bar rises up, allowing her to slide the thick leather and canvas beneath it. At her command, thread spins off the large spool and down into a smaller bobbin, across the length of the machine and down through the needle to bind the pieces together. Soon, a bag — timeless, and elegant — begins to take shape. But that’s only part of the story. While their husbands were stationed at Camp Frank D. Merrill in Dahlonega, Georgia, R. Riveter co-founders Cameron Cruse and Lisa Bradley were jogging buddies. Cruse had a master’s degree in architecture, but there wasn’t much call for a budding architect in their area of North Georgia. Bradley held a master’s degree in business administration, but wasn’t sure how to translate her dream of starting her own company into the nomadic lifestyle of a military spouse. Grumbles of personal frustration quickly gave way to curiosity: How many other military spouses were in their shoes? The answer? A lot. “The mission came first,” Cruse said. “We wanted to empower and employ

military spouses in a way that allowed them to move their jobs with them.” They needed a product. Clothes were ruled out early — too many sizes, too much nuance. Uniformity was crucial to their mission. In order for military spouses to do the work from any duty station in the country, the individual pieces had to be standardized. “Bags just made sense,” Cruse said. And when they started to look around for fabric, they noticed the wealth and durability of military materials just waiting to be upcycled. As their first experiment, the ladies hand-stitched a Dopp kit, which Bradley’s husband still uses. They’ve made huge strides since that first brainstorming session in November 2011. “This is a strap cutter,” Cruse said, holding a bulky wooden tool in her hands. She remembers the long hours spent cutting leather strips with a ruler and straight edge before they realized what it did. “It’s a whole industry we dove into without a lot of experience or knowledge,” Cruse said. Tools of the trade aside, Cruse’s architectural background translated easily to bag design. “You can see from everything I do that I have a minimalistic aesthetic, a little rough around the edges, but still modern in a way,” Cruse said. Each R. Riveter bag boasts a solid exterior and patterned liner. “It’s the little surprise on the inside.” The R. Riveter name is a subtle homage to Rosie the Riveter, a cultural icon grown out of WWII, when women manned turret lathes and welded cockpit shells to do their part for the war effort and fill in the gaps of a disappearing male workforce.

R. Riveter evokes the Rosie spirit, but in an updated way. While they’re not averse to rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done, these women are creative, educated and resourceful. They are not filling someone else’s shoes — they are creating their own path. “We’re about the women’s right to work and our ability to do something for ourselves,” Cruse said. “And do something for the greater American economy in the process.” Unlike the factory ladies of WWII, modern-day riveters often work while their children nap. Several spouses dye, cut and wash the canvas from military tents. Another group sews patterned liners from templates. Two spouses work solely with leather, cutting each bucket bottom and strap, then scoring the hide for assembly. They are stationed from Fort Knox to Fort Drum, each spouse shipping her orders back to be assembled at the new location in Southern Pines, a testament to the company’s portability. When Cruse’s husband received orders to Fort Bragg, R. Riveter came with them. When Colleen Horigan’s long-time boyfriend graduated from West Point and received his assignment to Fort Bragg, she prepped her resumé and pored over military support sites. “I came across R. Riveter and emailed Cameron to tell her I was moving to Fort Bragg and thought they were an amazing company. She said it was great timing because they were moving, too,” Horigan said. As the business expands, so does the potential for new job descriptions. In the Army, jobs fall into a particular Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). “We joke about having R. Riveter MOS’s,” Cruse said. They recently hired a graphic designer and photographer — both military spouses — to take over the website, originally designed and handled exclusively by

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Cruse and Bradley. The wealth of untapped talent among the military spouse community continues to astound Cruse. It’s also been a source of frustration. “It’s always difficult to tell someone we don’t have any openings at the moment,” Cruse said. Horigan is now the retail manager of the new flagship store, where materials are displayed alongside the finished products. Poles and ropes still attached, shelter halves are piled beneath a display of clutches fashioned from Coast Guard uniforms. Gold stripes stand out from stacks of blue Army dress pants on a high shelf running the length of the wall, the Mrs. Lee and the Mrs. Grant resting beneath. Each bag and accessory is named for a military spouse or service member: the Mrs. Merrill, named after Mrs. Frank D. Merrill and honoring the place where R. Riveter was first created and carried out; the Mrs. Bell, named for 2010 Military Spouse of the Year Lori Bell. Bradley is often asked if she is the inspiration for the Mrs. Bradley, but concedes the homage to the wife of

General Omar Bradley instead. The Dopp kit has been perfected since that first hand-stitched one a few years back. Now a staple of the men’s line, the Dewy Dopp kits are named for Admiral George Dewey, who achieved victory in the Battle of Manila Bay. Other lines include the accessories, with key fobs, cardholders and T-shirts, which allow customers to support the mission at lower price points. The Fido line of dog collars stems from Bradley’s passion for pets. The Willie is named after General Patton’s famous bull terrier, officially named William the Conqueror. The heirloom line is one of Cruse’s favorites, allowing her to work with materials that hold enormous emotion and meaning for each customer. One such client commissioned R. Riveter to carefully transform her late husband’s West Point blanket into bags for herself and her two daughters. More than purses, R. Riveter bags are thoughtfully constructed treasures. In a market admittedly saturated with products, R. Riveter bags hold their own in terms of quality and style. Where they rise above is the unique story. “R. Riveter bags are an investment in a great product, but also in a community of people,” Cruse said. With this in mind, Cruse and Bradley decided to pull their bags from other retailers and take a “boots on the ground” approach to marketing. They hold a vision for the company — a nationally recognized brand with storefronts near every major military installation, with the resources and revenue to empower and employ more military spouses. “We’re not there yet,” Cruse said, “but we will be.” PS R. Riveter bags can be seen in Southern Pines at 111 N. Bennett Street or online at www.rriveter.com. Melissa Goslin is a freelance writer who just added a Mrs. Finn to her Christmas list. She can be reached at mg@melissagoslin.com.

From Schoolhouse to Showplace Golf, great art and a powerful respect for history shape the hand-made home of Dr. Dion Arthur By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Gessner

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Story of a house

r. Dion Arthur knows what he wants, how to get it and what to do with it. The spinal surgeon, who practices in Hamlet but lives in Pinehurst and Wrightsville Beach, wanted a house with history. What’s more historical than the one-room schoolhouse built to serve snowbirds as well as locals in a town if not ancient, at least steeped in lore? Except for two fireplaces and several exposed brick walls, the modest schoolhouse between Pinehurst No. 2 and The Village Chapel has all but disappeared into a residence of epic proportions decorated in a style popular when the Vanderbilts held court in Asheville, the Tuftses, Campbells and Boyds in the Sandhills — a gilded age when life, like furniture, wore fringes, tassels and royal hues of maroon and gold. When woods were dark and carved, marble quarried in Carrara, manners observed. “This house wasn’t built for me but for history,” Arthur says. “It is like a graduate course in art and design.” But what would Miss Wilcox say? According to the November 1900 Pinehurst Outlook, Florence Wilcox, a graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts, taught all grades at the Pinehurst Schoolhouse, basically one sizable room with two fireplaces and cloakrooms “located on the road to the golf links, surrounded by simple playgrounds, neatly kept walks and a fine grove of oaks and pines.” No doubt this school was built in the late 1890s as an enticement for families wintering in the developing resort. The Outlook continues: “A large American flag floating in the soft breezes of the South serves to remind one of a New England school . . . parents (can expect) educational advantages equal to those in their Northern homes.” How reassuring. When the school relocated, the building became residences for a Dr. Blue and others, and was also an art studio. Many additions and renovations later, the overgrown property stood empty and neglected until Arthur assumed its conservancy in 1999. Arthur, a Pennsylvanian practicing medicine in Colorado, had been looking for a historic property, a grand one similar to those where his illustrious forebears from coal and tobacco, and other baronets lived. Perhaps he sought ready-made roots since his parents, both ministers, moved the family around instead of establishing a homestead. Arthur believes growing up inside churches influenced his desire for Empire, Gothic and Renaissance Revival surroundings. Pinehurst appealed to him on several levels, including golf. Once here, he began looking for a landmark property. A patient alerted him to the schoolhouse. “It stood out,” he says. What Arthur really needed was a blank canvas stretched over good bones. “I know my bones,” the doctor smiles. Blanking the canvas meant gutting the interior, replacing all systems, building a carriage house/garage/ apartment accessed by a cloister, landscaping the acre and enclosing it with a wrought iron fence and gates copied from Biltmore House. Arthur redrew the roof line in a graceful curve mimicking architecture he admired in a German village. Yet the exterior walls, finished in whitewashed cement, convey a French country appeal. The project required three years and many craftsmen, with Arthur overseeing each detail.

