July PineStraw 2020

Unhealthy Teeth?

Gum Disease?

Cavities?

Your Oral Health Can Affect Your Overall Health www.kuhndentist.com (910) 692-4450

1902 North Sandhills Blvd., Suite H Aberdeen, NC 28315

An unhealthy mouth, especially gum disease, can affect your overall health and increase your risk for serious medical conditions such as heart attack, stroke, diabetes, or preterm labor. Take control of your oral health and your overall health with regular dental cleanings, restorative treatments and proper home care.

Schedule your next appointment.

Call (910) 692-4450 today.

Office Hours: Mon-Thurs: 7:30am-3:30PM

www.kuhndentist.com (910) 692-4450

Caring For People.

Then. Now. Always.

Coronavirus has changed almost everything, but our resolve is stronger than ever.

We have been committed to our core purpose – To Care For People – since the beginning. We are committed to it now. And we are committed to it in the future. We are ready to serve you in new ways, but you can still expect to receive the excellent care you always have. FirstHealth is here for you and we’re ready when you are.

www.FirstHealth.org

FirstHealth Patient Care Team: Jane Claire Dawkins, R.N., Petra Service, R.N., Lacey Hughes, R.N. and Medina James, R.N. 540-170-20

FEATURES 65 Buster Gets a Bath Poetry by Ashley Memory 66 Diamond Lanes of the 19th Century By Bill Case The rise and fall of Moore County’s plank roads

70 Sandhills Photoclub 74 Wrangler on Medicare By Jan Leitschuh Or, what I did on my summer vacation

78 Fiberglass is Forever By John Wolfe Not just another roadside attraction

84 Whole in One By Deborah Salomon

Everything a golfing family needs under one roof

91 Almanac

By Ash Alder

July ���� DEPARTMENTS

19 25 29 33

Simple Life By Jim Dodson PinePitch Instagram Contest The Omnivorous Reader

By Stephen E. Smith

37 Bookshelf 41 Hometown By Bill Fields 43 In the Spirit By Tony Cross 44 Character Study By Jenna Biter 47 Home by Design By Cynthia Adams 51 Out of the Blue By Deborah Salomon 53 Birdwatch By Susan Campbell 55 Sporting Life By Tom Bryant 59 Golftown Journal By Lee Pace 92 Arts & Entertainment Calendar 95 PineNeedler By Mart Dickerson 96 Southwords By Jim Moriarty

Cover Photograph By Dee Williams Photograph This Page By John Gessner 6

PineStraw

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Calming Magnolias – for –

total relaxation THE DUX BED FROM SWEDEN CREATE YOUR SLEEP SANCTUARY

THE SALE IS ON 20% OFF THE PURCHASE OF THE DUX® BED AND BEDROOM ACCESSORIES NOW THROUGH AUGUST 3RD Now is the perfect time to create your ultimate sleep sanctuary. Enjoy 20% off The DUX® Bed and all DUXIANA® headboards and fine European linens and down including pillows, summer-weight duvets, cashmere throws, allergy control covers and our everpopular DUXIANA® Travel Pillow.

www.duxiana.com Promotion runs from July 3 - August 3, 2020 only.

Visit duxiana.com/summer-sale-2020 for more information.

Cannot be combined with any other offers or discounts.

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

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

Waterfront on Lake Pinehurst

M A G A Z I N E Volume 16, No. 7 David Woronoff, Publisher Jim Dodson, Editor

910.693.2506 • jim@pinestrawmag.com

Andie Stuart Rose, Creative Director

910.693.2467 • andie@pinestrawmag.com

Jim Moriarty, Senior Editor

910.692.7915 • jjmpinestraw@gmail.com

Alyssa Rocherolle, Graphic Designer

910.693.2508 • alyssa@pinestrawmag.com

Lauren M. Coffey, Graphic Designer

910.693.2469 • lauren@pinestrawmag.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Deborah Salomon, Staff Writer Mary Novitsky, Sara King, Proofreaders CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

John Gessner, Laura Gingerich, Tim Sayer

CONTRIBUTORS Tom Allen, Jenna Biter, Harry Blair, Tom Bryant, Susan Campbell, Bill Case, Wiley Cash, Tony Cross, Brianna Rolfe Cunningham, Mart Dickerson, Bill Fields, Laurel Holden, Jane Lear, Jan Leitschuh, Meridith Martens, D.G. Martin, Lee Pace, Renee Whitmore, Joyce Reehling, Scott Sheffield, Stephen E. Smith, Angie Tally, Kimberly Taws, Ashley Wahl ADVERTISING SALES

155 SW Lake Forest Drive • Pinehurst Everything you can imagine in lakeside living is offered in this deceptively spacious Lake Pinehurst home incorporating 4497 sq ft. The main floor rooms are warmed by wood-paneled ceilings and offer spectacular lake views. Enjoy the setting with a deck for entertaining or cruising the lake from a pontoon boat moored at the dock. A cozy screened porch is accessed from master bedroom or kitchen. Each of the four bedrooms has a beautifully appointed full bath. Highlights include: a dramatically finished family /game room, 2 laundry rooms, and exercise room (or alternatively a guest quarters with kitchen). Located on a quiet cove surrounded by beautifully maintained homes, the atmosphere at night with soft, twinkling lights is enchanting. Offered at $815,000

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

Maureen Clark

www.clarkpropertiesnc.com

when experience matters

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

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Ginny Trigg, Advertising Director 910.693.2481 • ginny@thepilot.com Jennie Acklin, 910.693.2515 Dacia Burch, 910.693.2519 Samantha Cunningham, 910.693.2505 Terry Hartsell, 910.693.2513 Perry Loflin, 910.693.2514 ADVERTISING COORDINATOR

Emily Jolly • pilotads@thepilot.com

ADVERTISING GRAPHIC DESIGN

Mechelle Butler, Scott Yancey

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

910.693.2488 OWNERS

Jack Andrews, Frank Daniels Jr., Frank Daniels III, Lee Dirks, David Woronoff 145 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, Southern Pines, NC 28387 www.pinestrawmag.com ©Copyright 2020. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

PineStraw magazine is published by The Pilot LLC The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

You might hear about larger selections on other dealership lots. Go see the neighbors at Cooper Ford before you buy. If you’re looking for an honest team of mechanics and technicians, go to Cooper Ford. Aaron is on site, but his team of professionals are empowered to make decisions to find the best solution to the situation.

W E K N O W S TAY I N G H E A LT H Y I S O N Y O U R M I N D,

PUT YOUR MIND AT EASE A N D M A K E A N A P P O I N T M E N T T O D AY.

As we all get a little closer to living a normal life, make sure your health stays on the forefront of living a healthy lifestyle. Pinehurst Surgical Clinic is here as always to help you meet your healthcare needs.

• Pinehurst Surgical Clinic accepts most major insurances.

CALL AND MAKE YOUR APPOINTMENT TODAY (910) 295 6831 Audiology & Hearing Care • Ear, Nose, Throat, Head & Neck • General & Bariatric Surgery • Imaging Laboratory • Ophthalmology • Orthopaedic Surgery • Physical Therapy • Plastic & Facial Plastic Surgery

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Urologic Surgery • Vascular & Vein Care • Women’s Comprehensive Health PineStraw

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SIMPLE LIFE

The Garden of America It may not be Eden, but it comes mighty close if we tend it

By Jim Dodson

The last time I went to church was

back in middle March.

Seems like half a lifetime ago.

On Sunday mornings these days — most days, actually — I’m out well before sunrise watering my gardens and watching birds.

The garden has become my church, the place where I work up a holy sweat and find — no small feat in these days of safe distancing and social turmoil — deeper connection to a loving universe. The arching oaks of our urban forest rival any medieval cathedral, and the birdsong of dawn is finer than any chapel choir. It’s the one time of the day when I feel, with the faith of a mustard seed, to quote the mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, that all will be well.

A rusted iron plaque that stood for decades in my late mom’s peony border reminded: The kiss of the sun for pardon The song of the birds for mirth, One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden Than anywhere else on Earth.

This well-loved verse is from a poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney, daughter and wife of an Anglican priest who reportedly was inspired to jot this particular stanza in Lord Ronald Gower’s visitor’s book after spending time in his garden at Hammerfield Penshurst, England. The poem later appeared in an issue of Country Life magazine in 1913, gaining Dorothy Gurney a slice of botanical immortality.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Though I descend from a line of rural Carolina farmers and preachers, it wasn’t until I began roaming Great Britain as a golf and outdoors editor for a leading travel magazine in the late 1980s that the verdure in my blood asserted itself and my own passion for landscape gardening took root and began to grow like a Gertrude Jekyll vine.

In those days, it was my good fortune to write about classic golf courses and fly-fishing streams that happened to be near some of Britain’s greatest sporting estates and historic houses.

One of the first I visited in West Sussex was Gravetye Manor, the former home of William Robinson, the revolutionary plantsman who, despite being Irish, has been called the “Father of the English Flower Garden.” Robinson’s pioneering ideas about creating natural landscapes with hardy native perennials, expressed in his famous book The Wild Garden, became the bible of English gardeners and led to a gardening style now admired and copied all over the world.

I showed up there to stay one hot mid-summer afternoon when the 100 acres or so of woodlands and gardens were already past their peak.

But like Dorothy Gurney, I was so taken with the sweeping natural landscape that I spent an entire day just walking the grounds looking at plants and chatting with the gardening staff. Among other things, I encountered my first Gertrude Jekyll vine, planted by Robinson’s protégé who went on to partner with Surrey architect Edwin Lutyens to create some of England’s most acclaimed private gardens.

After this, every time I traveled to England, Scotland or Wales with golf clubs and fly rod in tow, I made time to seek out some of the most historic houses and private gardens in the Blessed Isles. During bluebell season, I wandered through the breathtaking New Forest National Park to Chewton Glen — where farm animals by law walk PineStraw

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SIMPLE LIFE

free — and moseyed over to Kent to play a British Open course I’d always dreamed of playing. I also spent a blissful summer afternoon checking out the structural plantings of diplomat Harold Nicolson and the sumptuous gardens of his wife, author Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst, an ancient Anglo-Saxon word that means “clearing in the woods.”

I spent a day with Shropshire rose guru David Austin, toured the amazing terraced gardens of Wales’ Powis Castle, checked out the stunning gardens of Stourhead, Hidcote and Kew — even eventually found my way to Hammerfield Penshurst where Madam Gurney was moved to poetry. There I was so impressed by the riotous blueand-pink peony border — my late mother’s favorite garden flower — I vowed to someday make my own peony border.

Back home in Maine, in the meantime, I cleared a 2-acre plot of land on top of our forested hill, rebuilt an ancient stone wall and began making my own mini-Robinsonian gardening sanctuary. My witty Scottish mother-in-law suggested I give my woodland retreat a proper British name, suggesting “Slightly Off in the Woods.” The name was apt. The garden became my passion.

In 2004, I set off to spend a year exploring two dozen private and public gardens and arboretums all over Britain and eastern America, learning that gardeners are among the most generous and life-loving people of the Earth. Among other things, I went behind the scenes at the famous Philadelphia Flower Show and England’s venerable Chelsea Flower Show, got to pick the brains of America’s most acclaimed gardeners at places like Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Jefferson’s

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Monticello, Pennsylvania’s Chanticleer and Longwood Gardens, and finished the year by spending six weeks with plant guru Tony Avent and three fellow plant nerds in the wilds of South Africa hunting rare species of plants. During this time I even helped design my first golf course and shape its landscaping, at times wondering if I’d perhaps missed my calling, though what is a golf course but a great big parkland in the tradition of Capability Brown?

One of the most surprising moments came when I called on John Bartram’s historic garden across the Schuylkill River from downtown Philly. I spent an enriching afternoon in the garden of America’s first botanist, learning that Thomas Jefferson frequently turned up in the garden during the long hot tumultuous summer he spent in Philadelphia composing the Declaration of Independence.

According to Bartram garden lore, Jefferson jotted notes for his hymn of American democracy while reposing in the shade of a sprawling ginkgo tree on the grounds. The last time I checked, the ancient ginkgo was still standing.

For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture and botany were elemental passions of life. As Andrea Wulf writes in her wonderful and prodigiously researched bestseller Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation, a tour of English landscape gardens — like the extended one I took — helped restore Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’ faith in their fledgling nation during some of its darkest hours. Gardening also helped make James Madison America’s first true environmentalist.

“The Founding Fathers’ passion for nature, plants, gardens and

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PineStraw

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Summer Fun Has Just Begun

Framer’s Cottage

162 NW Broad Street • Downtown Southern Pines • 910.246.2002 22

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SIMPLE LIFE

agriculture is deeply woven into the fabric of America,” she writes, “and aligned with their political thought, both reflecting and influencing it. In fact, I believe it’s impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners.”

My book on America’s dirtiest passion, Beautiful Madness: One Man’s Journey Through Other People’s Gardens — was my most fun book to research and write. Since its publication in 2006, I’ve heard from gardeners all over the planet and have made plans for a follow-up book on the diverse gardening passions of America and the adventures of an early 20th-century plant hunter and Asian explorer named Ernest Henry “Chinese” Wilson, whose discovered lilies are probably growing in your garden today.

As any devoted gardener knows, the beautiful thing about a garden is that it is forever changing and never completed. Revision and evolution go hand in hand with making a garden flourish and bloom.

As another July dawns in the midst of a worldwide pandemic and sweeping protests in quest of long overdue social justice and an end to racism, it strikes me that American democracy is really no different from the botanical wonders of the world.