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Because the devil really is in the details. “When I walked into this room it took my breath away — my mind started spinning.” Arthur speaks of the sunken living room, a mini-ballroom with a 15-foot ceiling lit by high windows, a remnant of the art studio. The walls speak first: an English tea stain ragged (with diapers) over mustard-gold paint, creating an antique finish. Six coats of lacquer add patina. The huge space demanded proportioned furniture, Arthur realized. His sofa, throne chairs, ottomans and Victorian fainting couch integrate carved woods with multiple fabrics in rich tones. Most pieces are custom-made from the High Point market. Others, massive antiques Arthur found trolling estate sales. Surprisingly, no family heirlooms. Arthur sees this great hall primarily as a gallery for half a dozen paintings, some 3-D, all bizarrely beautiful, mystical, in a style bordering Chagall. A decade ago, he met then 12-year-old artist George Pocheptsov, of Ukrainian parentage, in Wilmington. “Georgie,” as he is known in art circles, began painting at 17 months. The prodigy progressed quickly, soon to be hailed a young Picasso. A documentary of his life — A Brush with Destiny — received four Emmys. “I fell in love with his work, spent time discussing my ceramics collection with him, watched his form of art evolve,” Arthur recalls. They remain friends. Besides the stunning paintings — one of Arthur’s mastiff — the salon displays Palissy “organic” platters alive with ceramic fish and reptiles, a style popularized by sixteenth century potter Bernard Palissy and revived in nineteenth century France. A glass cabinet reveals yet another collection: slightly grotesque clown figurines made by a Broadway set designer in the 1980s. An enormous repose-style mirror in the corner completes the effect. “I wanted a dramatic showpiece,” Arthur explains. He succeeded, lacking only Aladdin’s flying carpets. Arthur prefers polished dark oak floors, except in bedrooms, where broadloom has been installed. “I’m not big on rugs — dust, hyper-allergenic.” Look up: Strauss chandeliers glitter from the world’s finest lead crystal — even in the foyer powder room. Arthur confines wall decoration here and in the dining room, with a similar PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2014

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Old Pinehurst Schoolhouse 1898 lacquer treatment over deep crimson paint. Dark walls, beams, floors and furnishings backdrop his collection of brightly colored Waterford crystal Christmas tree ornaments. Arthur describes his master suite as befitting a British gentleman, with espresso brown walls, bare of art. None need. An alderwood bed from the studio of Hollywood furniture designer Phyllis Morris resembles Bernini’s Baldachinno — the twisted columns and canopy surrounding the altar at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But he rejected gold leaf overlay, a Morris hallmark. The dark-woods, bare-wall theme continues through the master bath into a vast two-fridge, three-dishwasher, Viking range kitchen, butler’s pantry and breakfast room, where Arthur may have invented a new décor mode: baroque minimalist. Neither toaster nor blender, fruit bowl nor herb pot, cookbook nor cappuccino machine interrupt the granite countertop expanse. Only barleysheath carvings on mahogany cabinets suggest food preparation happens here. “My desire was for (the kitchen) to be a traditional area, to minimize modernity.” Which means tucking the microwave into a nook and stashing all else behind cupboard doors. A bronze circular staircase winds from the kitchen to Arthur’s media room and home theater. Or, take the main staircase. Or the elevator. Upstairs, a worldlier world with rooms for guests and Arthur’s mother furnished in more contemporary designs, even recliners. Exception: a veranda copied from The Breakers in Palm Beach, overlooking Pinehurst No. 2 — also a cigar loggia equipped with exhaust fan. Beyond it, a windowless spa room where a stunning white leather multipurpose chaise glows under spotlights. Arthur acknowledges dimensions implemented by a previous owner in his kitchen and elsewhere better suit a family with staff, perhaps a corporate retreat. Few homeowners have the opportunity to create surroundings this personal. Even fewer combine a scientific profession with an arts avocation. And fewer, still, are satisfied to enjoy the results solo. Arthur shares the house with his 90-year-old mother and Samson, a 200-pound harlequin Great Dane. The doctor rarely entertains, except for family, on holidays. “I’m a very private person,” he says, living contentedly in 7,000 square feet which grew from an ordinary schoolhouse. Besides interpreting a residence of long-ago opulence, the surgeon has traveled to Kenya on medical missions. “This is so different from my (medical) career, which has consumed me,” Arthur reflects. “Now, it’s the enjoyment of what has been accomplished.” Except this mission may not be over. Rebirthing a period piece filled a chapter in his life, Arthur says. “As I get older I’m migrating toward minimalism. The next chapter will be to simplify.” Miss Wilcox nods approval. PS PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2014

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August By Noah Salt

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day — like writing a poem, or saying a prayer. What matters is that one be, for a time, inwardly attentive.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from a Gift From the Sea

Life’s a Beach “There are few secrets to eating well at the shore — unless a newcomer thinks that fish and shellfish come from a fast-food case tasting like their cardboard wrappers. The sea is where seafood lives. So catch it, net it, dig it, trap it. If all else fails, buy it from a local grocer or a skipper on the dock and tote it home. If there’s no place to buy fresh seafood, you must be in Ohio. Pack up and drive east. And another thing about catching and cooking your own: When the sea serves up dinner it doesn’t order the diner to ‘Enjoy your meal,’ a remark about as conducive to good appetite as ‘eat those Brussels sprouts.’ Unless you are spectacularly sedentary, it’s most rewarding to gather seafood by yourself, whether from the surf with rod or reel, from the marsh with baited string, or from a clam flat with toes or muddy fingers.” — From The Wild Edge: Life and Lore of the Great Atlantic Beaches, by Philip Kopper

“In August . . . there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and — from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . . the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.” — William Faulkner, Light in August

The Art & Soul of Wilmington

August is either a month to quietly endure or a month to celebrate, rarely anything in between. If summer were a human lifetime — as some of us thought as kids — August would be summer’s old age, for everything begins to wind down, fade away and show its wear by month’s end. For the cottage gardener who is weary from the long days of battling heat and drought, weed and sucker vine, a second burst of shrub roses, the last wild phlox at the edge of the woodlands and the first ripening fruit trees may provide a needed boost to the spirit. But otherwise the garden has fallen pretty quiet. Time to go elsewhere for a bit. Few months are better suited, in fact, for other tasks rarely seen on one’s work BlackBerry, including a neat disappearing act to coast or mountain slopes or just the back of the yard, a necessary escape from the tyranny of the clock to be with family or friends or simply alone to write a note in longhand or steal a nap in the hammock, chat with an elder on the porch, take an evening walk on a country road, read pure trash, beachcomb at low tide. We love August. We hate August. We need August. Can’t wait till you’re over, long hot August. Won’t you please come again soon, dear sweet lazy August?

August 2014 •

Salt

Arts Entertainment C a l e n d a r

Where’s Waldo

Sushi Cooking Class at The Flavor Exchange

1–11

Friday, August 1—Monday, August 11 WHERE’S WALDO? Search for Waldo in • Southern Pines shops and restaurants in the local

scavenger hunt. Visit the Country Bookshop to get a list of places participating. 140 NW Broad Street, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3211 or www.thecountrybookshop.biz.

•

CHEF DEMO. 10 a.m. — 1 p.m. Experience a chef demo cooking and learn cooking tips with free samples. Sandhills Farmers’ Market, Village of Pinehurst parking lot, off of Village GreenRoad West,

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Dance/Theater

Key:

Volcano Science at Southern Pines Public Library 8/

Pinehurst. Info: www.sandhillsfarmersmarket.com.

Friday, August 1

a bag lunch and stay afterwards for a one-hour free swim. Pool Park Pavilion, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

Registration required. 8 slots available. The Flavor Exchange, 115 East New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1345 or www.theflavorexchange.com.

STORYTIME IN THE POOL PARK. 11:30 a.m. COOKING CLASSES. 6:30 p.m. Hands• • Parents and children can take the fun outside. Bring on ravioli making with Chef Maria DiGiovanni.

FIRST FRIDAY. 5 — 8:30 p.m. A family-friendly • event with live music featuring The Delta Saints. Food & beverages, entertainment. Sunrise Green Space, 250 NW Broad Street, Southern Pines. Info: www.firstfridaysouthernpines.com.

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

Saturday, August 2

ANNUAL BATTLE REENACTMENT. 11a.m. • — 3 p.m. Wander through Colonial militia encamp-

•

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August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Nature Study: “Nifty Nests”

ments and watch various demonstrations and crafts from the colonial period. Military drills will be held throughout the day complete with musket firing. House in the Horseshoe, 288 Alston House Road, Sanford. Info: (910) 947-2051 or www.nchistoricsites.org/horses.

Saturday, August 2

ANNUAL BATTLE REENACTMENT. 11a.m. • — 3 p.m. Wander through Colonial militia encamp-

ments, watch various demonstrations and crafts from the colonial period, and military drills will be held throughout the day complete with musket firing. House in the Horseshoe 288 Alston House Road, Sanford. Info: (910) 947-2051 or www.nchistoricsites. org/horses.

COOKING CLASSES. 6:30 p.m. Hands-on • sushi making with Chef Clay White. Registration

required. 8 slots available. The Flavor Exchange, 115 East New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1345 or wwww.theflavorexchange.com.

Hunter/Jumper Show at the Harness Track 8/

The Big Lebowski plays at Sunrise Theater 8/

EXPLORATIONS. 3 p.m. The theme for AUTHOR AT THE BOOKSHOP. 4 p.m. Daniel • • August is “Laughter Yoga,” breathe, laugh, and relax. Wallace, author of Big Fish, with his book The King Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www. sppl.net.

And Queens Of Roam, a novel filled with deceit and dreams. The Country Bookshop, 140 NW Broad Street, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3211 or www. thecountrybookshop.biz.

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. • “Caterpillar Hunt.” Join a park Ranger on a one

Wednesday, August 6

Monday, August 4

growing and using lavender. Space limited to 30. Sandhills Community College, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 695-3882 or www.sandhillshorticulturalgardens.com.

mile walk to talk about basic life cycles of butterflies and moths and concentrate on the larval life stage, a caterpillar. Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or www. ncparks.gov.

LAVENDER WORKSHOP. 10 – 11:30 a.m. • Bluebird Lavender Farm will conduct a program on

NORTH & SOUTH AMATEUR • CHAMPONSHIP. 8 a.m. The 57th annual women’s

PRESCHOOL STORYTIME. 3:30 — 4 p.m. • Celebrate “Fizz, Boom, Read!” with the Summer

and 63rd annual men’s golf tournament will be playing on No. 5 and 8. 100 Centennial Drive, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 235-8140 or www.pinehurst.com.

Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Dance/Theater

Reading Program. Join us for stories, songs, and fun, and then stay for playtime. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

•

Sports

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•

BEGINNERS DANCE CLASS. 6:30 p.m. Bring your partner and your sense of humor and come try dancing. Cost: $10 cash. Pinehurst Dance Studio, Pinehurst Executive Center, 300 Hwy 5, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 331-9965.

Thursday, August 7

•

FAMILY FUN NIGHT. 5:30 — 6:30 p.m. Tonight’s theme is Volcano Science. Children in grades K — 5 and their parents are invited to attend. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net.

•

COOKING CLASSES. 6:30 p.m. Handson ravioli making with Chef Maria DiGiovanni. Registration required. 6 slots available. The Flavor Exchange, 115 East New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1345 or wwww.theflavorexchange.com.

CLASSIC FILM SERIES. 7:30 p.m. The • Graduate will be playing as the Sunrise Summer

Classic Series. Cost: $5. Sunrise Theater, 250 Northwest Broad St, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928501 or www.sunrisetheater.com.

Friday, August 8

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 10 a.m. • “Underground Wonders.” Join a park Ranger to find

out what life is like underground through fun educational activities. Ages 3 to 5. Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or www.ncparks.gov.

Connecticut Ave, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net.

STORYTIME IN THE POOL PARK. 11:30 • a.m. Parents and children can take the fun outside.

Bring a bag lunch and stay afterwards for a onehour free swim. Pool Park Pavilion, 730 South Henley St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

COOKING CLASSES. 6:30 p.m. Your choice • to decide what to make. Registration required. The

Flavor Exchange, 115 East New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1345 or wwww.theflavorexchange.com.

Saturday, August 9

WALK WITH A BOTANIST. 10 a.m. – 12 • p.m. Explore the Oak Loop and River Trails at Cape

Fear Botanical Garden while a guide identifies plants and local flora. Registration required by Monday, August 4. Cost: $15/member; $20/non member. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 North Eastern Blvd, Fayetteville. Info: (910) 486-0221 or www. capefearbg.org.

CRAFT DAY. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Get the cre• ativity flowing making rocket and plane inspired crafts. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West

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COOKING CLASSES. 6:30 p.m. Your choice • to decide what to make. Registration required. The

Flavor Exchange, 115 East New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1345 or wwww.theflavorexchange.com.

Sunday, August 10

MOVIE AT THE LIBRARY. 2:30 p.m. • This month the library will be showing an ad-

aptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net.

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Nifty • Nests.” A Ranger will show the park’s bird nest

collection and see the incredible variety of shapes, sizes, and materials that are used by different species. Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or www.ncparks.gov.

Monday, August 11

SANDHILLS PHOTOGRAPHY CLUB • MEETING. 7 p.m. This will be a club competition:

“Open Creative.” Guests welcome. Hannah Center Theatre Center at the O’Neal School, 3300 Airport Road, Southern Pines. Info:www.sandhillsphotoclub.org.

WE WANT READERS! ONE BOOK, ONE COMMUNITY CIVIC UNITY THROUGH THE READING OF LITERATURE

THE RIGHT STUFF BY TOM WOLFE

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION STARTING SEPTEMBER 4TH

WANT TO SHARE YOUR NASA EXPERIENCE? We are looking for knowledgable people with great stories about their experiences with the space program to share in discussions as part of the community read of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff”

Contact Kimberly Taws at Readtherightstuff@gmail.com

The Country Bookshop

140 NW Broad St, Southern Pines, NC 28387 (910) 692-3211

ca l e n d a r

Tuesday, August 12

•

SPARK A REACTION. 5:30 p.m. The new summer program, Spark a Reaction, focuses on the theme “Creative Concoctions.” Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

Wednesday, August 13

•

PRESCHOOL STORYTIME. 3:30 — 4 p.m. Celebrate “Fizz, Boom, Read!” with the Summer Reading Program. Join us for stories, songs, and fun, and then stay for playtime. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

CLASSIC FILM SERIES. 7:30 p.m. The Big • Lebowski, will be playing as the Sunrise Summer

COOKING CLASSES. 6:30 p.m. Hands-on pas• ta making class. Registration required. 6 slots avail-

Friday, August 15

Sunday, August 17

Classic Series. Cost: $5. Sunrise Theater, 250 Northwest Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928501 or www.sunrisetheater.com.

•

STORYTIME IN THE POOL PARK. 11:30 a.m. Parents and children can take the fun outside. Bring a bag lunch and stay afterwards for a one-hour free swim. Pool Park Pavilion, 730 South Henley St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl. net.

Saturday, August 16

able. The Flavor Exchange, 115 East New Hampshire Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 725-1345 or wwww. theflavorexchange.com.

CELEBRATE! SPECIAL EVENTS • SHOWCASE. 1 – 4 p.m. Meet the professionals who can help you plan a wedding, birthday party, charity gala or corporate outing. Cole Auditorium, on the campus of Richmond Community College, 1042 West Hamlet Ave., Hamlet. Info: (910) 331-9965 or www.celebrate-events-showcase.com.

BEGINNERS DANCE CLASS. 6:30 p.m. Add TERRA COTTA POT MOSAIC WORKSHOP. SUMMER KIDS MOVIES. 2:30 p.m. Watch • • • some moves to your slow dancing and learn the basics 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Express your creativity by transWall-E, a heart warming film about the last robot to the Cha Cha! Cost: $10 cash. Pinehurst Dance Studio, Pinehurst Executive Center, 300 Hwy 5, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 331-9965.

Thursday, August 14

•

ANNUAL SUMMER FUNDRAISER. 6 – 9 p.m. “Sail around the Mediterranean” will be a Tapas event with regional foods and wine catered by Elliotts. Reservations required by August 6. Cost: $45. Weymouth Center, 555 East Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-6261.

Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Dance/Theater

forming a Terra Cotta pot into a centerpiece for a favorite small plant. Children over 12 are welcome. Registration required by Monday, August 11. Cost: $35/member; $40/non member. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 North Eastern Blvd, Fayetteville. Info: (910) 486-0221 or www.capefearbg.org.

TEEN MOVIE MONTH. 2 p.m. The teen mov• ie of this month is based on the bestselling YA novel Divergent by Veronica Roth. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

on Earth. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 West Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net.

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Bats in • the Sandhills.” Myths and truths will be discussed, as well as practical methods for removing them from your home. Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or www. ncparks.gov.

•

Sports

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August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Wednesday, August 20

AUTHOR AT THE BOOKSHOP. 5 p.m. Mary • Ann Claud with her book The Dancin’ Man. The

story centers around working class Ted who marries Virginia and into her rich, Southern, textile companyowning family. The Country Bookshop, 140 NW Broad Street, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3211 or www.thecountrybookshop.biz.