A true gardener’s work is never complete, likewise for a true patriot of the diverse and ever-changing garden that is America. The garden must be tended regularly, weeded and watered, nurtured and fed, pruned and tended with a loving eye.

The good news is, gardens are remarkably resilient. They can take a beating, endure violent storms and punishing drought, yet come back even stronger than ever as a new day dawns. As Jefferson, Adams and that Revolutionary bunch knew, the one thing a healthy garden or democracy can’t abide for long is neglect and indifference.

And so, as mid-summer and our nation’s 244th birthday arrive, I plan to spend even more holy time in my garden — church until further notice — planning a new blue-andpink peony border in memory of my late mama and thinking about what it means to be a good gardener and a true citizen of this ever-evolving garden we call America. PS Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Applying Expertise, Integrity & Passion to Rural Real Estate

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PinePitch

TRUST BUT VERIFY: As our communities deal with the challenges presented by the novel coronavirus, please be aware that events may have been postponed, rescheduled or existed only in our dreams. Check before attending.

Sculpture Race

Celebrate art and human innovation by building a dynamic sculpture in the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Art in Motion Sculpture Race. The only requirement is that your creation be inspired by a work of art from the museum’s collection. There will be a Sculpture Race Webinar on July 8 at 7 p.m. to inspire and inform. Digital submissions are due by July 21. The virtual exhibition and awards ceremony will be July 31. For further information visit ncartmuseum.org.

Troubadour Series

Let the Live Games Begin

The NHL could be returning to the world of live sports as early as the end of July with the beginning of the 24-team 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs. After canceling what remained of the regular season, players were allowed to return to voluntary training in small groups in June. Phase 3 of the league’s plan — formal training camps — was set to begin in the first part of July. Meaningful hockey (Phase 4) would be close behind, possibly by the end of the month. The PGA Tour and live tournament golf returned in June at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, but without spectators. From July 16-19 the mini-roars and golf claps will return for the first time after Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine gave the green light for up to 8,000 spectators at the Memorial Tournament in Columbus, Ohio. Can the Super Bowl be far behind?

Walk on the Wild Side

The Contenders, the duo of Josh Day and Jay Nash, will kick off the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center Troubadour Series with a concert at Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst, from 7:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 11.

Their latest album, Laughing with the Reckless, is a testament to the experiences of their life on the road. Opening for The Contenders will be singer/songwriter Aaron Burdett. Tickets are available at ticketmesandhills.com.

Getting Fresh on the 4th

The Southern Pines Business Association will host its annual sidewalk sale on Saturday, July 18. Broad Street businesses will have merchandise on sale displayed outside stores. Normal business hours and social distancing apply. For information call (910) 315-6508.

There’s something for everyone at the farmers market on the Village Green in Pinehurst from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, July 4. There will be fruits, vegetables, flowers, cheese, meats, breads, desserts, handmade soaps, pottery, woodcrafts, wine, beer, cider, coffee and a partridge in a pear tree.

Magic Carpet Ride

The Imagine Youth Theater will present its musical production of Aladdin Jr. on Thursday and Friday evenings, July 23-24, at 7 p.m. at the Hannah Marie Bradshaw Activities Center at The O’Neal School, 3300 Airport Road, Pinehurst. For information call (910) 420-1025 or go to www.taylordance.org.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PineStraw

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Join Pilot Publisher David Woronoff for

JOHN GRISHAM

LIVE!

Tickets available on TicketMeSandhills.com John Grisham is the author of thirty novels including The Firm, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief. He has written one work of nonfiction, a collection of stories, and six novels for young readers.

AN EXCLUSIVE AFTERNOON WITH JOHN GRISHAM

Monday, July 13 at 2pm • $200 Purchase one login to the exclusive online event with John Grisham moderated by David Woronoff. You will have the opportunity to speak to John and ask him a question and receive an autographed copy of Camino Winds shipped directly to your door. Split it with your friends or invite your book club, this is a gathering that will be something to remember.

AN AFTERNOON WITH JOHN GRISHAM

Wednesday, July 15 at 2pm • $5 David Woronoff is the President and Publisher of The Pilot, a North Carolina media company that includes the magazines Business North Carolina, PineStraw, O.Henry, SouthPark, Seasons and The Pilot newspaper as well as various other publications. The company also includes The Country Bookshop and First Flight Digital.

Join John Grisham and David Woronoff as they chat about writing, publishing, life and possibly their mutual love for baseball. Your ticket cost is applicable to a copy of Camino Winds or any book from The Country Bookshop.

CAMINO WINDS Bruce Cable’s Bay Books is going about business as usual when Hurricane Leo veers from its predicted course and heads straight for the island. Bruce decides to stay and ride out the storm and the hurricane is devastating. One of the apparent victims is Nelson Kerr, a friend of Bruce’s and an author of thrillers.

The nature of Nelson’s injuries suggests that the storm wasn’t the cause of his death but the local police are overwhelmed from the storm and Bruce begins to wonder if the shady characters in Nelson’s novels might be more real than fictional.

140 NW Broad St, • Southern Pines, NC • 910.692.3211 • www.thecountrybookshop.biz • thecountrybookshop Website Open 24/7 • Delivery Offered • Check Website for Hours

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www.howellsmasonry.com 10327 Hwy 211 • Aberdeen, NC 28315 The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

INSTAGRAM WINNERS

Congratulations to our July Instagram winner!

Theme:

Fathers

#pinestrawcontest

July Winner

Next month’s theme:

“What are you reading?”

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

To submit your photo on Instagram you need to post a photo, tag us @pinestrawmag and in the caption field add the hashtag #pinestrawcontest (Submissions needed by Monday, July 20th) PineStraw 29

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THE OMNIVOROUS READER

Going Viral Shedding light on dark days

By Stephen E. Smith

In the mid-’��s, Richard Pres-

ton’s nonfiction The Hot Zone was a bestseller.

Based on a 1989 outbreak of an Ebola-like strain of virus in Reston, Virginia, the horrors depicted in Preston’s book kept this reviewer awake at night. Even though the sickness was confined to monkeys imported for research purposes, it took an Army medical team clad in spacesuits to exterminate the infected primates.

With ample time to contemplate the predicament in which we now find ourselves, I did what reviewers do: I read, albeit belatedly, other books about pandemics. I downloaded Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History, Sara Shah’s Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, and David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (there are umpteen other equally enlightening volumes I haven’t had time to pursue), and I discovered in each book a blueprint for the COVID-19 pandemic — disturbingly precise roadmaps for events over which we might have managed a modicum of control on a worldwide, national and personal level had we taken to heart what history and science has to teach us.

If you’re interested in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic, Quammen’s 2016 Spillover is by far the most informative — and the scariest — study. He focuses on zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, AIDS, rabies, influenza and West Nile, infections that sicken animals and jump to humans. COVID-19, although not identified when Spillover was written, is a zoonotic that has escalated into a pandemic via human-to-human transmission, and Quammen makes it possible for the layman to comprehend the viral dynamic at work. He explains in straightforward terms how global travel and exploding world populations make it possible for a virus such as COVID-19 to spread rapidly.

We tend to view the spread of such a virus as an independent misforThe Art & Soul of the Sandhills

tune that happened to us (how else would a nonscientist see it?), but “That’s a passive, almost stoical way of viewing them,” he writes. “It’s also the wrong way,” making us susceptible to anecdotal testimony and false cures that might be harmful.

Quammen says that emerging diseases are the result of two forms of crisis on the planet — ecological and medical. “Human-caused ecological pressures and disruption are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading pathogens ever more widely,” Quammen writes.

Logging, road building, slash-and-burn agriculture, the consumption of wild animals, mineral extraction, urban settlement, chemical pollution, nutrient runoff into oceans — most of what we call “civilizing” incursions upon the natural world — destroy the ecosystem. This destruction releases viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists and other parasites embedded in natural relationships that limit their geographical range. “When the trees fall and the native animals are slaughtered, the native germs fly like dust from a demolished warehouse.”

In 2012 Quammen asked this straightforward question, “Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of the rain forest or a market in China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?”

If we can’t predict the next pandemic, says Quammen, we can remain vigilant, we can monitor worldwide transmission, and take precautions. Argue as we may about how and why we got here, the fact remains we find ourselves in a frightening moment whose ramifications must be faced head on. Spillover allows the reader to do just that.

As thorough and graphic as the above-mentioned volumes are, they don’t truly immerse the reader in the personal misery visited upon the Spanish flu generation or on those of us suffering the most extreme ravages of COVID-19. But there are books of fiction — doses of focused reality — that do just that, books I’d read 50 years ago.

The first is Katherine Anne Porter’s 1939 Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of three “short novels.” Told in the third person, the title story lulls the reader into the complacency of daily life — until the influenza sweeps up and almost kills the youthful protagonist. Porter’s description is worth reading in full, but here’s a sample: “Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her PineStraw

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Moments like these are missed but not gone forever...

Our Our OurLife Life LifePlan Plan PlanCommunity Community Community has has hasserved served servedolder older olderadults adults adultssince since since1964, 1964, 1964, As restrictions are loosened in North Carolina, please know that we were early to put measures providing providing providing exceptional exceptional Independent Independent Living, Living, Living, in place to protect our Penick Village family and that meansexceptional we will also beIndependent the last to loosen.

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has served adults since 1964, Home Home HomeCare, Care, Care,Assisted Assisted Assisted Living Living Living &older &&Plan Skilled Skilled Skilled Nursing.

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Our Our Our Our Our Life Life Life Life Life Life Plan Plan Plan Plan Plan Community Community Community Community Community Community As our community remains closed to visitors, we will continue to utilize alternative means providing exceptional Independent Living, has has has has has has has served served served served served served served served older older older older older older adults adults adults adults adults adults since since since since since since 1964, 1964, 1964, 1964, 1964, to facilitate communication with loved ones. We find ways to be innovative in providing providing providing providing providing providing providing exceptional exceptional exceptional exceptional exceptional exceptional exceptional exceptional Independent Independent Independent Independent Independent Independent Independent Independent Independent Living, Living, Living, Living, Living, Home Care, Assisted Living Skilled Nursing. providing services to and engaging with our residents daily.

Our Our Life Life&Plan Plan Community Community has has has served served served& older older adults adultsNursing. since since 1964, 1964, Home Home Home Home Home Home Home Care, Care, Care, Care, Care, Care, Care, Assisted Assisted Assisted Assisted Assisted Assisted Assisted Assisted Living Living Living Living Living & & & & &Skilled Skilled Skilled Skilled Skilled Skilled Skilled Skilled Skilled Nursing.

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Nursing. providing providing providingexceptional exceptional exceptional Independent Independent IndependentLiving, Living,

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Enjoy Enjoy Enjoyvibrant vibrant vibrantliving living livingwith with withdelicious delicious delicious cuisine, cuisine, cuisine, personable personable services, services, services,and and and veins like heavy personable fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her enriching enriching enriching opportunities opportunities &&amenities amenities amenities eyes and saw paleopportunities light through a coarse white & cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift herallow hand.” that that that allow allowyou you youtototogrow grow growolder older olderbetter. better. better.

COMBINING NEW TRADITIONS Porter suffered bouts of influenza at least OMNIVOROUS READER

& CLASSIC CUISINE three times in her life, so she writes from an acuity borne of experience, and she’s careful to impress upon the reader that we are all cursed with the conviction that nothing terrible can happen to us . . . until it happens.

If Porter captures the suffering endured by a victim of the pandemic, North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe wrenches the reader’s soul when conveying the agony of watching a BANQUET FACILITY WITH SEATING FROM 1 TO 100! GREAT BURGERS & SANDWICHES IN THE LOUNGE loved one die from the Spanish flu in Look Homeward, Angel. With Wolfe, the reader is Locally Owned & always in danger of being consumed by his Operated for Over 25 Years excessive wordiness, but it’s that verbosity Dinner Mon-Sat 5-10pm • Lounge 5pm-until that’s effective in conveying a terrible reality.

Monday-Saturday 5:00pm-10:00pm Again, the writer’s words are worth reading in 910-692-5550 • 672 SW Broad St. full, but here’s an excerpt: www.beefeatersofsouthernpines.com Southern Pines, NC “The rattling in the wasted body, which seemed for hours to have given over to death Enjoy Enjoyvibrant vibrant vibrant living living living with with with delicious delicious delicious all of life that is worth saving, had now ceased.

The personable body appeared to grow rigid beforeand cuisine, cuisine, cuisine, personable personable services, services, services, and and them. . . But suddenly, marvelously, as if his enriching enriching enriching opportunities opportunities opportunities & & amenities amenities amenities resurrection and rebirth had&come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful that thatallow allow allowyou you youtoto to grow grow grow older older older better. better. better. respiration; his gray eyes opened. . . casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain mummers of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornfully and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.”

Books about death and disease don’t make for cheerful reading, but understanding the pandemic is better than succumbing to its ravages or losing a loved one to COVID-19.

Wear a mask, wash your hands, social distance — and read wisely. PS

Enjoy vibrant living with delicious

Join Joinus. us.

cuisine, personable services, and enriching opportunities & amenities Enjoy Enjoy Enjoy Enjoy Enjoy Enjoy vibrant vibrant vibrant vibrant vibrant vibrant vibrant vibrant living living living living living living living living with with with with with with with delicious delicious delicious delicious delicious delicious delicious thatcuisine, allow youpersonable to grow older services, better. cuisine, cuisine, cuisine, cuisine, cuisine, cuisine, cuisine, personable personable personable personable personable personable personable services, services, services, services, services, services, and and and and and and and

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Enjoy Enjoy Enjoyvibrant vibrant vibrantliving living livingwith with withdelicious delicious delicious You may not be ableand to control cuisine, cuisine, cuisine,personable personable personableservices, services, services, and and the whole Join Join Joinus. us. us. world but you enriching enriching enriching opportunities opportunities opportunities &&amenities amenities amenities Enjoy vibrant living with delicious& may learn to cuisine, personable services, and that that thatallow allow allowyou you youto totogrow grow growolder older oldercontrol better. better. better.your

enriching opportunities & amenities that allow you to grow older better.

inner world.

Join Joinus. us.

Join us.

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Check our schedule at hotasanastudio.com for live streaming and live outdoor classes or use our on demand classes at hotasanaonline.com 910-692-YOGA (9642) PineStraw

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BOOKSHELF

FICTION

July Books

Utopia Avenue, by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of SoHo, a TV debut on Top of the Pops, the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon and San Francisco during the autumn of ‘68. Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper; of music, madness and idealism. Can we really change the world, or does the world change us?

The Pull of the Stars, by Emma Donoghue

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders: doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumored rebel on the run from the police; and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, caregivers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

Crossings, by Alex Landragin

There are two ways to approach this novel — read it straight through in a traditional manner, a tale told in three novellas; or skip around the entire work using the key given in the prologue. Either way, Crossings is a deliciously clever literary treat of love, suspense and historical fiction, combined with the paranormal ability of two separated lovers searching for one another throughout centuries and continents.

Hieroglyphics, by Jill McCorkle

The brilliance of Jill McCorkle is that her novels read as if you are enjoying a marvelous cup of coffee and conversation with a very dear friend. Hieroglyphics is told from the point of view of four people. Lil and Frank, an elderly couple from Boston recently moved to Southern Pines, North Carolina, are forever bound by the grief of having lost a parent tragically at a very young age. Shelley is a young mother fighting her past while raising her troubled child, Harvey, whose dark and vivid imaginings provide daily challenges. Above all, Hieroglyphics is about memories and remembering, loss of love and loved ones, preserving the past and what remains after we are gone. Written with poignancy and wry honesty, this is the work of a master at the top of her game.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The Book of Lost Names, by Kristin Harmel

Inspired by a true story, this historical novel centers around Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian who, as a graduate student in 1942, fled Paris to a small mountain town where she forged papers to help Jewish children escape to Switzerland.

Determined to find a way to keep track of the children’s real identities, she and a forger, Rémy, entered them in code in an 18th century religious text, one of many books looted by the Nazis during the war. When she sees a photograph containing the priceless volume, Eva knows only she holds the answers but it means revisiting old memories.

NONFICTION

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, by Francis Fukuyama

The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state. In 2014, Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the international order. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism.

Identity is an urgent and necessary book — a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America, by Nicholas Buccola

On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America’s most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire Is Upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, and how the debate and the decadeslong clash between the men illuminates the racial divide that haunts America today.

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BOOKSHELF

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Together We Grow, by Susan Vaught

Let our team of experienced financial professionals guide you to and through a confident and secure retirement!

Call to schedule a complimentary review of your accounts today!

David Moore Photography

On a rainy, stormy night, the fox family is at first sent away from the crowded barn, but when the duck opens the door and invites them in, they are gracious and thankful. A sweet, lyrical story that reminds us, there’s always room to be kind to those in need. (Ages 3-5.)

Vinny Gets a Job, by Terry Brodner

When Vinny learns jobs are places to get food and toys, he decides he must have a job of his own. After hilarious, unsuccessful stints at his neighborhood Italian restaurant, flower shop and natural history museum, Vinny’s owner reminds him that he already has a very important job — to be a good dog. Laugh out loud fun for story time or any time. (Ages 3-6.)

Ronan the Librarian,

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by Tara Luebbe and Becky Cattie After discovering an unusual cache in his plunder, Ronan the Barbarian becomes Ronan the Librarian! With a little coercing and some pretty fantastic modeling, Ronan convinces his fellow pillagers that books can indeed be the greatest treasure. (Ages 4-6.)

The Elephant’s Girl,

by Celesta Rimington Lex and Fisher are zoo kids. They both live in a Nebraska zoo — Fisher with his parents and Lex with her . . . well, with her Roger. After a tornado blew Lex into the zoo as a baby, she was protected by Nyah, an elephant, and then grew up in the care of Roger, the zoo’s train driver. Now, a strange new wind is blowing. It threatens everything important to Lex, and Nyah may just be the key to it all. Fans of Three Times Lucky, Circus Mirandus and Savvy will not be able to put down this clever, fun mystery about a girl, a friend, an elephant and a very special kind of family. (Ages 8-12.) PS Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Hiatt’s Vision is a Guiding Compass One Man’s Vision in 1952 is now one of the Sandhills’ largest networks of specialty & primary care providers. Dr. Joseph Spurgeon Hiatt, Jr. founded Pinehurst Medical Clinic with one idea in mind, “to give the people of Moore County and surrounding communities the best medical treatment available, anywhere.”

Celebrating 68 years, Pinehurst Medical Clinic is an established healthcare leader in Moore County and continues to expand upon Dr. Hiatt’s vision. Attracting and retaining some of the regions most talented physicians, PMC is committed to providing the highest quality care to the Sandhills and the patients they serve.

Hiatt’s vision remains the compass for Pinehurst Medical Clinic currently, consisting of over 100 primary and specialty care providers, approximately 650 employees and 18 locations. www.pinehurstmedical.com • 910.295.5511

Dr. Brooks Mays Endocrinology

Dr. Ker Boyce Electrophysiology

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Dr. Wayne Lucas Gastroenterology

Dr. Pamela Guest Dermatology

Dr. Michael Antil Primary Care

Dr. Karen Schorn Pheumatology

Dr. Michael Pritchett Dr. Michael Batalo Oncology Pulmonology Hematology FirstHealth Affiliate FirstHealth Affiliate

Dr. David Cowherd Cardiology FirstHealth Affiliate

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A professional estate sale service founded in 1969

by Nancy Huggins Nelms and Elizabeth (Libby) Grierson Ward, Howie & Huggins became the business you know today when Phil Huggins took it over from his mother in 1980. This year, Phil is celebrating 40 years since taking the helm and continuing their legacy of helping you with a smooth and stress-free liquidation.

Since its beginning, Howie & Huggins has been there to help you with any transition, including downsizing, the move of an aging parent, death, divorce or relocation, by providing the highest quality sale with the most professional service.

Our staff will show respect not only to you and your family but also to the belongings entrusted to us.

THE REGION’S PREMIERE ESTATE SALE SERVICE PROVIDER Philip H. Huggins, AEL 910.670.1813 • 910.235.3763 howieandhuggins.com • estatesales.net

Licensed and Bonded • Member Better Business Bureau Accredited Estate Liquidator ASEL

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NOMINATE

YOUR FAVORITE LOCAL BUSINESSES! • July 6th - 24th • The top 8 nominees in each category will make it to the voting ballot in August

••• Voting Opens Up August 10th - 28th

••• Winners Announced in the 2020 Best of the Pines Magazine in October WWW.BESTOFTHEPINES.COM

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

HOMETOWN

Cheers to Tony D Where people know people are all the same

By Bill Fields

Everybody didn’t quite know every-

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BILL FIELDS

body’s name, but Tony D would have told you to take the over.

Even if you had never been to Tony D’s Sports Café, located in the Connecticut town I’ve called home for two decades, you know it. The beer was cold and cheap, served in generous glasses, and tabs were paid in cash.

The regulars at Tony D’s came from all walks of life. There were mechanics and teachers, plumbers and stockbrokers, policemen and fishmongers, sportswriters and realtors, firefighters and town clerks, nurses and soccer coaches, accountants and car salesmen.

The middle of May, regardless of occupation, we were all feeling sad.

Most of us hadn’t seen Tony in two months, since shortly before the bar closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Word got around that Anthony Victor DeLibero, recently diagnosed with several serious health issues, had died in the hospital of a heart attack at age 65.

“His bar and baseball were his whole life,” said his obituary, accompanied by a photo of a young Tony D, sporting a mustache and wearing a tie.

It was a much different image than the Tony I’d known for 15 years or so. I never saw him away from the bar, where, regardless of the season, he was dressed in gym shorts, T-shirt, tennis shoes and a ball cap worn catcher-style even though he’d been a pitcher.

Tony loved the New York Yankees, and so did many of his customers. Come the postseason the place would be packed for a Yankees game, most of the couple of dozen televisions tuned to the baseball and some of the most passionate fans wearing jerseys, everything from Thurman Munson’s 15 to Aaron Judge’s 99. Joe brought his childhood Mickey Mantle signature glove, half a century old, for good luck.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Tony D’s long, narrow space — you could see how it previously housed a hair salon — would get packed during the baseball playoffs or on football afternoons. The last few seasons, Tony opened early on Thanksgiving Saturday so my girlfriend and I could be in position for the noon kickoff of Ohio State-Michigan. Tony made a good Bloody Mary on those occasions, but by the second half his longtime bartender, Laurie, would be there and making her version, perhaps the world’s best.

I loved teasing Tony about that, but I was usually on the receiving end of the barbs. He had long been in the major leagues in that department. Tony could be gruff and profane, but there was something beneath the bluster. If there was an illness or death in the family, his concern was real. Owing to business trips, I might go a few weeks without stopping in for a cold one or two. When I got back, Tony would be glad to see me — as long as I didn’t ask him to put golf on one of the TVs or do an imitation of one of Yankees radio announcer John Sterling’s hokey home-run calls. (“It’s an A-Bomb for A-Rod.”) Tony passed away May 16, less than 24 hours after one of his longtime customers established a GoFundMe drive to help during what was shaping up as a long recovery. Dozens of folks stepped up quickly and generously, giving nearly $9,000 toward Tony’s business and his medical bills, news that reached him before his death. “He could not believe the outpouring of support from all of you and he appreciated it more than I can express,” reported James, who had launched the fundraiser.

A few years ago, when it looked as if Tony might lose his bar because of landlord issues, I began making a series of photographs of the place and its people. He teased me about that, too, but I think he would be happy about the memories. I know I am. PS Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

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Grand Opening

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Italian Fine Dining Born amid the storied walls of The Magnolia Inn, Villaggio Ristorante promises an exquisite old-world experience second to none.

We look forward to hosting you. —RON & JULIE MILTON

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CALL 910-420-2485 TO RESERVE

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

IN THE SPIRIT

In the Mix Pierre Ferrand 1840 shines

By Tony Cross

My introduction to cognac

PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CROSS

happened in the late summer of 2003. I had my first “front of the house” job at an intimate, independent French restaurant. It was small, and so was the staff; I was one of two servers. The owner, Raymond, was the chef, and his partner, Alan, was the sous-chef. Raymond’s wife, Ginette, ran everything up front. I began working there after they had been established for 13 years.

La Terrace was one of a kind. Usually on Saturday evenings, after all of the guests had retired to their homes, and the closing duties were finished, Raymond and Alan would sit at one of the two large round tables in the dining room, enjoying a snifter of Rémy Martin cognac. I remember Raymond explaining to me how cognac is a digestif, a beverage (usually alcoholic) that helps you digest your food.

He let me try it, and I’m sure I just shrugged it off. “What do you know? American punk.”

It was a mild rebuke, meant in the nicest way possible. Really. And he was right — all I cared about at the time was drinks, girls, and rock ’n’ roll. Maybe not much has changed.

These days you can find a much wider variety of brandy on the shelves. Brandy is any spirit that’s distilled from juice. Pisco, armagnac and cognac are a few examples. Cognac is produced in the Cognac region of France, and there are six regions, or appellations, where the grapes are grown. The grapes are fermented after being picked and then double distilled in copper pots. The “eau de vie” is then aged in oak barrels.

Cognac is classified in three different categories: VS (Very Special/Superior): Aged for at least two years in oak casks.

VSOP (Very Special/Superior Old Pale): Aged for at least four years in oak casks.

XO (Extra Old): Aged for at least six years in oak casks.

I’m not an aficionado by any means, so I’m not going to go down a list of cognacs and the differences/similarities in them. I will, however, recommend a great cognac for mixing cocktails. Pierre Ferrand 1840 Cognac is one of the most accessible and versatile cognacs on the market. At 90 proof, it’s great in mixed drinks. It has more of a backbone than Hennessey or Rémy. And don’t get me wrong, I love Rémy Martin.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

I became aware of Pierre Ferrand five or six years ago, when I picked up Death & Company: Modern Classic Cocktails, by David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald and Alex Day (still one of the best cocktail books ever put into print IMO). “The Sazerac cocktail was originally made with cognac, until the European phylloxera epidemic in the late 1800s wiped out grape production and bartenders switched to rye,” they write, and go on to suggest using the 1840. One of the finest appellations in Cognac is Grande Champagne, and that’s where the Ferrand estate is located. Ferrand only produces Grand Champagne cognacs (which basically means they only use grapes grown from the soils of that appellation).

If you’re not into making cocktails, you can definitely enjoy this neat. I do. I purchased a bottle the other week, and as you’ll see in the picture above, what’s missing was enjoyed straight. It’s velvety and rich. I picked up notes of pear, lemon and spice; it has a pretty long finish. I don’t think this cognac was designed to be enjoyed neat, but it holds up quite nicely. The place it really shines is in cocktails, like the Sazerac. Some bartenders do equal parts cognac and rye — that’s probably my favorite build. I’ll leave you with the classic Sidecar cocktail recipe from the Death & Co. book.