BEGINNERS DANCE CLASS. 6:30 p.m. Come • try a slow romantic Latin dance, and have some fun with the Swing. Cost: $10 cash. Pinehurst Dance Studio, Pinehurst Executive Center, 300 Hwy 5, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 331-9965.

Thursday, August 21

WINE AND WHIMSY PAINTING. 6 – 7:30 • p.m. Enjoy a glass of wine or beer while painting

your garden theme masterpiece. All art supplies are provided. Limited to 16 participants. Registration required by Monday, August 18. Cost: $20/member; $35/non member. Cape Fear Botanical Garden, 536 North Eastern Blvd, Fayetteville. Info: (910) 4860221 or www.capefearbg.org.

Friday, August 22

JUNIOR INVITATIONAL GOLF • TOURNAMENT. 8 a.m. The 31st Annual Mid Pines Invitational Golf Tournament is a two day event for golfers under the age of eighteen. Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club, 1010 Midland Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2114 or www.pineneedles-midpines.com/ golf-news-events/invitationals.

Saturday, August 23

•

CHILDREN’S TREASURE TRAIL ADVENTURE. 9 a.m. – 12p.m. The third annual adventure includes activities from caring for bees to playing with worms. Music from The Army Ground Forces Band “Loose Cannons.” Free and open to the public. Sandhills Community College Horticultural Gardens, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Registration required: Tricia Mabe, (910) 695-3882.

TRANSIT DAMAGE FREIGHT

Sunday, August 24

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Moth • Mimicry.” Come discover moths’ amazing mimicry and camouflage tactics that help them survive. Enjoy some impressive pictures in this presentation on deception. Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or www. ncparks.gov.

Monday, August 25

LUNCH & LEARN. 12 – 1 p.m. “Fall • Perennials and Their Care.” Bring your lunch and

the Garden will provide drinks. Register by email landscapegardening@sandhills.edu. Sandhills Community College Horticultural Gardens, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 695-3882 or www.sandhillshorticultralgardens.com.

••• • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports

• • •

Dance/Theater Fun History

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Friday, August 29

PSJ HUNTER/JUMPER SHOW. 8 a.m. This all day event is located on • Route 5 at The Harness Track. Pinehurst Harness Track, 200 Beulah Hill Road

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Saturday, August 30

MOORE COUNTY COMMUNITY FLEA MARKET. 8 a.m. – 2 p.m. Shop • with a variety of vendors and booths ranging from crafts to flea market items. The Fair Barn, 200 Beulah Hill Road South, Pinehurst. Info: (910) 295.0166 or dbunch@vopnc.org.

Sunday, August 31

NC Licensed & Nationally Accredited Home Care Agency

780 NW Broad Street • Suite 410 Southern Pines, NC

South, Pinehurst. Info: (803) 649-3505 or www.vopnc.org.

910.585.7485 • Aberdeen Historic District www.OddsAndHemsAberdeen.com

NATURE STUDY PROGRAM. 3 p.m. “Become a Jr. Ranger.” Join a • park Ranger at the visitors’ center to explore the junior ranger and handbook.

Weymouth Woods, 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-2167 or www.ncparks.gov.

WEEKLY HAPPENINGS Wednesdays

SANDHILLS FARMER’S MARKET. 2:30 – 5:30 p.m. Village of Pinehurst • parking lot, off of Village Green Road West, Pinehurst. Info: www.sandhillsfarmer-

By the Project

smarket.com.

By the Hour

Art Galleries

Call for appointment

ABOUT ART GALLERY inside The Market Place Midland Bistro Building, 2160 Midland Road, Pinehurst. The gallery features local artists. Open Monday-Friday 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. (910) 215-596.

Pinehurst

910-315-3206

ART NUTZ AND RAVEN POTTERY, 125 SW Broad St., Southern Pines. Come see the potter at work. Features art, pottery from local potters, handmade jewelry, glass and more. Monday-Saturday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (910) 695-1555, www.ravenpottery.com.

vickieaumaninteriors@yahoo.com

Artist GAlleRy OF SOUTHERN PINES, 167 E. New Hampshire Avenue., Southern Pines. Features art and fine crafts from more than 60 North Carolina artists. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday-Saturday. (910) 692-6077. booty barre™, redcord®, core suspend™, pilates

legacy lakes club

COTE

TIMEWORKS Watch & Clock Specialist

New! Come check out our large selection of Swiss Army watches Clock & Watch Repair Large Selections of Seiko & Belair Watches Disney & Marvel Clocks Novelty Clocks and Gift Items

www.CoteTimeworks.com

910.303.8346

106 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines

Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St. in historic Aberdeen. Exhibit hours are noon – 3 p.m., Monday-Saturday. (910) 944-3979. Broadhurst Gallery, 2212 Midland Road, Pinehurst. Showcases works by nationally recognized artists such as Louis St. Lewis, Lula Smith, Shawn Morin, Rachel Clearfield, Judy Cox and Jason Craighead. Meet-the-artist opportunities available. Monday-Friday (closed Wednesday), 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., Saturday, 1 – 4 p.m and special appointments. (910) 295-4817, www.broadhurstgallery.com. The Campbell House Galleries, 482 E. Connecticut Avenue., Southern Pines. Monday-Friday 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and every third weekend of the month from 2 – 4 p.m. (910) 692-4356, www.mooreart.org. The Downtown Gallery inside Cup of Flow, 115 NE Broad St., Southern Pines. Ever-changing array of local and regional art, pot tery and other handmade items. (910) 693-1999. Exchange Street Gallery, Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange Street in historic Aberdeen. “It’s Southern, Ya’ll,” works of Pat McMahon and Betty DiBartolomeo. September 2-28. Regular hours noon to 3:00, Monday-Saturday. (910) 944-3979.

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Key: Art Music/Concerts Fun History Sports

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Dance/Theater

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Hastings Gallery in the Katharine L. Boyd Library at Sandhills Community College, Pinehurst. Gallery hours are Monday-Thursday 7:45 a.m. – 9 p.m., Friday 7:45 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Saturday 8:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. HOLLYHOCKS ART GALLERY, 905 Linden Road, Pinehurst. Features artwork by local award winning artists, Phyllis Andrews, Diane Kraudelt, Linda Griffin, Carol Rotter, Jessie MacKay, jeweler Michele Garrett Laster and artist/owner, Jane Casnellie. Monday-Saturday 10:30 a.m. – 9:30 p.m. (910) 255-0665, www.hollyhocksartgallery.com. Lady Bedford’s Tea Parlour, 21 Chinquapin Road, Pinehurst. Features local artist Jude Winkley’s original oil paintings. Tuesday Saturday 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. (910) 255-0100, www.ladybedfords.com.

BARGAIN BOX II

The Gallery at Seven Lakes at the St. Mary Magdalene building, 1145 Seven Lakes Drive. Just nine miles from the Pinehurst Traffic Circle up 211, this gallery is dedicated to local artists. WednesdayThursday 1 – 4 p.m.

NON-PROFIT THRIFT SHOP

Bene fits Moore Cou nty Cha rities & Nu rsing Schol a rships for SCC Stude nts

Encore

ca l e n d a r

Donations Accepted During Regular Business Hours

Tuesday-Saturday 10am-4pm 7299-A, 15-501 in Eastwood (Behind Wylie’s Golf Cart) 910-235-5221

Consignments

Located on the corner of

McCaskill Road East & Rattlesnake Trail Pinehurst, NC Wednesday-Saturday 11:00am - 5:00pm

ART

ANTIQUES

HOME & GARDEN FURNISHINGS

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

The Old Silk Route, 113 West Main St., Aberdeen. Specializes in Asian original art, including silk paintings, tapestries, Buddhist Thangkas and Indian paper miniatures. Monday, Thursday-Saturday 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. (910) 295-2055.

SANFORD ANTIQUE MALL ANTIQUE & VINTAGE FURNITURE, PRIMITIVES, GLASSWARE, ART & N.C. POTTERY, JEWELRY, ADVERTISING, TINS, TOOLS,

SANDHILLS WOMAN’S EXCHANGE, 15 Azalea Road, Pinehurst. All merchandise at the Exchange is handmade by consignors who live in the community. 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Lunch served 11.30 a.m – 2 p.m. (910) 295-4677. Seagrove Candle Company, 116 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Showcases art of the Sandhills and Seagrove area. Monday, WednesdaySaturday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., (910) 695-0029.

Antiques • Collectables Vintage • Primitive Unique Home & Ofﬁce Decor New & Consigned Furniture www.westendpastimes.com Find us on Facebook!

5336 NC 211 • West End, NC • 910-673-2065

Buying Vintage

and Military Watches

SKY Art Gallery, 602 Magnolia Dr., Aberdeen. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (910) 944-9440, www. skyartgallery.com. Studio 590 by the pond in Dowd Cabin, 590 Dowd Circle, Pinehurst. This historic log cabin is the working studio and gallery of artists Betty DiBartolomeo and Harry Neely. Fine oil paintings, commissions and instruction. (910) 639-9404. White Hill Gallery, 407 U.S. 15-501, Carthage, offers a variety of pottery. (910) 947-6100.

Nature Centers Sandhills Horticultural Gardens (32 acres of gardens). The Sandhills Horticultural Gardens are handicapped-accessible. Daylight hours year-round. (910) 695-3882.

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• • • • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Literature/Speakers Fun

Dance/Theater Film History Sports

LINENS, BOOKS & MAGAZINES OPEN EVERY DAY!! MON-FRI 10a TO 5:30pm SUNDAYS 1p TO 5p

find us at 148 s. moore street N.C. POTTERY • JEWELRY FURNITURE • ART • CANDLES & MUCH MORE! OPEN EVERY DAY 919.776.3489

118 SOUTH MOORE ST. SANFORD, NC

919.775.1969

www.carolinaartistscolony.com

www.sanfordantiquemall.com

Super Sale!

20% Off - Patio Furniture - Garden Statuary

ROLEX & TUDOR Especially 1950s-1980s era GMT & SUBMARINER WARPATH MILITARY COLLECTIBLES 819 Hope Mills Road, Fayetteville Ed Hicks (910) 425-7000 edhicks82@aol.com • warpathmilitaria.com

Twice Is Nice QUALITY CLOTHING CONSIGNMENT STORE Under new ownership

Featuring Men’s, Women’s and Junior’s Clothing, Shoes, Jewelry and Homeware Now Accepting Fall Consignments

1 Sale

1st & 2nd of every month. 255 W. Morganton Rd, Southern Pines, NC (910) 692-4659

- Architectural Artifacts

Sale Starts Labor Day

RAILSIDE

ARCHITECTURAL & ANTIQUES 123 EXCHANGE ST., ABERDEEN • 910-690-3089 • Wed - Sat 11 to 5

Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve (898 acres). 1024 Fort Bragg Road, Southern Pines. (910) 692-2167. VILLAGE ARBORETUM. 35 acres of land adjoining the Village Hall on Magnolia Road, Pinehurst. (910) 295-1900.

Historical Sites Bethesda Church and Cemetery. Guided tours for groups by appointment. 1020 Bethesda Road, Aberdeen. (910) 944-1319. Bryant House and McLendon Cabin. Tours by appointment. (910) 692-2051 or (910) 673-0908. Carthage Historical Museum. Sundays, 2 – 5 p.m. or by appointment. Located at Rockingham and Saunders streets, Carthage. (910) 947-2331.

Fame. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., Monday-Friday, at the Weymouth Center for Arts and Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Avenue., Southern Pines. (910) 692-6261. Shaw House. Open 1 – 4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. (910) 692-2051. Tufts Archives. 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m., MondayFriday, and 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Saturday. (910) 295-3642. Union Station. Open 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. Located in downtown Aberdeen. (910) 944-5902. Sandhills Woman’s Exchange Log Cabin. Open 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. (910) 295-4677. PS To add an event, email us at pinestraw@thepilot.com by the first of the month prior to the event. Or go to www. thepilot.com and add the event to our online calendar.

House in the Horseshoe. Open year-round. Hours vary. 288 Alston House Road (10 miles north of Carthage), Sanford. (910) 947-2051. Malcolm Blue Farm and Museum. 1 – 4 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Group tours can be arranged by appointment. (910) 944-7558 or (910) 603-2739. North Carolina Literary Hall of

from pageMARKET! 103 FARMER'S

August PineNeedler Answers

ca l e n d a r

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Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports

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Dance/Theater Fun History

Solution:

P A T E

A T O M

P U P S

A R E A

S E M I F I N A L

A S S B L T C O E B E D

8 3 6 9 4 1 7 2 5

S L O P A E R O A T O E S L Y T O A R O A R R T U G B W E R E C H E S P M A O O N R A S C A L A G E N A N T I R C E C U A S A N S Y E S L E

1 7 5 2 6 8 4 3 9

2 9 4 7 5 3 6 1 8

3 2 8 6 9 7 5 4 1

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O V A L O P E N S

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6 1 7 4 8 5 3 9 2

5 6 1 3 2 4 9 8 7

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7 8 3 5 1 9 2 6 4

9 4 2 8 7 6 1 5 3

MOORE COUNTY FARMERS MARKET

“Food Demonstration By Rhett Morris of Rhett’s Restaurant Saturday, August 23th 9:30 to 11:30 am”

Tomatoes, Fruits, Veggies, Jams, Meats, Flowers & Plants, Corn, Baked Goods, Prepared Foods, Crafts, Goat Cheese, Peaches, Cantaloupes, Blueberries, Watermelons Mondays- FirstHealth (Fitness Center) Facility courtesy of First Health 170 Memorial Dr • Pinehurst 2pm-5:30pm Will be open through October 27th Open Year Round • Thursdays - 604 W. Morganton Rd (Armory Sports Complex)

Facility courtesy of Town of Southern Pines Southern Pines 9am-1pm

Saturdays - Downtown Southern Pines

Facility courtesy of Town of Southern Pines Broad St & New York Ave 8am-Noon Will be open through October 25th

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

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

Lounge 5pm...until Serving Favorite Dishes Late Friday & Saturday Fine Wines Craft Beers Full Service Bar

Dinner: Monday-Saturday, 5 until 10pm Parties • Groups Special Occasions Seating for up to 100

A Sandhills Tradition for Over 20 Years

Combining New Traditions and Classic Cuisine!

910-692-5550 672 S.W. Broad St. Southern Pines

www.beefeatersofsouthernpines.com

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

i n i n g

Gui

d e

WEDNESDAYS

FARMERS

MARKET

195 american fusion cuisine supporting local farmers

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

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

2:30-5:30pm Village of Pinehurst Parking Lot 1 Village Green Rd. West

SATURDAYS 10:00am-1:00pm Village of Pinehurst Parking Lot 1 Village Green Rd. West

Join us every

Saturday & Sunday for

all the NCAA and NFL action on our big screen TV on the patio! We carry the

NFL Sunday Ticket Fresh & Local Produce Pasture Raised Meats Free Range Eggs Baked Goods & Crafts Live Music & More!

so you can enjoy your favorite team every week!

Chef Demo

August 9th • Downtown Pinehurst Parking lot • 10:00am-1:00pm

Nutricious • Delicious • AllergeN Free Soups, sauces, salsas and smoothies share more than the letter “S”. Transforming a peach smoothie into cool and refreshing gazpacho is easy. Soup is a superfood that multitasks! Turn last night’s sauce into tomorrow’s lunch or dinner with a twist. Join us at the Pinehurst Farmers Market for a smoothie and cold soup demonstration by chef Sueson Vess. Chef, author/food writer and educator, Sueson Vess helps people eat healthier without sacrificing flavor. Sueson provides food coaching to achieve and maintain a “goodfor-your-health” lifestyle by reviewing dietary needs and goals and developing customized meal plans. Contact Us: 803.517.5476 • www.sandhillsfarmersmarket.com sandhillsfm@yahoo.com | www.facebook.com/SFGMarket

We are open daily

at 11:00am!

155 NE Broad Street Southern Pines, NC 910.692.4766 belltreetavern.com

Open 7 nights Dinner served at 5 pm

70 Market Square (in the village of Pinehurst)

ten-ya.com

910-255-1085 PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 2014

P E N I C K V I L L AG E ’ S

50 Anniversary th

C E L E B R AT I O N

Featuring a Community Read of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff”

sandwiches • burgers

salads • wraps

soups • floats ice cream • coffee

SEPTEMBER 26TH: A Night With Tom Wolfe at Pinehurst Member’s Club SEPTEMBER 27TH: See “The Right Stuff”at Sunrise Theater with video commentary from Tom Wolfe For event listings, check out our insert in the August 31st issue of The Pilot.

check out our daily specials on facebook

A Community for Active Lifelong Living A Continuing Care Retirement Community

Downtown Southern Pines 910-692-7273

500 East Rhode Island Ave. | Southern Pines, NC www.penickvillage.org | (910) 692-0300

TOTAL CONNECT Control your alarm system and home automation from your mobile device. Receive alerts, view live video and control your security systems remotely including thermostats, lighting, locks and more.

Ballet SerieS

10/26 11/16 12/7 12/21

Get Connected… For Free!

with a 3 month free trial. For a limited time only.

1/25 3/8 4/19

The Legend of Love The Pharaoh’s Daughter LaBayadere The Nutcracker Swan Lake Romeo & Juliet Ivan the Terrible

Captured

LIVE in HD from

Moscow!