Sidecar

2 ounces Pierre Ferrand 1840 Cognac 1/2 ounce Cointreau 3/4 ounce lemon juice 1/4 ounce cane sugar simple syrup Garnish: 1 orange twist Shake all ingredients with ice, then strain into a coupe. Garnish with the orange twist. PS Tony Cross is a bartender (well, ex-bartender) who runs cocktail catering company Reverie Cocktails in Southern Pines.

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C H A R AC T E R S T U DY

Knives Out

By Jenna Biter

“I’m more

of a Japanese maple freak than a bonsai freak, but I can show you,” Joe Marotta says matter-of-factly but somehow merrily, too.

He walks through the kitchen and opens the door to the backyard.

Trees, 20 or 30, and plants line a bricked walkway, each in a pot of specific size and color, and some with accompanying stands.

“Do you make these?” I motion at the wooden stands.

“Yup,” he says with a grin.

Japanese maples of assorted cultivars fill a majority of the pots, and beyond they fill the backyard. Bihou has yellow bark; Shirazz has salmon pink leaves; Radiant has iridescent bark and, when it matures, it will have iridescent leaves, too. “I have about 55 Japanese maples on the property,” he says. Hanna Matoi, a weeping cultivar, is his favorite.

The bonsai are the first stop and, ultimately, the last one on our circular tour of the backyard. A pergola covered in greenery, a wooden swing and raised garden beds planted with tomatoes, onions and eggplant absorb the space between the trees. With his back toward me, he fiddles with a bonsai before heading toward the garage.

“You could just take a small tree or plant and put it in a pot and then it’s a tree in a pot,” he says. “But, if you start trimming them and trying

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to shape them — that’s the art of bonsai.” He turns, catches my eye and laughs a round laugh. “I’m new to that, too.”

Too. He’s alluding to his other craft, knife making, a skill he’s been honing about as long as he’s been pruning bonsai. In his garage, Joe stands over 26 knives-to-be.

It’s where our conversation started nearly an hour ago.

“I was born and raised on a horse farm in Michigan, and we had racehorses,” he says, standing at a worktable in this garageturned-workshop. With a state-of-the-art table saw, planer, anvil and the works living comfortably in the spaces meant for Fords and Chevys, it probably hasn’t been a garage for some time.

“The other family business, it was a construction business,” he says. “I went the racehorse route, and I became a horseshoer.” For 35 years, two in the Sandhills, he shod horses, before trying his hand at construction, trimming houses for his cousin.

“And, there was a piece of molding or something I put up, and I said, ‘This just doesn’t look good to me; it doesn’t look right.’” His cousin told him to do whatever he needed to do to make it look right. It’s the mantra he’s carried through to the art of bonsai, blacksmithing, woodworking and the nexus of the latter two, knife-making. The warmth of his voice advertises the delight that comes from the discipline of mastery, the joy of knowledge.

“Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” he asks. “In 2017, I was diagnosed with lymphoma, and, halfway through my treatments, they discovered I had kidney cancer.” He pauses.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM SAYER

The artisan of Aberdeen

C H A R AC T E R S T U DY

“In January of the next year, after I got my chemo treatments for lymphoma, and I had a good prognosis, they took my right kidney out. Then, after that, they said, ‘As of right now, you’re cancer-free,’ and so far I have been.”

Joe shrugs. “Well, in the meantime, I didn’t have any business, and I wasn’t feeling good enough to do anything, so I decided I would start making knives from horseshoe rasps.”

He holds up a large, metal file. “This is called a big foot,” he says, waving the farrier rasp. “Normally, they’re about 14- to-16 inches. ’Bout halfway through my shoeing career, I switched to these because you get more leverage. Less stress. You don’t work as hard.”

He imitates the filing of a horseshoe in midair. “What I do is I’ll lay them out like this,” he says, setting down the repurposed rasp before grabbing a template to demonstrate how he cuts out the knives.

“Because this is so coarse and sharp,” Joe says as he lightly runs his fingers over the nubs on the file, “I knock down the rasp bed.”

Then comes the shaping of the knife on a homemade grinder. Not only does he make the knives, he makes the machinery to make the knives. He flicks on a switch. “You sit there and grind and grind and grind,” he booms over the mechanical humming. Chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh . . . the metal and the grinder’s belt meet in a spray of sparks.

“Dunk it in water in case it gets hot,” he says and plunges the knife into a bucket.

“The trickiest part is getting the bevel right. When you look down at the knife, you want the taper to be symmetrical,” he says. “After you grind about a hundred knives you get pretty good at it.” He adds modestly, “I’m still not great at it.”

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

The process courses ahead in almost perpetual motion. Handles-inprogress lay out in a variety of colorful, unfamiliar woods. “I try to use all exotic hardwoods. This is bocote, this is wenge. This is also bocote, but it’s long grain . . . redheart . . . leopardwood,” he lists off the names as he points.

Even the garage-turned-workshop doesn’t have the space for a production line that includes making leather or wooden sheaths — the latter called sayas — to accompany his cutlery, so the process spills into the house. His wife, Cheryl, says, “He wants my sewing room, but he’s not getting it.”

Joe pretends to ignore her but can’t contain a smirk as he explains how he makes the sheaths. “I cut a template out. Stain it and stamp it,” he says, cruising through the process. “Sew this, then put a welt in there, and, now, I just got to sew that together, stain it, finish it and then that’s the sheath.” He walks over to his homemade saddle pony to demonstrate saddle stitching.

Knife-making, machining, leather-making. “How do you have time for all these hobbies?” I ask.

“Ever since I got sick, and I had cancer, all I got is time,” Joe says. For the discipline of mastery, for the joy of knowledge.

“He also does bonsai,” someone chirps from the corner of the room.

“I’m more of a Japanese maple freak than a bonsai freak, but I can show you,” he says matter-of-factly, but somehow merrily, too. PS Jenna Biter is a fashion designer, entrepreneur and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jenna.biter@gmail.com. Marotta Custom Knives are available online at www.marottaknives.com.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

HOME BY DESIGN

A Room of Our Own

After years of open floor plans, design trend watchers see beauty in dedicated spaces with doors and actual walls

By Cynthia Adams

Every spring and fall, the

High Point Market Authority handpicks a group of designers and trend-trackers to scour showrooms for top design trends and products. But how to get around the Market’s COVID-induced closure, the second in its 111-year history (the first being World War II)?

Like everyone else in America, the Market turned to Zoom in mid-May, bringing together tastemakers from around the country to highlight their chicest picks from websites and leading homefurnishing companies’ new product lines. In a virtual confab, Rachel Cannon, Nancy Fire, Joanna Hawley-McBride, Don Ricardo Massenburg, Rachel Moriarty, Ivonne Ronderos, Victoria Sanchez, and Keita Turner presented their finds and posted them for viewing on the Spotters’ Pinterest boards.

Allow me to break down some key takeaways.

Recent lockdowns made us miss rooms. As in, rooms with walls The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

and doors. Doors that close.

This is a reversal of many seasons’ worth of pooh-poohing discrete spaces. Season after season, tastemakers regularly demonstrated an aversion to them. And not only in print. On HGTV, home flippers would walk in and size up a fixer-upper. Right off the bat they would eye existing sheetrock or plaster walls with the sort of suspicion normally reserved for a sewage leak.

“We need to open this up!” the renovator would declare giving said wall the stink eye. “First thing we’ll do is take out that wall!”

No matter if there was a 1911-era fireplace in that wall oozing charm, the problem was, that mantel and fireplace required a wall.

And walls, if not absolutely essential and load bearing, a renovator term one quickly learned, were verboten.

Having flipped a few houses myself in my single days, I would wail at a hallmark Fixer Upper scene in which Chip and Joanna Gaines proceeded to take a sledgehammer to an architectural detail or quirk that gave a house character. The end result was an open-concept house erected within the gutted shell of a formerly unique structure.

But the times, Children, are a-changin’.

After sheltering in place, working and home-schooling children, there were just so many days of hearing “Baby Shark” without losing brain cells. Or hearing one’s partner booming away on yet another PineStraw

47

HOME BY DESIGN

Zoom call. Or clearing away the breakfast mess before a Skype call could occur.

Weary Mamas and Papas and empty nesters learned there is something to treasure about personal space when one had so little.

After years of open floor plans, the Style Spotters agreed, there is a great realization: “Open plans are going to change,” one declared.

If you lack the skill set to build a wall in the time of a pandemic, buy a screen, the designers suggested in May. Something else the Style Spotters uttered grabbed my attention: comfort. Comfort and coziness are useful in uncertain times, they agreed unilaterally.

So, soft edges (featured on a cabinet by Theodore Alexander) or the organic (citing a Clubcu Oak French Console with a handmade look) were deemed pleasing.

Art and accessories with lots of texture also made the tastemaker’s cut. As did things “organic, creative, imperfect,” or “global and glam” — all reassuring design choices.

In a pandemic-scarred world, “Home is going to be the hub of everything,” one said.

The humble entryway or grand foyer is changed and weighed with practical needs (shucking off clothing or sanitizing our hands), as more than one urbanite designer allowed.

Rachel Cannon, whose Zoom space was neutral, tasteful and quiet, says she likes to design for introverts like herself. Though seek-

48

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ing calm in her color palette, she confessed she was not as enamored of the Pantone color of the year, Classic Blue, as her Style Spotting compatriots. Illustrating her preference for soothing elements, Cannon cited Hickory White’s case goods.

On the opposite end of the personality spectrum, the boho-loving camp did not seek calm. They chose geometric, bold, sexy furnishings among case goods and furniture, as well as art and accessories.

They liked candy colors that smacked of fun and games. The radical chic designers favored effusive and tribal-inspired designs in fabrics.

Prominently mentioned was Shipibo textiles, created by the Peru’s indigenous Shipibo-Conibo people.

The Style Spotters responded unanimously to a question about favorite projects: The entire group expressed their enthusiasm for designing powder rooms. “You can take risks!” one suggested. As a bonus for extroverted designers, the style-savvy added: It can be bold!

So skip to the loo, my darlings! It may have a dearth of toilet paper, but it does have walls and lockable doors, suitable for when one simply has to shut out the noise. Or corona-avoid everyone. PS Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

The Style Spotters program is co-sponsored by Crypton Fabric and Studio Designer. More information about the Style Spotters program and the 2020 team can be found www.highpointmarket.org/ products-and-trends/style-spotters.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

OUT OF THE BLUE

A Patriotic Wish The art and craft of loving country

By Deborah Salomon

If months

have a persona, then July must own patriotism.

This is confirmed by the paraphernalia at Dollar Tree. Soon as the graduation stuff is cleared away out come the stars and stripes — on everything.

Which makes me wonder about the emotion that ties people to their place of origin.

This complicated emotion sends soldiers onto the battlefield.

Patriotism is what rises in our throats and spills out of our eyes when the flag is raised in the schoolyard, when an Olympic athlete stands atop the podium, when the national anthem is sung before a baseball game or taps sounds over a military burial. I do not think patriotism can be taught, or learned. Developed, maybe.

It reminds me of the fifth basic taste: umami, which unlike sweet, sour, bitter and salty, is not exactly a taste itself but an intensification provided by glutamate (MSG). Umami makes food taste better.

Patriotism makes being an American feel better.

Patriotism has an amorphous quality that can be applied at several levels to all manner of situations. Like living abroad.

Not that Canada is really “abroad.”

Oh, yeah?

I lived in Canada for 26 years — arriving there as a 21-year-old bride who had never been outside the U.S. or even west of the Atlantic Seaboard. Everything was immediately different: The language (try high school/college French in Quebec province). The money (multicolored). The newspapers (hockeyhockeyhockey). The food (ground beef is “minced beef,” cookies are “biscuits”). The measurements (Celsius, metric). The customs (queue up at bus stops). The schools (11 grades). A hundred more details, all foreign. I was lonely, confused, overcome with a sudden patriotic longing for the familiar.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

I reacted by celebrating American Thanksgiving (Canadian T-G is a minor October holiday), putting out an American flag on July 4th.

Look, you guys, an American lives here!

Over the decades, returning from Europe or the Middle East, I always felt a rush of something when the plane touched down.

This emotion may have originated with my father, born in the USA of destitute immigrants from Eastern Europe. He served in France, in World War I, as an ambulance driver because his eyesight wasn’t good enough for the infantry. On Veterans Day he sold red paper poppies. Whenever battlefield visions surfaced, he’d say, “You don’t know how lucky you are, little girl.”

He wasn’t exactly patriotic but definitely had feelings for his country.

On the other hand, my mother thought July 4th was the day Americans got killed driving to the beach or coming home from a fireworks display. Even sparklers were potential funeral pyres. Therefore, my budding patriotism was never fed by a picnic or barbecue.

What happened to simple patriotism, the American way?

What has the American way become . . . anyway?

Certainly not what’s going on in Washington, D.C., suffering its own epidemic of slander, deceit, cronyism, materialism, partisanship.

I wish that this 4th we would stop and taste the umami, enjoy the emotional rush watching young soldiers wearing camouflage fatigues arriving home from deployment, and old soldiers bedecked in combat insignia shuffling down Main Street. Because patriotism dredges up a pride, an inspiration that supersedes the red, white and blue Jell-O mold, the twisted Uncle Sam T-shirt.

Yes, I’m a bit idealistic — apple pie in the sky. But maybe for one day, or maybe a whole month, we could put on a patriotic face, a united front to reassure the world — disillusioned by recent events — that America is still the greatest nation ever. 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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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

B I R D WA T C H

Bird on a Wire

Meet “the other bluebird,” the indigo bunting

By Susan Campbell

“What, what? See it, see it! Here,

here!!” Where? It’s a bird: high up on a power line singing incessantly, day-after-day during the summer months. This one can only be a male indigo bunting, loudly advertising his territory. He will continue to call out his challenge to everyone and anyone who will listen. His two-syllable, repeated vocalization is unmistakable.

To some, this fella is the “other” bluebird, slimmer but blue all over. Indigo buntings are an iridescent, darker blue than the familiar Eastern bluebird. And, as with all blue birds, their feathers are actually brown. The color we see is not due to actual blue pigmentation but from specialized microscopic structures that reflect and refract in the blue wavelength. And, as with other buntings, this bird has a strong, conical bill, capable of cracking hard-shelled seeds.

Female indigo buntings, however, are camouflaged; equipped with dull feathers that blend in with the habitat. They appear to be mostly brown with a pale throat, a lightly streaked breast and some hints of blue on the back. During the winter, males molt into drab plumage: not unlike our goldfinches. Immature males are often blotchy blue and brown their first spring and, as a result, will not likely breed. But when they don their breeding plumage they are a The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

sight to behold and unmistakable.

Indigo buntings are found in a variety of habitats throughout the Piedmont and Sandhills. They tend to favor forest edges. But you can also look for them in brushy fields or clearings where weedy seed plants and insects are abundant. Associated dense woody growth provides good nesting substrate. Buntings may even be lured to where they prefer small oily seeds such as thistle (nyger). However, these birds have a broad, opportunistic diet. In early spring when seeds and insects are in short supply, they turn to buds, flowers and even young leaves. Indigo buntings eat mainly insects in the summer, not only feasting on a variety of caterpillars but large, hardbodied beetles, grasshoppers and cicadas.

It should, then, come as no surprise that this species will disappear from areas where scrubby borders have been cut and grass is regularly mowed. “Tidying up” of our subdivisions and parks displaces indigo buntings as well as other migrant songbirds that require low cover.

This is one reason why it is important to maintain as much green space in native vegetation as possible in our communities.

But indigo buntings do not stick around all year — as fall approaches, these little bits of the sky will flock up and head south to Central America and the Caribbean. They will fly great distances at night, using the stars to guide them. In fact, indigo buntings were the subjects of early migration research in the 1960s. But, come the following April, they will be back in their favorite haunts, singing their familiar song once again. PS Susan would love to hear from you. Feel free to send questions or wildlife observations to susan@ncaves.com PineStraw

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

SPORTING LIFE

Beach Daze

When only O.D. and The Pad would do

By Tom Bryant

I grew up in the ’��s, and

I believe the lifestyles during those wonderful times will never be seen again. World War II was over, with the slight exception of the police action in Korea. (Folks involved in that so-called police action would strongly disagree with the terminology — to them it was a war.) After that, the country settled into a cycle of prosperity not seen by the general population in a very long time.

In my own house, Dad was the single provider. Mom never worked outside the home. Raising four children was her full-time job. We had one car, and it was a family car, a 1957 Chevrolet station wagon, built to haul about anything. We weren’t poor, middle class maybe, but a long way from being rich. From the age of 13, I worked at one job or another every summer. Service stations, food stores, and finally Dad let me work at the ice plant, where he was manager.

As a teenager, I earned my own spending money and helped with my college finances as well. But in the summer of 1959, I was a brand new graduate of those bastioned halls of higher learning at Aberdeen High School, and I was ready to celebrate.

College was right around the corner. In my mind, I had just graduated and was not real excited about becoming a freshman again. I had a pocketful of money I’d been saving, and two weeks of vacation before I had to report to Dad for summer work. There was for me only one destination during that off time, and that was the The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

beach. Not just any beach but Ocean Drive Beach — better known as O.D. — and The Pad, better known as The Pad. In our short time as teenagers, The Pad had become a tradition for several of my good friends and classmates, and graduation had added an extra emphasis on the importance of heading east. O.D. was calling.

Clifton and Graham, friends and also recent graduates of old AHS, were already there, supposedly on a scouting mission to find a place for us to stay for a few days, cheap. I was to meet them at The Pad at 3 o’clock Monday to begin our celebration.

The Pad was located on the corner of a street dead-ending at the ocean, right across from The Pavilion, an attraction in its own right.

Home to games, carnival-type rides and snack bars, it also had a concrete dance floor and jukebox.

Both The Pad and The Pavilion were opened in 1955 and were mainstays at Ocean Drive Beach for fun and frolic. Structurally, The Pad wasn’t much, just a shed covering the bar and its sand floor and a square deck for dancing. I honestly can’t remember if the dance floor was wood or concrete. Behind the bar, washtubs were full of ice and cans of beer. In those days Pabst Blue Ribbon, PBR, was the most prevalent, and the wall surrounding the entire building was lined with empty beer cans. It was rumored that the wall was erected to hide dancers doing the shag, a six-count rhythm created by bands and music performed by groups like The Drifters.

All in all, The Pad and The Pavilion were the place to see and be seen, especially if you were young and in a party mood. As Harold Bessent, manager of The Pad for its last 10 years, said, “It became a sort of Mecca.”

Right on time, Graham and Cliff came sauntering out of the white sunshine glare of the beach into the cool shade. Chuck Berry was blasting “Johnny Be Good” from the jukebox, I was leaning against the bar talking to the on-duty afternoon bartender.

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55

SPORTING LIFE

“Hey, Bryant, where’s your car? We didn’t see it outside. Didn’t make it down here?” Cliff was constantly chiding me about the car Dad had given me for graduation. Especially after he heard that it had two flat tires on the way home from the estate sale where Dad bought it. The old car, a 1940 Chevrolet Deluxe, served me well over the next several years.

“It’s parked around the corner. New tires,” I laughed. “Ready to go. What have you deadheads been doing? I hope you’ve found us a place to sleep. Cheap.”

“You won’t believe it,” Graham said.

“Larry,” pointing to the bartender, “put us on to the Just-A-Mere-Guest-House, not two blocks from here. We left the car there and walked back. We booked us a room for three days, the only room they had available.”

That vacation week when we celebrated our graduation at The Pad and Ocean Drive Beach was one that we’ll never forget. We had a grand time. And at reunions ever after, it would always come up, “Do you remember that week at The Pad when Blue . . . ” The Pad was torn down in 1994, not meeting the town’s requirements for safety and other things. The memories that old bar created for hundreds of young folks just beginning life after high school, would never be forgotten.

The ‘50s and that restful, peaceful time were over. The unknown future lay on the horizon. There was the Cold War with Russia, the hot war in Vietnam, the technological race against other countries, and even perhaps against ourselves. I realize that when remembering the past, a person has a tendency to forget the bad stuff and just remember the good. My mother always said, “If you think the good old days were that good, try using an outdoor toilet when it’s 14 degrees outside.”

As a matter of fact, I think The Pad had outside bathrooms, and if I remember correctly, they were just a little better than what Mom was talking about. The difference, and a good thing for us, it wasn’t 14 degrees. PS Tom Bryant, a Southern Pines resident, is a lifelong outdoorsman and PineStraw’s Sporting Life columnist.

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

Jordan (Golf ) Rules The Last Dance on the first tee

By Lee Pace

Lew Ferguson

PHOTOGRAPH BY RICH WAINWRIGHT / PINEHURST RESORT

opened the golf shop at Pinehurst No. 7 early one morning in June 1990 and exchanged pleasantries with the day’s first golfer to check in. The young man was waiting on the rest of his group to arrive, so he took the chair beside the counter in the golf shop and buried his head in his USA Today.

Another golfer walked in moments later and checked in with Ferguson. The man took note of the guy reading the newspaper, got a quick glimpse of his face and the long legs protruding from the chair.

He mouthed in a whisper to Ferguson: “Is that Michael Jordan?”

The man in the chair overheard the question. He dropped his newspaper to reveal his face.

“Yes,” said Michael Jordan, who then went back to reading his paper without another word. Sadly, what Jordan was reading was an account of his Chicago Bulls team having lost in the NBA Eastern Conference finals to the Detroit Pistons — less than 12 hours earlier.

Ferguson loves telling stories like these. The former head pro at No. 7 and later the director of golf at Pinehurst Resort and Country Club has a bunch of them where Jordan, his love of golf and the Pinehurst golf scene collide.

“The Bulls lost, their season was over, and Michael drove all night long and came straight to No. 7,” Ferguson says. “He rolls into the gate in a black Porche 911 with North Carolina plates and the number 23. I have to say, he was pretty sporty.”

Jordan’s life was dissected to the nth degree recently through the 10-part ESPN documentary The Last Dance. Cursory details The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

of his passion for golf were presented, but the film hardly scratched the surface. With Pinehurst perched within reach of Jordan’s hometown of Wilmington and college headquarters in Chapel Hill, and with his former coach, Dean Smith, himself an avid golfer having many connections in the Sandhills, it’s easy to understand how Jordan found a deep presence in Pinehurst that exists today.

Ferguson made Smith’s acquaintance in the early 1980s when he was working at the Country Club of North Carolina under longtime pro Buck Adams. Smith would visit CCNC often to take lessons from Adams and play the club’s 36 holes. Ferguson had moved to No. 7 when he took a call from Smith one May afternoon in the late 1980s.

“Lew, I need a favor,” Smith said. “Michael needs a place to hide and play golf. Can you help?”

Ferguson secured tee times for Jordan and his entourage, and they would play dawn to dusk, sometimes with Smith joining the competition. Jordan became so enamored with No. 7 that a few years later, he listed it as his favorite course in an American Express commercial.

Jordan occasionally ventured over to the main Pinehurst clubhouse for golf on No. 2, particularly when a large group of basketball coaches and players on the NBA and collegiate levels convened in an annual summer outing run by Smith and Doug Moe. Larry Brown, Julius Erving, Bill Raftery, Jerry West, Dave Gavitt and Billy Cunningham were among the regulars in the 1990s.

Brown and Moe were a fixture partnership, and Brown wryly remembers them playing Smith and Jordan at CCNC one year.

There was some home construction underway next to one particular tee, and Brown recalls the workers taking respectful note of who was playing.

“When Coach and Michael stepped up to hit, everything got quiet,” Brown says. “You could hear a pin drop. They hit their shots, and then it was our turn. The commotion started right up.

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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

Doug and I hit with the hammers and saws going full blast.”

Brown remembers another time he and Jerry West were playing Jordan and Roy Williams, the coach who first recruited Jordan to Carolina in the early 1980s and took over leadership duties of the outing when Smith retired and later quit playing golf.

“Jerry was a really good golfer,” Brown says. “He was probably the best we ever had in our group. Jerry the whole time was trying to pump me up. Oh, man, that was an important match. Boy, was he competitive.

All of us were, really. The golf course became a natural extension of the competitive nature that had served us all so well on the basketball court.”

It begs the question, who won the match?

“I remember, but I’ll keep that in the family,” Brown says.

Through the mid-1990s, Jordan visited Peggy Kirk Bell at Pine Needles, Adams at CCNC and Ferguson at Pinehurst until March 1997, when he made the discovery of a new private club on Meyer Farm Drive just northeast of the village. An early Forest Creek Golf Club member named Roy Mashburn was friends with Jordan and invited him to the club with the Tom Fazio-designed course that opened in 1996.

Mashburn called Chuck Cordell, the club’s director of marketing and broker-in-charge, and asked him to play with them.

At the time, there few homes built and hardly anyone around. The course was a perfect green, having been over-seeded through the winter, and Fazio’s genius of routing the course through the rolling hills, pine forests and lakes left an indelible mark on Jordan.

“We had not even finished the front nine and Michael’s asking about joining and buying property,” Cordell says. “He said he only owned a house in Chicago and one at Hilton Head that he was fixing to sell. This was a perfect escape for him.”

That was a Wednesday. On Friday, Jordan was back at Forest Creek and looking at a blueprint of lots just opened along the 16th hole of what would be known as the South Course when the second 18, the North Course, opened in 2005. Cordell showed Jordan three lots and said, “One of these would work.”

“I’ll just take all three,” said Jordan.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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

“I thought he was kidding,” Cordell says. “But he was dead serious. So I said, ‘Well, you want to ride out and I’ll show them to you?’

“He gets that big ol’ smile of his and says, ‘How about we just go play golf and you show them from the golf course?’”

Cordell has seen Jordan break 70 on the Forest Creek South course from the back tees. Over many rounds with Jordan in various locales over more than two decades, he’s learned there are several constants on the golf course: You always play the tips. You always play for money — “whatever makes you nervous,” Jordan likes to say. And you always have to listen to his incessant chatter.

“The only thing that Michael did better than basketball was talking,” says Williams, who after returning to UNC as head coach in 2003, joined Jordan on the Forest Creek membership roster. “You’d better be on his team or he’d talk you to death. He could hit it a long way — sideways every now and then — and he had a nice touch. But you’d better be able to stand up to the lip.”

Jordan did in fact close on buying those lots and still owns the property today, though he’s never built a house on them.

When he’s visited Forest Creek over the years — often bringing fellow pro sports and entertainment figures like Mario Lemieux, John Elway, Charles Barkley, Ahmad Rashad and Jack Wagner with him — he’ll stay in one of the club villas or a private home available for a short-term occupancy.

“I’ve always been delighted to see Michael come for a visit, and I’ve been delighted to see him go,” Cordell says with a laugh. “I was a dead puppy after three days.