Sundays at 1:00 p.m. Season Tickets on sale NOW! See office for form. For tickets and more information please visit sunrisetheater.org or call 910.692.8501 The Sunrise Theater • 250 NW Broad Street • Southern Pines NC 28387 The Sunrise Preservation Group Inc. is a 501 (c)(3) Tax-Deductible, Non-Profit Organization

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen

Rae-Lynn & Steve Ziegler

N.C. Symphony Outdoor Concert Friday, June, 2014 Photographs by Al and Annette Daniels

Mike & Larraine Lencki, Pam Carracino, Dave Wood, Nancy Dorato, Tom & Barbara Wood Jerry Phipps, Lucille Christie Thuron McLaughlin, Stephenie Carter, Kenneth Collins

Palmer, Chad, Tracy, and baby Lily Sampson

Brandon Lane, A.J. & Mary Schlaff, Brett Wells Shelley, Channing, Bailey, & Aaron Cooper

Ellen Perkinson, Mary Scoggin, Bonnie Hanham, Jean Laino, Joann Hirata, Jane Hanham Leyda & Luis Rosado, Ann Marie & Steve Glossinger

Adam Crocker, Natalie Dean, Ashley Hunt

LuAnn Kinney, Brian Borchardt Marshall & Erika Nickel, Lisa & Mike DuCharme

Karen & Rick Jarboe

It’s Summer. Time to Party!

Bachelorette Parties Birthday Parties Girls Night Out

Build Strength, Flexibility, Body Awareness and Confidence

Pole Fitness Classes Chair Dance Classes Booty Beat Classes Contemporary Dance Classes

910-725-1931

www.aryiafit.com • 180 S. Page St. • Southern Pines, NC 28387

Cool Comfort for your home

Energy Efficient Air Conditioning Units • Economical • Reliable • Powerful

Commercial • Residential HVAC • Homes • Businesses • Schools • Churches

CALL US TODAY

949-3232

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

Labels: Foxcroft, City Girl, Softworks Knits, Talor Brook Jeans, Pants, Winding River, Patty Kim Jackets Missy, Petite, 1X and 2X • Ladies accesorries & apparel

Lookin ’ for Linda Monday - Saturday 10a.m. - 5p.m.

5485 US 1 Just North of Southern Pines 910.695.2622

BUYING GOLD & SILVER HIGHEST PRICES PAID!

We Are Buying: www.PinehurstCoins.com • Rare Coins & Bullion • Scrap Gold & Silver

• Sterling Flatware

• Platinum, Gold & Silver Coins

• Diamond, Gold & Silver Jewelry • US Paper Money & Notes • Free Appraisals • Private Transactions Rooms Available Upon Request • On Site Smelting and Assay • View our Entire Inventory On Our Website

PCE

Pinehurst Coin Exchange Inc.

1420 Highway 5 | Pinehurst, NC

910.235.COIN (2646)

CUTLER TREE

Tree Pruning • Removal Plant Site Consulting Stump Grinding • Shrub Care Tree Conservation for New Home Sites Free Estimates Geoffrey Cutler Fully Insured 910-692-7769 910-690-7657

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen 4th of July Parade Downtown Pinehurst Friday, July 4, 2014

Photographs by Jeanne Paine Xzavier, Kayla & Mya Smith, Brandon Onyemen

Summer & Bob Barmore

Molly & Tyler Fassett Gabe Ramirez

Marine Corps League â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Color Guard Lamont Legrand

Charlotte Walker, Christina Hutchinson, Griffin Walker, John Hutchinson, Nash Walker

Elizabeth Bermudez, Cindy Paris

Ava Edwards

Larry Golay

Xxxxxxxx

Sherri Grantham

Riley

The Experts in Downtown Living and Custom Designed Homes

Residential & Commercial Development Owned & Operated by a Registered Architect and a Professional Builder

(910) 725-1221

www.pdcnc.com • info@pdcnc.com

• Planning • Providing • Performing All Things Interiors

Residential & Commercial Remodeling & New Construction Floor Coverings, Wall Coverings Tile, Furniture, Accessories Window Treatments & Rugs 225 W Morganton Road Southern Pines

Francy Thompson Interior Designer, Owner

910-246-8046 • 413-556-9883 fax totaldesignsolutions@hotmail.com www.tdsinteriordesign.com 94

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen

Maren Anderson, LuAnn Kinney

Blues Crawl Saturday, July 12, 2014

Photographs by London Gessner Melissa Hall, Taniya Smith, Annette Barnett

Charles & Loretta Aldridge Bruce Egan, Cali Evans

Clarke & Cindy Edgar

Craig & Leslie Crowe Don Gray, Frank Dean, Janet Kenworthy, Gene Shoenfelder

Julie Karner, Steve Menendez Loren, Eduardo & Lori Safille

Matt Westley, Cathy Bleers Joseph & Victoria Wiseman

Front row: Mike Fowler, Ironing Board Sam, Lakota, John D. Holeman, Captain Luke, Tim Duffy, Boo Hanks, Pat Mother Blue, Aaron Greenhood; Second row: Papa John Locklear, Taniya Locklear, Bubba Norwood, Hank Slyker, Harvey Dalton Arnold, Big Ron Hunter, Belinda Hunter, Joan Bagley, Mel Melton; Third row: TA James, Max Drake, George Johnson, Lightening Wells, Henry Slyker, Cool John Ferguson, Gerald Robinson

Closest Place to • Caregiver Breaks & Trial Stays • 24 Hour Staff • Housekeeping • Activities • Laundry •Delicious Dining

919-774-7170

Home...

only better!

Retirement Inn 2002 Woodland Avenue Sanford, NC

800-552-8785 • thebayberryinn.com Extraordinary Choice,

Exceptional Lifestyle.

Well•Spring residents enjoy exceptional retirement living with the most diverse mix of social activities and healthcare plans in the area. Here you can maintain an independent lifestyle while enjoying new friendships and opportunities for enrichment. At Well•Spring, we strive to be your first choice for retirement living. Contact us today to learn more about our award-winning community.

www.well-spring.org

4100 Well Spring Drive, Greensboro, NC 27410 Phone: 1-800-547-5387

CARF/CCAC ACCREDITED SINCE 2003

August 2014P��PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SandhillSeen

Jaime & Carter Cuff

Teresa McDaniel, Wendy Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neil

The Band of Oz Outdoor Concert Wednesday, June 18, 2014 Photographs by Al and Annette Daniels

Roberta, Matthew, & Richard Maness, Jane McEwan

Carole Boxell, Christy Drennan

Baby Henry and Katherine Rucker, Sarah & Ellen Stewart

Mike Serle and pet Shia, Kira Nunez Brenda & Steve Bouser

Don Shuster, Pat Bennett

D.J. King Curtiss Carpenter is flanked by Vickie & Marvin Stephens Lisa Stephenson, Vicki & Jamie Baddour

Sharron Privott, Lori Gotch, Tim Bailey

Don & Debbie McKenzie

Carthage Saw & Mower 910-947-2041 3812 Hwy 15-501, Carthage Stop on by to see how we can save you money on your new TORO! Z MASTER ZERO TURN MOWERS Commercial grade Toro Z Master mowers are tough enough to power through the most challenging conditions for a pristine cut every time. It’s combination of performance and durability is an investment that stands the test of time.

BUYING & SELLING ALL GOLD & SILVER

416 S. Elm Street High Point, NC 27260 336.887.1315 M/C, Visa, AMEX, Cash Accepted Monday - Saturday 10am-5pm

PRESCRIPTIONS FILLED.

Satisfaction Guaranteed.

910.944.0808

3 Pharmacists to serve you

800 N Sandhills Blvd, Aberdeen, NC 28315 Next to the Aberdeen Police Department

Fast, Courteous Service

BUYING ALL:

Phone refills 24 hours a day

Sterling Silver

Drive thru pharmacy OUR EXPERIENCED PHARMACISTS Sheena Wimberly, Rph Mark Smith, Rph • Sri Gottipati, Rph

Scrap Gold

Diamonds

Gold & Silver Coins

Free Friendly Appraisals! • Fast, Secure & No Pressure Private Transaction Room 98

Citywide Delivery Senior discounts on OTC Products

Look no further. We’ve got what it takes to be your NEW pharmacy Home.

Town Center Pharmacy

610 S. Bennett St., Southern Pines • 910-692-7158 • tcp-rx.com Monday-Friday 8am-6pm • Saturday 9am-3pm

August 2014P�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

T h o u g h ts f r o m T h e Ma n S h e d

The Art of Pool Hopping My pal Sally had just the thing for a hot summer night

By Geoff Cutler

By the middle of August,

we were back from camp with only a few weeks before school would begin again. Some years we’d make the drive to Michigan and fill out those last days of summer with family and friends. Other years we’d stay home and make full use of the club’s swimming pool, golf and tennis courts. On nights when my mom didn’t want to cook, or my dad didn’t care to grill, we’d dress and have dinner in the club’s dining room. That was always fun and we got a kick out of my dad ordering orange sherbet with butterscotch sauce for dessert.