He’s up at 6 a.m. wanting to shoot pool.

Then it’s 36 or 54 holes of golf. Then dinner, some wine and poker or more pool — until the wee hours. Then a little sleep and do it all over again.”

Sounds like Michael Jordan is Exhibit A of the golf nuts Pinehurst has been hosting for more than a century. PS Lee Pace has written about Pinehurst for more than three decades from his home in Chapel Hill. One of his forthcoming projects is a 25-year anniversary of Forest Creek, due out in 2021.

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July ���� Buster Gets a Bath When I pick him up and tilt to the bathtub he falls limp with shock This cannot be. . . .

Then it’s dark thoughts from dark eyes, the dog I love so much hates me A torture worse than death.

All sudsy now, scent of clover and dead leaves washed away with lavender and lemon.

How could you?

The sprayer — that cobra of doom strikes again and again.

Even if it feels good I’ll never say so.

After a brisk towel rub he springs all over the house a hero home from the war The bath? It was my idea.

— Ashley Memory

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Diamond Lanes of the ��th Century The rise and fall of Moore County’s plank roads

By Bill Case

I

t is hard to envision just how remote and isolated the Sandhills were in the 1840s. Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen were decades away from coming into being. Infrastructure was virtually nonexistent in this sparsely populated area. With only rutty, often impassable dirt trails to travel upon, the area’s scattered farmers and plantation owners — mostly of Scottish descent — found it inordinately difficult to ship harvested products like turpentine, naval stores, fruit and tobacco much beyond the Moore County line. The same predicament confronted settlers throughout the state’s interior all the way to the Piedmont. Merchants in the Eastern market towns were similarly exasperated with the perpetual challenges of sending supplies in the opposite direction.

Bustling Fayetteville emerged as a transportation hub of importance. Commodities coming from the frontier could be barged from the city’s wharf on the Cape Fear River down to the coast at Wilmington. From that seaport, oceangoing vessels could move goods to destinations up and down the Eastern Seaboard and as far away as Europe. But the maddening obstacles to transporting merchandise (and people) from the west to Fayetteville were forestalling the development of that city and the state’s economy.

A better transportation model had to be found, and a band of Fayetteville promoters took the lead in exploring alternatives. The building of a new railroad was considered, and a prospective train route west was surveyed. But the scheme was ultimately abandoned because of (according to one disenchanted proponent) “the poverty of the country.” A railroad would not enter Fayetteville until 1858.

More intriguing was the concept of wooden plank roads. They had proved popular and cost-effective in Canada and areas of New York state. Compared to what was needed to build a railroad, construction materials were readily available and inexpensive. No iron or steel was required, just wooden planks 8 feet long and 8 inches wide laid horizontally across long heart pine sills and covered by a thin layer of sand. The necessary lumber could often be found in the woods right beside the construction site. The roads were “single track,” just wide enough for a single wagon, but users were able to pull to the side on parallel dirt paths so that oncoming wagons could pass.

The most appealing aspect of “mudless highways” was the time saved in transporting goods or stagecoach passengers. The distance

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that took a wagon four days over the ancient dirt or sand paths could be traveled in 18 hours on a plank road. According to one observer, the increased efficiency on planks was the result of “the diminution of friction by which a horse was able to draw two or three times as great a load as he could on an ordinary road.”

A movement to build plank roads from Fayetteville into the state’s interior rapidly gained steam during the 1840s, led by Gov. William Graham, who believed that poor roadways had placed North Carolina under “greater disadvantages than any state in the union.”

He convinced the state legislature to grant charters to those entrepreneurs seeking to build and operate plank road companies. Five such charters were granted for roads that fanned out from Fayetteville like bicycle spokes to various westerly destinations. The state of North Carolina even purchased stock in several of them.

Not surprisingly, there was political controversy regarding whether North Carolina should be dispensing taxpayer funds to support these private ventures. The state’s entrepreneurs and merchants (generally associated with the Whig Party) overwhelmingly approved of the public investment. Not only would their businesses benefit, the value of their real estate holdings alongside any new road would also potentially skyrocket. The Fayetteville Observer reported that the plotting of a plank road through one vast tract caused the land’s value to shoot up from 11 cents per acre to $2.

Many small farmers, primarily Democrats, suspected that the state’s partnership with the companies would inevitably lead to roads not being routed with the best interests of the public (and that of small farmers) in mind. There was suspicion that the landed gentry would be tempted to make payoffs to ensure roads were routed next to, or through, their properties. And farmers objected to the legislature’s broad grant of eminent domain powers to plank road companies.

The most ambitious undertaking was that of the Fayetteville and Western Plank Road Company (ye olde F&W), which contemplated building the longest wooden road in history (129 miles) from Fayetteville to Salem (now Winston-Salem). Billed by its boosters as a latter day Appian Way, the proposed road sparked interest in Moore County as plans called for it to pass through Carthage. More westerly communities along the wooden highway’s intended path included The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

Hordes of opportunists endeavored to capitalize on the perceived bonanza by applying for authorization to build other plank roads. A majority of those applications involved construction of spur extensions stemming off the five westbound roads from Fayetteville, including the F&W. The legislature liberally green-lighted charters (84 in all) with the nonchalance of a grocery store handing out potato chip coupons.

In 1850, the F&W commenced the construction of the initial section of its plank road running from Fayetteville’s Market House to the Little River. That stretch was completed and placed under toll

by April of that year. According to Starling, the remaining sections, including the one running through northernmost Moore County, were awarded by contract.

When the contract for the construction of the section of road around Cameron was awarded, the prospects of successful bidder Maj. Dugald McDugald seemed especially rosy. McDugald was in a position to profit from the venture in several ways. Not only would the 47-year-old be paid handsomely for building the road, it would pass through McDugald’s land just north of Cameron, increasing the value of his 4,000-acre spread exponentially. The wooden highway would also provide superior transportation to Fayetteville for the turpentine and naval stores produced from the tens of thousands of pines on McDugald’s plantation. He also intended to build a large hotel adjacent to the plank road at a point where it straddled the Moore and Lee County lines (in the vicinity of Page Store Road today).

Dugald’s father, Col. Archibald McDugald, had been a figure of note in North Carolina during the Revolutionary War. After emigrating from the Scottish Highlands in 1767, Archibald chose to fight with Loyalist forces when hostilities erupted between the Crown and

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE STATE ARCHIVES NORTH CAROLINA

Seagrove, Asheboro and the then tiny settlement of High Point.

Much of the proposed route had been trailblazed by Daniel Boone in the 1760s.

In the course of a three-day public meeting held in Fayetteville on April 11, 1849, F&W promoters successfully solicited $80,000 in stock subscriptions from private investors. The state of North Carolina acquired controlling interest in the company by tendering its own subscription in the amount of $120,000. The shareholders elected a board of directors and hired Edward L. Winslow as F&W’s president at the munificent annual salary of $500 plus traveling expenses.

Revenue to operate the proposed road was to be generated by collecting payments at tollhouses — manned by keepers, naturally, since E-ZPass was a few years off — placed approximately 11 miles apart.

Fares were set at one-half cent per mile for a horseback rider, one cent for a carriage pulled by one horse, two cents for a team of two horses, and four cents for a six-horse team.

Construction of plank roads involved an arduous process as the underlying surfaces had to be carefully graded for proper drainage. On a productive day, a team of 15 workers could lay 650 feet of planks at an estimated cost of $1,300 per mile. North Carolina’s wooden roads were mostly built by private individuals subcontracted by the chartered companies. According to historian Robert B. Starling, many of these contractors accepted company stock in partial payment for their services, a shrewd move since savvy investors considered plank roads a can’t-miss proposition. The editor of Salisbury’s newspaper, the Carolina Watchman, was among the cheerleaders, writing, “There is scarcely a man of intelligence but believes the stock [in the F&W] would pay a handsome dividend.”

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Annual reports for Fayetteville and Western Plank Road Company stockholders and a 50 dollar share certificate

By January 1853, the plank road neared Salem. However, leaders of the community’s powerful Moravian Church balked at locating the road within the town due to concerns that wagons and stagecoaches creaking over the wooden planks would disturb religious services. Eventually, the F&W’s terminus was moved 7 miles from Salem to Bethania. On April 13, 1854, the F&W stockholders were told that the road was finished.

The long-awaited linking of the Piedmont region with Fayetteville and its river access to the coast brought a sense of excitement to the previously isolated hamlets. “The arrival of the stagecoaches was announced by the loud blowing of a bugle,” wrote historian J. H. Monger, “and crowds often gathered in the villages to see the stagecoaches arrive.”

Initially, the F&W seemed on the threshold of becoming an Amazon-like blockbuster business. In 1853, it earned net income of over $17,000. The following year that net increased more than 60 percent to $27,419,77! Loftier future profits were predicted.

It wasn’t to be. An array of intractable difficulties beset the F&W and the other plank road ventures. Based on the experience of Canadian plank roads, it was presumed that the F&W’s wooden planks would not require replacement for 10 years. Unfortunately, the lifespan was less than half of that in North Carolina’s heat and The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE STATE ARCHIVES NORTH CAROLINA

the Patriots. Archibald’s association with the losing side ultimately caused him numerous travails.

Captured by the Patriots in 1779 while journeying south to join Loyalist forces in Savannah, Georgia, he was held on a prison ship in Charleston Harbor for nearly a year. After his release in an exchange of prisoners, he joined the Royal North Carolina Regiment and was subsequently appointed to the rank of colonel in the Loyal Militia. The elder McDugald was a lead officer in the astonishing 1781 Hillsboro raid in which Loyalist militia captured Patriot Gov. Thomas Burke.

After the close of the war, the state confiscated 740 acres of McDugald’s land. Like many Loyalists, he settled for a time in Nova Scotia, then later sailed to England, where he spent three years successfully petitioning the Crown for a pension. Archibald returned to Moore County around 1794 and married Rebecca Buie. The couple parented four sons and two daughters.

Archibald’s subsequent financial recovery enabled him to reinvest in northern Moore County real estate, and Dugald inherited much of the land after Archibald’s death in 1835.

As was the case with virtually all Southern plantation owners in the antebellum period, Dugald McDugald owned numerous slaves. But with his farming operation, the harvesting of turpentine, building of the hotel, and the plank road under construction, he needed even more manpower. McDugald asked his wealthy neighbors whether they would agree to let him “borrow” their slaves to perform the labor involved in constructing the road. Records are vague, but it appears he rented 15 slaves from Kenneth Murchison and many more “upcountry” from a Mr. Alston.

As Starling puts it, McDugald was “playing a game of chance.”

He, his brother Daniel, and sisters Peggy and Polly were required to give their bond promising safe return of the slaves. After the work began, disaster struck. Typhoid fever broke out among the crew, and the deadly disease rapidly overwhelmed the project. At least 12 of Murchison’s 15 slaves died. The total number of deaths from the devastating ordeal is unknown. The ill-fated workers are believed buried in unmarked graves on the Moore County side of the plank road, a forlorn and untended testament to the suffering endured by AfricanAmericans in building the South’s infrastructure.

The debacle financially ruined McDugald. To make good on his bond to the slaves’ owners, he was forced to liquidate all but 200 acres of his plantation. Construction of the unfinished hotel was abandoned. The locals referred to the misbegotten — now long gone — structure as “McDugald’s Folly.”

Col. Alexander Murchison completed the section of the F&W road up to Carthage. In a furious dash to the finish, Murchison operated five steam sawmills day and night. The F&W also built a tributary spur from the main plank road north to the small settlement of Gulf and south to a point immediately west of Cameron.

Today, South Plank Road follows the path of this old spur.

humidity. Winslow’s 1853-54 report to the shareholders provided sobering guidance.

“The expenses of repair and replacing planks on the road, bridges, and culverts, will be heavy, I fear, in the coming year,” wrote the president.

Despite the fact that Winslow’s tenure had resulted in net profits, the state, with controlling interest in the F&W, decided not to renew his contract in 1854. The new president was quickly confronted with even greater threats to the bottom line.

Revenues were steadily declining — nefarious users of the road had found ways to bypass the tollgates. The cheating became so rampant that the company hired traveling toll collectors to track down the miscreants.

The 1850s also marked extensive railroad expansion throughout North Carolina, and an increasing number of the state’s farmers found it to their advantage to use them rather than the plank roads to transport their products. To make matters worse, one of the few American financial catastrophes significant enough to have its own name occurred. The Panic of 1857 diminished economic activity, dried up credit, and made paupers of farmers and merchants alike. The F&W’s report to shareholders that year noted, “The great diminishment of toll is owing to two causes — the short crops and the completion of the North Carolina Railroad.” The cost of repairs ($20,388.72) substantially exceeded the tolls collected ($15,966.69).

In 1858, F&W president Jonathan Worth tried his best to put a positive spin on the company’s increasingly dire situation, professing his belief that income from operations would not decrease any further while Plank Road historical marker on highway 27 in Carthage, North Carolina cautioning that “no dividend, however, can important transportation hub. High Point was virtually non-existent be paid for some time to come, if the road is kept in reasonable repair.” before F&W’s road came through, and the same can be said for The company’s problems mirrored those of the other chartered Cameron. The road also favorably impacted Carthage. Once the plank road companies, many of which never built any roadway at all. plank road reached that community in 1850, a new business was Only 500 miles of plank roads were ultimately constructed in North formed to meet the increased demand for carriages. That operation Carolina, and the F&W built a quarter of the total. was the forerunner to the iconic Tyson and Jones Buggy Company, Plank roads were on life support by the end of the decade, and which manufactured buggies in Carthage until 1925. the turmoil of the Civil War pushed the entire enterprise over the The old wooden highways may be no more, but the creaking of cliff. Business activity on the roads virtually ceased. The planks soon wagon wheels across the planks still echoes and the cost, unmarked, deteriorated into total disrepair. By 1862, the state had authorized the still lingers. PS F&W to abandon the road and sell the assets.