August in Boston tended to be a cooling-off month. Crisp clear mornings with bright sunshine gave way to warm and comfortable afternoons with low humidity. In the evening one might even need a sweater, and you got a sense that fall was becoming impatient and that the trees were itching to turn yellow, orange and red. But not always. Some years, August could be the month when heat waves brutalized us and cool autumn days under brilliant fall foliage seemed but a far-off dream. Those years the temperature pushed 100 degrees every day and the humidity soared. Your clothes stuck to you like a box of Band-Aids and my mom pulled all the shades during the daylight hours to keep the sun out. We didn’t have central air-conditioning back then so fans were recruited, and all over the house they pushed hot air from one room to the next. The dogs sprawled panting on the kitchen floor. They looked dead. At night, we let the shades up and put the fans in the windows. But that didn’t help. We went to bed and lay in pools of our own sweat. Sleep didn’t come easy. Or it didn’t come at all. It was on nights like those, usually around midnight, I’d hear the a rat-atat at my second floor window. She’d bring me out of the fetid doze in which I lay by hurling crabapples. This particular night I could just make her out on the lawn below, standing by her bicycle and ready to go. Just for good measure, she hurled another crabapple and it cracked off the pane. “C’mon,” she whisper-yelled, “it’s a perfect night to pool-hop!” Sally was a tomboy, and growing up, she was one of my best friends. We went to the same church, swam and played tennis at the same club, and her family even had a place in Michigan just like us, so we were almost never

apart. Now ole Sal, she was, and still is, what you might call a free spirit. She was always up for doing something wild and crazy, and I was happy to oblige. Pool-hopping on hot and steamy summer nights was one of our favorites. I threw on a suit and T-shirt and climbed out the window onto the ledge. The roof of the porte-cochere was right next to the window, and I scrambled onto it, and then shimmied down the gutter to the porch below. And off we went, riding our bikes as fast as we could pedal them. She had the coolest bike ever. A men’s (Sally would have walked before she’d have ridden a girl’s bike) dark green ten-speed Raleigh Super Course. I think the bike had been her older brother’s, maybe even her father’s, but her dad was so proud of the thing that he made her keep it sparkling clean. Sally was forever having to scrub and polish it. I can still see her with her chamois and toothbrush working those chrome wheels to a shine. I told my parents once I couldn’t keep up with Sally on my old banana bike, and when they saw that bike of hers, they knew it was true. That’s how I got my first ten-speed. It was something called a Tour de France. Not quite as cool as Sally’s, but plenty quick enough for me to be able to ride alongside her and not a hundred yards behind. We sped through the night, the wind roaring in our ears and pushing back our hair. We talked as we rode and planned where we’d swim, and Sally would laugh and chortle and carry on about what a beautiful night it was. And then we’d be there . . . wherever that was. We’d go deathly quiet like a couple of cat burglars and hide our bikes in the bushes. We chose pools that weren’t fenced and weren’t right up against the house. Back then, pools didn’t have to be fenced, and they were often located some distance away from the residence. One time, because Sally had a hard time staying quiet, a light came on in the house, but we were out, off and away on those ten-speeds before bathrobe and slippers could be found. Most places stayed dark, the owners away for the summer, or lying in front of their fans, oblivious, awake, and sweating in their own damp beds. Sally didn’t have a curfew. I was kind of jealous of that because my parents would have . . . well, I don’t know what they would have done if they knew I’d sneaked out like that in the middle of the night. But not Sally’s parents. I dropped Sally off at her house that night and there was her dad out in the yard maneuvering his sprinkler to a new spot on the lawn. He laughed and chortled just like Sally and said how after such a beastly hot day he could see why we wanted to be out riding on such a beautiful night. Back home, I scurried up the side of the house, lifted the screen I’d left cracked a bit, and slipped back into bed, cooled off and ready for sleep. PS Geoff can be reached at geoffcutler@embarqmail.com.

Real Estate in the Sandhills

PRESERVING AND RESTORING HISTORICAL HOMES Relocated from Nantucket Island now servicing Moore County with over 16 years of carpentry experience

Carpentry Specialist Preserving & Restoring Historical Homes Additions • New Construction • Remodeling Caretaking • Renovations & Repairs Custom made furniture and built-in cabinetry

www.nathanwilliamsconstruction.com 910.246.8072 | Cell 508.221.1016

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

910-692-0855

www.WindridgeGardens.com Summer Hours: Wed-Sat 10-5, Sun 1-5

100

August 2014i�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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

Hail Yeah, Caesar Don’t let August get your goat

By Astrid Stellanova Did your Mama tell you why August is so important? Because of Caesar Augustus? Surprise! — he was a Libran. Or because it’s National Goat Cheese month? Look to the stars, Lovey. The Perseid meteor shower occurs mid-month.

Leo (July 23–August 22) Lordy mercy, when you cast such a wide net, you are going to haul up a whole lot of trash. So, here you are, dealing with flotsam and jetsam, but you went fishing, didn’t you? Do some triage on your own life, baby. Let your legs of faith carry you right where you need to go. You may complain, and do often and loudly, but you are also a born finisher and you are almost as capable as you think you are. This month will be almost too calm for your tastes. By mid-month, you will enjoy new income that will make your pricey tastes nearly affordable. Virgo (August 23–September 22) Gut check time. Recently you’ve been the top ticketing agent for guilt trips — give it a rest. Can you stop issuing tickets? It’s second nature for you to help people. So get in synch and stop being critical. You may want the last word but you aren’t all that all the time. Except, when Venus transits your sign August 12–September 5, you are going to be unusually creative and spectacular. Keep a journal. Libra (September 23–October 22) Go deep or don’t go at all. Deep, as in, deeper than a pie pan. All cylinders will click this month — socially, romantically, financially and even emotionally. You’ll find yourself almost bewildered by the positive attention you get. The colors blue and pink will bring you some big magic this month, but don’t wear them thirty days in a row, OK? You may think it’s all coincidinky those colors work for you, but it ain’t, Honey Child. Scorpio (October 23–November 21) Let’s just get off that high horse you’ve been riding, and lower your standards. Life is 80 percent reality and 20 percent where you want to be. You will always want what you can’t have. Fuggedaboutit, Darling. Work for what you want; dust off the résumé and get it out there. You have a transit between August 12 and September 5 that will make it easier to make work prospects come together to suit secretive ole you. Sagittarius (November 22–December 21) The saying is, you can’t make a comeback when you haven’t been anywhere. Get off the sofa — the cushions are sagging! Fish out the change under them cushions and go somewhere! Adventure calls, you’re overdue, and luck (plus spare change) is on your side. Between the 12th and the 15th, you have a unique opportunity when Venus and Mercury travel through Leo. This means put yourself out there — flip a coin — take a trip or a chance. The transit favors you all month. Capricorn (December 22–January 19) If the buck really did stop with you, you’d finally get paid. You’ve been responsible since you were 6 years old and got a paper route. Time to experience irresponsibility! Push back from the desk and take the trip you’ve been daydreaming about this month. The first two weeks bring a time of opportunity when Mercury enters Leo. By the 25th, you may well find yourself overseas, living the dream, Baby.

Aquarius (January 20–February 18) Ever have the feeling it’s simpler to get older than get smarter? You have spent most of your life not caring what other people think, and why start now? You really might just save the world, but, more importantly, yourself. When Venus enters Leo after the 12th, relationships resolve and you can sink into a bliss-out time. Pisces (February 19–March 20) The water is hot, right? So take your finger out, and don’t just stand there talking about how durn scalding the H2O is. After all, affection and understanding are what you are craving, even more than attention. The good news is, the stars line up for you when Mercury enters Virgo on the 15th. That bad patch with your loved one gets fixed up very nicely, by the way. Just squirt some Fix-a-Flat into your blow out and keep on trucking, as all will be forgiven. Aries (March 21–April 19) Can you put out a fire by blowing on it? Or breathing it? There is a lot of strength in being a risk-taker, but you, ever-ramming Ram, got burned. Your daredevil self knew it would happen. And you don’t want advice from Astrid either. So make a note, and take it in stride, but don’t throw caution to the wind. When Mercury enters your sign you will be obsessed with work. The full moon on the 10th is going to be something else, Baby. Make it fun. And lead by example. Taurus (April 20–May 20) The full moon on the 10th and new moon on the 25th mean good — no, excellent — news. I know this has come up before, but bears repeating: wonder why they named one of the most popular cars after your sign? Because most Taureans had rather fight than switch. That’s right. A Taurus will work hard. A Taurus won’t give up. A Taurus may not be charming, but they are reliant. And this month, you experience a nice reward, long due you. Gemini (May 21–June 20) Time to inhabit your own fool self. You got your mind together, but your body is falling apart. Stop talking and start walking. Watch your diet. Get some sleep. You are going to need it because company is coming, and your home is where everybody is going to gather. Activity is going to ramp up from the 15th onward. Roll out the welcome mat, but roll it back up when you are really exhausted — even you need shut-eye sometimes. Cancer (June 21-July 22) Suspicious? Sulky? Crabby? Your imagination is on overdrive. What you think happened is not exactly accurate. Give your friends another chance, and use it for a good story. Because most things in life are material for you, anyway. During the full moon on the 10th, you receive unexpected news that is beneficial and might make an opportunity open up that wouldn’t have been possible before. PS For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.

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August 2014i�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

July PineNeedler

FARMER'SFarmer’s MARKET! Market 1

By Mart Dickerson

Mailing fee President’s office 20 21 22 23 Considerate Remnant of cloth 24 25 26 Negative battery 27 28 29 30 31 terminal 15 Medicine 32 33 34 35 36 37 17 Winged 38 39 40 19 “A long time ___” 22 Globe 41 42 43 25 Not yours 26 Stair 44 45 46 27 Baby dogs, for short 47 48 49 50 51 28 Region 29 Adolescents 52 53 54 55 56 57 30 Uses a key 58 59 60 61 62 31 Swiss mountains 33 Command, on 63 64 65 Young’s Rd 35 Can rot 66 67 68 36 Metric weight unit 37 Catch sight of or moral means 33 “As you __” ACROSS 39 FRESH AND SWEET long time ___" 60 FRESH COOL 19 "a AND 1 Old-fashioned51 dadsWily 34 “I __ allegiance...” 40 Ashen 63 FRESH AND 38 FRESH AND 4 Pig food 52 Great summer sandwich, 22 Globe GREEN FUZZY 42 Like Disney’s 8 FRESH POD ioned dads inits. 25 not yours kingdom 40 FRESH AND SPICY 64 East continent 12 Dined 53 negative (prefix) 26 stair 45 Mouse catcher 65 Downwind, on a boat Western bar 13 Air (prefix) 55 hearty41pub Pod draugt baby dogs, for short 27 46 Sulky 66 Hair stylist solutions 42 Pilots a craft 14 Delicacy by physical or region 58 Pressure, 28 47 TV station 43 Beret 67 Faucet problem 16 FRESH AND RED x) moral44 means adolescents 29 48 Slovenly person 68 Our time zone The Little ___, old 18 Goat fur TV show 49 Spirited horse Fresh and Cool uses a key 60 30 20 Author Dickinson 46 Tasting like deer 51 Cackle DOWN h and red21 Let go of a secret 63 Fresh and Green 31 swiss mountains 47 Association (abbr.) 53 1 Crown of the headon young'sTeen rd skin ailment 33 Command, 23 Made a hole 64 east Continent 50 Ripen 54 Loch __ monster 2 Molecule dickinson 24 Distant 65 downwind, on a boat 35 Can rot 51 Wily 56 Dues 3 Next to last weight unit f s secret 25 Rowing tool 66 hair stylist solutions 36 Metric 52 Great summer competition 57 Guitar finger marker 26 Lily’s bulb 67 Faucet problem hole sight 37 Catch sandwich, inits. 4 Half man, half goatof 59 Shaft of light 27 Set of 2 53 zone Negative (prefix) 68 our time 39 Fresh 5 MGM’s lion and sWeet 61 Apply 29 Barge puller 55 Hearty pub draught tool 40 ashen 6 Lode yield 62 US spy group init. 32 Burial vase b DOWN 58 Pressure, by physical 42 like disney's kingdom 16

uller 1 Crown of the head ase 2 Molecule __" 3 next to last competition giance..." Fill in the grid so 4 half man, half goat every row, every and FuZZy 5 MGM's lion and sPICycolumn and every 6 lode yield 3x3 box contain bar 7 Mailing fee the numbers 1-9. craft 8 Presidents office 9 Considerate e ___, old tv show 10 remnant of cloth ike deer 11 negative battery terminal ion (abbr.) 15 Medicine 17 Winged

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Mouse catcher sulky tV station slovenly person spirited horse Cackle teen skin ailment Puzzle answers on page 99 Mart Dickerson lives in loch __ monster Southern Pines and would dues welcome any suggestions Guitar finger marker shaft of light from her fellow puzzle masters. She can be reached apply at gdickerson@nc.rr.com. us spy group init.

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southwords

Half the Rest of My Life

By R ay Pardue

The request was modest

enough — tutor as a volunteer in an adult literacy program sponsored by our county in Maryland, working one-on-one with a man in his mid-50s who wanted to read. The Adult Education Department, strapped for resources and desperate for volunteers, posted notices in county facilities, pleading for people willing to tutor and to assist in classrooms.

About the time the notices were posted, I retired from the Department of Defense to enjoy life unfettered by the clock, happily giving up commuting in bad weather dished up by Mother Nature in traffic difficult enough to negotiate in good weather. There would be golf during the week, rather than on crowded weekends, staying up late, and reading for pleasure when the whim struck. My prescient wife, Helen, anticipating I would be bored after years of technological challenges, international travel, and intensive work with associates of admirably high intellect and energy, nudged me into the tutoring program. I am convinced she was driven by a dread of having to conceal the messy evidence of an ax murder (mine), precipitated by my innocent offer to conduct a work flow analysis of the way she ran our household and to implement systemic changes. Before meeting my assigned student, I had to learn how to tutor a person of my age in a skill I had always taken for granted. I had assumed every adult could read. The training for volunteer tutors was useful in introducing adult literacy program methodology and approaches, but, in the end, it was evident the job fell largely to the tutor to assess student needs to tailor an approach based upon motivation, grasp and attitude. First contact with my prospect was by telephone. My program administrator had provided a name and telephone number, and shared her disappointment over a lack of progress. It would be clear soon enough that the problem derived from haphazard approaches to the student’s particular problem, including insensitivity of tutors — there had been three — and their failure to keep their end of the bargain by occasionally failing to show up for tutoring sessions. In our first telephone conversation, my prospective student, Eddie, was wary. He shared his frustration over tutors who failed to show, who were impatient with his questions, sometimes laughed at his mistakes, and

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treated him as somewhat backward. As we talked, he became more comfortable with this stranger and his offer to help, reassured both by my willingness to listen and by my offer to begin slowly. We agreed that Eddie could call it all off at any time. To my question as to his motivation, Eddie in that first telephone conversation related a story of crushing frustration in having to listen passively while others talked about books and magazine articles. He spoke of clever methods he devised to conceal his reading disability from his employer, and of reliance upon his deeply supportive wife and daughter — a university graduate — for explaining and translating day-to-day matters. He talked of a childhood problem that prevented him from enunciating understandably, of the feeble efforts of the school system of the time to provide for special needs, and of his inevitably dropping out of elementary school. At the end of his tale, he shared the intensity of his desire in this one beautifully articulated statement: “I would give half the rest of my life to be able to read a book.” The desperation and compulsion in that one simple sentence made it clear that Eddie was going to succeed in learning to read. Succeed he did! Less than a year after we started meeting, Eddie was reading whatever took his interest: billboards, newspapers, books, advertisements, road maps, street signs, magazines. All were fair game for his inquiring mind and for his new perspective of a world that had been foreign and daunting for a half century. Read a book? I arranged for Eddie to have an encyclopedia (he didn’t have Internet access), which he began to consult regularly to fill in blanks that existed because of his earlier inability to read. Those blank spaces weren’t filled by a tutor, rather by Eddie’s strong urge to be a participating member of a society that requires communication skills. And, to read a book didn’t cost Eddie half his life, unless you count the first part. Maybe those first fifty or so years represented payment in advance for a skill he richly deserved, and which he finally secured. Good job, Eddie, I’m proud of us. Quite some time after Eddie and I finished our program, he tracked me down, seeking advice. He had been offered a promotion, and was unsure if he could handle the responsibilities of a supervisory position. What did I think? I opined that, since he now was a reader, nothing should hinder him, and that it’s almost always better to be the boss. Eddie agreed, and said he would accept the new position the following morning. He did. PS Ray Pardue, a Penick Village resident, tutors at the Moore County Literacy Council’s Read Moore Center in Southern Pines. He has tutored in Korea, Japan, and Maryland, and at Samarkand Manor in Eagle Springs.

August 2014i�� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Illustration by Meridith Martens

For Eddie, who dreamed of learning to read, meeting Ray the literacy volunteer changed the world

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