In vogue about the same length of time as disco in the 1970s, Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be these “farmers’ roads” played a critical role in opening up the entirety reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com. of the state to commerce and cemented Fayetteville’s position as an The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Sandhills Photography Club

Dominant Yellow The Sandhills Photography Club meets the second Monday of each month at 7 p.m. in the theater of the Hannah Marie Bradshaw Activities Center of The O'Neal School at 3300 Airport Road in Pinehurst.

Visit www.sandhillsphotoclub.org.

TIER 1

2nd Place: Pam Jensen - Ballerina

1st Place: Judy Nappi - Feather

3rd Place: Diane McKay - Old Baldy 1st HM: Jennifer Donovan - Good ol’ 43 70

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2nd HM: Shari Dutton - A Hole Different Perspective

3rd HM: Tom Batts - Running Paint

4th HM: Jennifer Donovan - Barn Cat

TIER 2

1st Place: Dee Williams - Chased by a Bee The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

2nd Place: Kathryn Saunders - Dragonfly PineStraw

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3rd Place: Mary New - Spring Sunshine

1st HM: Darryl Benecke - Arrogance

2nd HM: Dee Williams - Yellow Lady

3rd HM: Susan Bailey - Sunflowers 72

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TIER 3

1st Place: John German - Orchid

3rd Place: Jim Davis - Sundrop

2nd Place: Neva Scheve - Yellow Flowers

2nd HM: Gisela Danielson - Orb Constellation

1st HM: Donna Ford - Illuminate The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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ON MEDICARE

I

t was raining — again. Cold, slushy, May rain, at 6,500 feet.

On my third day of work, as a 65-year-old wrangler on a guest ranch near Yellowstone National Park, my Western saddle suddenly shot forward onto the neck of my startled mount. I was pointed downhill on the slickest, steepest, narrowest slope of the morning’s mountain trail.

Outwardly, I was cool, calling ahead for a halt to the line of guests. Inwardly, I was freaking — how to fix this heavy saddle quickly, with a gaggle of guests in an awkward, uncomfortable, downhill hold?

As I sit homebound in these viral times, I find myself mind-traveling back to my Montana “summer vacation” last year. I had been, by far, the oldest wrangler in a young person’s job. My colleagues were in their early 20s, and I was older than their grannies. My immediate boss was 34 years my junior.

So I needed “street cred,” as it were. I was out of practice. And now I was stuck on a steep, muddy goat track, on an unhappy horse deciding if bucking down the mountain through the guests would solve his saddle problem.

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By Jan Leitschuh

Mid-May in the high country of southern Montana can be a snowy, rainy, muddy mess.

I was bringing up the rear on a lope (Western canter) ride, an option for the more experienced guests. It was so slippery we never chanced the faster gait, just walked and trotted to keep guests safe.

The cold, gray clouds tossed some wet snow into the rainy mix. I was riding Sebastian, a nice, sturdy bay gelding with a massive, round barrel. Though I had cinched him up as much as I humanely could, the saddle and pad still let loose on the steepest downhill. When I called downslope to the lead wrangler to halt our ride for a moment, he was so far below, it was a miracle he heard.

How was I going to fix this? With a wall of Douglas fir rising on the right, I slid off the downhill, left side. When my boots hit the greasy clay, they shot out from under me, and I nearly slipped under my mount. Now my hefty horse really towered above me, with his hindquarters even higher uphill. I had to set the heavy saddle backward. Reaching up to reposition an awkward, 40-pound stock saddle loaded with safety gear, with frozen fingers, on an anxious horse pointed downhill, while balancing on two greasy, mud-slicked rocks in the chilly rain, while guests waited in a precarious position of their The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY JAN LEITSCHUH

WRANGLER

Or, what I did on my summer vacation

own, was not the greatest of my challenges in the moment.

I still had to remount.

With a long cowboy slicker and multiple layers of warm clothing hindering flexibility, downhill of a tall, skittish horse, with pounds of slippery clay bricked on my boots and no solid footing, I knew I would have to give it my all to regain the saddle. Over the summer the demands of the job would harden my aging muscles to wrangling tasks — but I was not quite there yet.

Calling on all my reserves, I sprang up off the greasy rocks. My pride, guest safety and new job were at stake. Just as my brain was registering that I was about to fail to haul my aging, clay-heavy, clothingburdened carcass aboard, I let out a desperate roar of effort and just managed to regain the saddle, feeling an electric “sproing” in my left ribs that left me breathless and panting.

“OK!” I called forward, panting, and the ride started back up. I hoped my hasty saddle reset would last to the bottom of the mountain. I was wet, muddy, used up, hurting and mildly terrified.

At 65, I was the only “wrangler on Medicare” among youth. And I was beginning to see why it was a young person’s job. I thought, “What am I doing here?”

The next day, I broke my foot.

Thus began one of the best summers of my life.

No stranger to horses, I’d been an equine professional most of my life as a teacher, trainer, competitor, clinician, breeder, whipper-in and national dressage judge. I dove deeply into Western horsemanship as well, traveling to California to spend a remarkable winter with a life-changing teacher, the late Tom Dorrance. Yet as I tried to take care of my aging parents through six years of various health crises, while still keeping up my business, I found myself running out of gas and enthusiasm. The joy that had propelled me deeply into horses was gone. I was cooked.

A month after my mother died, I was burning out fast. I’d picked up a book about a woman who hiked the entire Appalachian Trail solo, and electricity shot through me as I read. I dreamed about the AT. The very concept lit a fire under me — Walking! Freedom! The idea hearkened back to my earliest draw to horses: mobility, a means of going places. After a two-year planning process, I sold my show horse, breeding stallion and broodmare, the majority of my horse gear, abandoned my beloved horse country lease, and pared my belongings down to a small storage locker.

And then I walked away. Literally. On the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine.

When I returned six months later, I honored the clinic commitments I had left stacked up around the country. But when I walked out of the arenas, I knew this chapter of my life was over. My horse interest, the most powerful driver in my life since before I could talk, was absent.

Imagine my surprise when, 15 years later, it came roaring back.

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First, Denise, a trainer in Illinois and an old friend, asked me if I would return for a clinic. When I protested that I hadn’t ridden in years, she basically told me they didn’t want my butt, they wanted my eyeballs. I’d always believed in walking the talk. So I phoned up some old students and asked if I could watch them work, and offer what I could, to see if I could still be useful. Turns out it was like riding a bike.

Then, when I found myself retired but in need of some part-time employment, I looked at seasonal jobs and stumbled across “wrangler.”

Wrangler! I could do that! I had done it as a college student, traveling to Colorado for a fabulous, Rocky Mountain summer of trail rides and teaching. Returning to the Rockies would be a dream.

Local support bloomed. With my husband’s blessing, I blasted out applications, résumés and riding videos. Artist/rider Beth Roy loaned me an old campaigner to use in a wrangler video to display the needed skills to employers. Local trainer Kris Hamilton offered me long use of an old Western saddle. To get legged up, another friend, Cricket Gentry, found me a spare horse to ride. One windy day, the mare snapped out a sharp 180 and nearly spun me off — nearly, but didn’t — and as I sat up Cricket shouted, “You still got it!”

Maybe, just maybe, at 65, I still did.

I’d sent out a score of inquiries, but only two guest ranches topped

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my list. Radio silence. Was I too old?

Two weeks before I would need to leave, I got three offers — and the last one was my top pick. I was ecstatic, wild with joy, even. I was headed to Mountain Sky Guest Ranch, a 19,000-acre luxury dude ranch near Emigrant, Montana, with food, housing and use of the fine facilities included. My new bosses had taken a chance on a 65-year-old. My ranch had fielded over 400 applications for 15 positions. I was truly grateful, and privately vowed to be an asset in every way I could.

The early days were overwhelming.

Besides dealing with a broken foot, I had to memorize the herd of 150 horses — their names, habits, health, quirks and traits. There were ranch protocol, safety and first aid classes to master. Multiple trails and local geography had to be learned. Disconcertingly, I was finding my brain wasn’t as nimble as it had been when last I’d wrangled — in college. My young colleagues, unsurprisingly, socialized and shared information mostly among themselves. The work was deeply physical, with us on our feet or in the saddle for 12 hours a day, at times. Rotating staff brought the entire herd of horses down the mountain before daylight each morning, and returned them in the evening.

A young wrangler, Cody, kindly crafted me an iron plate fitted to the bottom of my cowboy boot. If I duct-taped it on every morning, it stiffened the boot sole enough that I could continue to work with the broken metatarsal.

But the “Iron Maiden,” as I called it, was heavy, and my foot ached.

I missed my husband. The steep trails were mildly terrifying but I’d wrangled in the Rockies — what was I expecting? There were large critters out there that could eat you. Some days I was too tired to eat, just took a shower and collapsed in my room. So much information to master! I was having trouble sorting out the many trails. My sacroiliac joint sprained itself from limping, and that pelvic glitch was a bigger hindrance than the foot, making lifting heavy items (like saddles) excruciating. The rest of May and most of June, I was in fairly grinding pain, frustrated, tired, hobbling behind my colleagues. My bosses made concessions, and I chafed at my limitations.

But the sun came out in June. I learned the horses and the trails.

I genuinely enjoyed the guests, especially coaching them to better horsemanship. Best of all, my deep and primal love of horses came roaring back.

Wranglers are assigned newer horses to bring into ranch routines.

My wrangle pony, “Honor,” a funny little Wyoming mustang, utterly stole my heart. Dark bay, almost black, this opinionated little girl could turn on a dime, usually in a whirling spook, but lots of groundwork and attention created a bond between us. She made me laugh. By July, I could call her name across the crowded corral and she would call back, trotting through the mud to find me.

“Homer” was another horse I was asked to ride. An affable bay roan gelding, he’d started an unsettling habit of trotting down hills.

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Sometimes he would even cut a switchback and plunge down the short cut, disconcerting guests. I was asked to nip that in the bud.

Soon I became deeply fond of him as well, and often chose Homer to help flag the other horses when bringing up the herd. He was comfortable, honest and came around swiftly — and even saved my neck one early June morning.

For my first morning “gather,” I was to round up the herd on the mountaintop with another, more experienced colleague. I caught Homer, tacked him, and we set off into the cold dark at a fast clip.

New growth sage perfumed the damp, stony mountain, and sometimes sparks flared from our mounts’ steel shoes. It was 4:30 a.m., pitch black, and I soon discovered my tiny backpacking headlamp was useless. I could follow the faint glint of the barbed wire fence, but basically I was gathering blind, trusting Homer to avoid stepping in a badger hole or tripping headlong over a sage bush. I didn’t yet know what I was doing, and it was terrifying. Every brushy crash, in my mind, was a mama grizzly or a mountain lion, neither of which was rare in our world. After an hour, we had somehow gathered the herd at the gate, ready for the long push down from the mountaintop to the ranch. My colleague felt that since it was still early in the season, someone — me — needed to lead the horses to make critical turns and twists. The other would stay on the mountain, waiting for the final corral count to be radioed back, then round up any stragglers.

The first task was to get 100-plus horses down the stony switchback, “Yellow Brick Road,” as we called the quick descent. In several places, the road edge dropped off.

“Get in front of them,” my colleague instructed.

“You mean trot downhill?” I asked. I was quietly agog. I couldn’t see a darn thing. The descent was slippery, steep and rocky. And Homer wasn’t supposed to even trot downhill.

“Go as fast as you have to, to stay in front of them,” he answered.

Gulp. OK . . .

“GO!” he urged as he opened the gate. The restless herd churned down the mountain.

We went. Since I couldn’t see, all I could do was hope Homer The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

could. Shut your eyes tight — that’s what I saw for 10 long minutes. On horseback. Downhill. With 100 loose horses hurrying behind me.

I held firm to the saddle horn in case Homer chose to deploy his switchback shortcut move — I didn’t want my horse to disappear from beneath me, leaving me hanging in mid-air like Wile E. Coyote before the inevitable crash. Back and forth we swayed in the dark, fast — too fast — taking the switchbacks, the herd pounding behind us, the edges unseen. It was a total trusting in fate and Homer — and both delivered.

After an eternity, I heard the creek roaring at the bottom of the mountain. We thundered across the wooden bridge, swung a hard left, skirted the leg-swallowing cattle guard across the road, crossed another bridge and turned a hard right up the next slope toward the ranch a half-mile away as the darkness finally yielded to faint shapes.

All before coffee.

Every horse was accounted for that morning. Homer got a rubdown, an extra measure of grain, and my complete, grateful loyalty.

He was solid. I made a point to look out for him in the herd. One large turn deserves another.

our main boss, took a seat across from me. “You were as advertised,” he said with a smile. “You just never quit.”

I went to hug Julie, Adam’s assistant and my immediate supervisor. She pulled me to the side. “We got the most effusive praise from guests about you,” said Julie. “Strong finish. Your hard work was appreciated. You are welcome to return.”

When I got home last fall, old friend Trish Greenleaf immediately installed me on one of her horses. We trail ride often. I was back riding and requests for instruction and even colt starting began coming in again. The little work I accept has a richer, different flavor now that I’m retired. I’m gratified (and mystified) that this old passion has re-emerged in my life.

Meanwhile, at ranch elevation, the patchy snow has mostly melted off Emigrant Peak, and the wild raspberries are sweetening. Wild roses perfume the trails. The moose and elk and cattle calved and moved to higher ground, the bears roam, looking for a meal. The ranch herd will have shed their winter coats and sleeked up. This year, the ranch chose to close until at least early August.

I think of Honor and Homer and Flower and friends, and suddenly, it’s not COVID-19 cabin fever I’m feeling. It’s Rocky Mountain fever. PS Jan Leitschuh is a frequent contributor to PineStraw magazine.

As summer routines settled in, parts healed. The sun-washed days warmed up and grew longer, the scenery was unparalleled, the guests interesting and often international, the four-star food was delicious. I rode other horses — the fine red mare Flower, the gaited pinto Archie, the large grey Badger, the lazy, good-natured Teddy, the grullo Mouse.

I respected the horsemanship of my supervisors, and the programs they created to keep guests both safe and entertained.

Breakfast rides, dinner rides, team penning, moving cattle. I grew stronger, slimmed down, came to relish the steepest trails. I found a tribe with some of the older staff in dining, housekeeping, the wellness spa, veterinary. I met some fears, limiting beliefs about aging, barriers, and plowed forward. Late afternoons driving the herd back up the mountain became a favorite activity.

I did see grizzlies, eventually. Also moose, pronghorns, mule deer, fox, marten, airborne cranes and elk. Wildflowers galore, from pink shooting stars, arrowleaf balsamroot, Indian paintbrush to wild roses and postcard fields of purple lupine. Hiking was sublime, even if you did need to carry bear spray. I burned up my senior parks pass on days off visiting Yellowstone, viewing bison, wolves, hot springs, fumaroles, sulfurous mud pots, geysers and more.

Some of the wranglers returned to school in August, but my commitment was through the first week of October. It was a long time to be gone from home. We had cold and snow that last week. Montana was making it easier to say goodbye.

At a last meal in staff dining before I left, the head wrangler, Adam, The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Fiberglass is Forever Not just another roadside attraction

By John Wolfe • Photographs by Andrew Sherman

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here is a man in Columbus County who creates dinosaurs in his backyard. He also builds bulldogs, painting some in tidy Marine Corps dress blues, and lighthouses as tall as an NBA player. Giant flamingos wearing bow ties and top hats watch him work, as kaleidoscopic cows, horses and zebras graze in the fields around him. A centaur points toward a pond where oversized herons hunt for giant, glittering fish heads. Gargantuan golf balls are teed up beside polar bears. A whale that can’t swim breaches in the distance. A Jolly Green Giant, undoubtedly responsible for the massive tomatoes and colossal watermelons growing nearby, startles a glass-eyed Pegasus; it rears up on its hind legs, wings flapping. Overlooking the whole tableaux is a 50-foot tall woman — a Uniroyal Gal, to be precise — wearing a cowboy hat.

No, it’s not a fever dream. This is Grahamland, an 8-acre fiberglass menagerie on the side of U.S. 74-76, halfway between Lake Waccamaw and Wilmington. If you’ve ever driven that stretch of road, you’ve seen it. It’s impossible to miss, even at 70 miles an hour.

The sculptures stare out at the highway, imploring you to pull over for a closer look, and many people do. Fiberglass artist Hubert Graham might get 20 visitors from across the state, country and world on a good day. Some people buy a sculpture — all of Graham’s work is for sale — but everybody asks the same question: Where on Earth did all this stuff come from?

It began with one lighthouse 25 years ago. Back then, Graham worked for the power company, and came home one day to find his front door kicked in and some belongings gone. The house was surrounded by woods then, hidden from the highway, so Graham cleared the land and, with the help of two friends, welded together a metal lighthouse with a security light on top. Pretty soon all his neighbors wanted one, too, but a hailstorm two years later left the original badly dented and sent Graham in search of a more durable material. He found a man named Bill Sharp, who built lighthouses from fiberglass up in Rocky Mount. Sharp was a roamer, far more interested in chasing women than in building lighthouses, but he taught Graham to “glass” and ended up selling him his molds when he retired.

Graham eventually left the power company and got a job at Southport Boat Works, building fishing boats and further developing his fluency with fiberglass. When that company went under they offered him the contents of their warehouse for one dollar, on the condi-

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tion that he clear it out in 40 days. So he hired some former co-workers to help, and ended up with 200,000 gallons of resin and 300,000 pounds of fiberglass — the raw materials for Grahamland.

Fiberglass resin has a shelf life. The next few months were a frenzy of activity for Graham, building as much as he could before his resin kicked off. Every afternoon he would wax and gel the molds for whatever he was building (his sculptures are pieced together from molds, which he makes — half horse heads, sides of cows, legs for bulldogs), and in the morning his hired help would come in and roll the glass while he went to work at Corning. That afternoon, once it had cured, he would pop out all the pieces and do it all over again. After a year, he had used up all the resin, and had a yard full of fiberglass puzzle pieces of sculptures, waiting for assembly.

To build a horse takes seven days. Graham never works on one thing at a time; while he’s putting a horse together, he might be making horns for a bull or fins for a dolphin, too. His work shed has benches full of petrified paintbrushes, scraps of glass and angle grinders; rolls of fiberglass cloth and 55-gallon drums of resin line the walls. Everything is covered in fine itchy white dust, and the chemicalsweet smell of uncured resin, like some strange synthetic fruit gone far too ripe, hangs in the air. The floor is a textured mosaic of hardened resin drops, splattered with paint and glitter. Here is where the Frankenstein-like job of assembling the jumble of molded parts into a recognizable creature takes place. The seams are glassed from the inside to hide them, which means Graham must contortion himself up inside each dusty, hot, cramped animal and smooth on layers of glass and pungent resin. The stomach goes on last.

Once the glass has cured, the real work begins: sanding. The ancient Greek Gods may well have punished Sisyphus by giving him a sander and some fiberglass instead of a boulder to roll up a hill; the work is loud and endless, and the dust is like itching powder that gets everywhere. Graham estimates it takes him 18 to 20 hours to sand smooth just one horse, during which time he wears through 30 discs of sandpaper. Amazingly, he works in short sleeves. “I’ll get too hot otherwise,” he says. “The less you sweat, the better off you are.” Then comes the paint, and the end result is something that will outlast almost anything else people can create. Wood may rot and metal may rust, but fiberglass is forever.

Like all artists, Graham is a dreamer, and had big plans for Grahamland. He envisioned a theme park where people could come PineStraw

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to escape everyday life, complete with a mini-golf course (where people could putt-putt into giant fiberglass animal heads, naturally) and a restaurant topped by one of his signature giant lighthouses. Then Hurricane Florence came swirling up from the sea, and Grahamland was completely underwater. Animated by the furious flood, the sculptures scattered into the surrounding woods, some making it a half-mile away. Seven-foot-tall pink flamingos floated past grizzly bears treading water; a fleet of fiberglass hot dogs sailed on the storm-tossed waves. The Big Uniroyal Gal lost most of her clothing to the jealous fingers of the wind (fear not — she’s decent again). When the waters receded, Graham hopped in his tractor and shepherded his animals back home, but there is still a bathtub ring halfway up the side of his house.

Then the coronavirus came, and Grahamland’s gates closed again. He found himself, as many of us did during the quarantine, with more time on his hands than he’d ever had before, and found himself enjoying it. He finally has time to spend with his girlfriend. Before, he admits, their relationship suffered: “I wasn’t paying her any more attention than the man in the moon.

I was too busy doing fiberglass stuff.”

But the recent death of his father put things in perspective The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

for him. His father worked all his life, putting in 39 years with International Paper, acquiring a big house filled with things, but in the end, Graham says, he never got to enjoy it. “It’s so sad. You work all your life, you gain all this material stuff, and what do you got? When you die, all that stuff stays here . . . At the end of your life, were you happy? Happiness means more than anything else. Happiness, together with someone to share your life with, that means more than anything in this whole wide world.”

Three disasters in a row have left him burned out, and Graham is pushing 60. A quarter-century of hard work hasn’t gotten easier with age, and with no apprentice who could continue it, he’s not sure what the future holds for Grahamland.

But he’s created something unique, something remarkable.

Something durable enough to survive storms and plagues.

Something that makes people smile when they drive past.

Maybe that’s enough.

Will he build more? Graham chuckles. “I don’t know if I want to be up in another bull’s ass or not.” PS John Wolfe enjoys life as a writer and mariner on the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found online at www.thewriterjohnwolfe.com.

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STORY OF A HOUSE

Whole in One

Everything a golfing family needs under one roof

By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Gessner

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olor this scene serene. Jana Van Paris, a lovely blonde wearing white pants, white shoes, a white shirt covered by an oatmeal sweater, sits back against a dining room chair upholstered in the same shades. The entire house — except for her husband, Todd’s, navy blue office/study — is painted a soft, glare-free white, the exterior bricks, French vanilla. Other furnishings, for the most part, continue gradations of this neutral mode.

“For me, white and neutrals represent peaceful, relaxing calm,” Jana says.

Color, when it appears in crewel and Oriental rugs or upholstery, tends toward muted blues and dusty apricots. After an elongated black and white checkerboard foyer, floors are dark-stained hardwood in stunning contrast to the white.

This sets the scene for comfortable formality.

How many families sit down to weeknight meals on a mirror-topped dining room

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table that reflects a crystal chandelier worthy of a ballroom?

In contrast, this serene mode is regularly interrupted by the happy noise of teenage boys — lots of them — who spill out of the rec room that has a putting green built into the carpet.

Because golf is the overriding operative in this home on 5 acres, facing the sixth green of the Cardinal Course at the Country Club of North Carolina. Todd and Jana play. Their son Jackson, 16, trails a string of national titles after his name. His golf buddies from around the U.S. and abroad stay in a bunk room over the garage.

In parts and whole, this house exists to satisfy the particular needs of one family. Yet unlike other golf palaces in gated communities, modesty rules: no trophy case, no framed photos with luminaries, although, Jana admits, plenty are in storage.

i Jana grew up in a different environment, on a cattle, cotton and soybean farm in Alabama, which her family has operated for five generations. She was restless. “I wanted to see what was out there,” she says, and took a degree in business. Her position with an international pharmaceuticals firm included travel.

“That’s how I met Todd, through business.”

Until 2017 the Van Paris family lived in a Chicago suburb, with a vacation home in Pinehurst. Chicago weather isn’t The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

conducive to year-round golf. Besides, “We wanted out of the corporate world,” Jana says. “All the stars were aligned.”

But their Pinehurst pied-à-terre wasn’t big enough for the projected lifestyle, which included entertaining locals for an evening and out-of-town golfers for longer. Something about this elongated red brick house with green shutters, built according to 1985 luxury standards, appealed to Jana. It needed a makeover but not a complete renovation.

“The setting was beautiful and it had good bones. I could envision it meeting our needs.”

Most important, the house overlooked the golf course.

First to go were the red bricks and green shutters. They doubled the size of the terrace, which now stretches the length of living room, dining room and kitchen, with distinct areas for cooking, eating or just relaxing. A wall of huge black-rimmed glass squares was installed between living room and terrace, with doors opening out through dining room and kitchen, creating a nice flow for entertaining. The wall between formal dining room and kitchen became an archway framing the kitchen remodel, visible to diners, with footed furniture-style cabinetry . . . in white. Instead of a breakfast nook, space at the end of the kitchen became a small sitting room.

“Todd loves to cook,” Jana says. “He eats what he grows. We needed a kitchen big enough for everybody to hang out.”

When Jackson and his friends descend, there’s always the PineStraw

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counter bar, with stools, also that big table with comfy barrel chairs on the terrace.

The double garage was finished off as a playroom with grasscloth walls, TV, a watercolor of Pinehurst No. 8 and ping-pong table. Jana explains that golfers, especially juniors, love pingpong. That conversion meant building another attached garage with the bunk room over it, accessed by a full-sized staircase.

Although the house serves family living well, formality prevails, especially in the living room, with its grand piano.

Potted orchids, Todd’s favorite, are everywhere. In the center, a multi-colored carpet over a neutral one. Cream upholstery does not detract from the focus: A series of black and white intaglio prints — a technique popularized during the 15th century — hangs over the sofa. A contemporary painting, suspended from the ceiling, appears to float through the drapes.

Small benches rather than many chairs enable guests to form conversation groups.

i Art, obviously, speaks to Jana and Todd. “Art is creative, like music. I like different kinds,” says Jana, who plays her piano The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

regularly. “When we traveled, we would pick up a piece that represented the trip, or an event.” They collect what they like, whether from a popular or lesser-known artist. “I want to own the original,” says Jana.

After reading about the Spanish modernist Alvar (Àlvar Suñol Munoz-Ramos) they sought a painting, now in the dining room. “We won’t purchase a piece to store in a closet somewhere. We’ll find a spot for it.”

Amid the serenity of neutrals — which extends to the bedrooms — Jana found a spot for whimsy: powder room wallpapers.

“I like surprises, too.”

i Year-round golf at their doorstep, copious indoor-outdoor space for entertaining, a kitchen garden, home offices, private quarters for their teenage son and friends — color that successful.

“We like the way the house lives,” Jana says. After Chicago, they especially appreciate the quiet.

“We were sitting on the patio watching TV . . . and we both said, ‘Don’t you just love it here?’” PS PineStraw

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The gallery is closed the month of July.

Studios and office are open to the public 10 am - 4pm Mon. - Fr., Sat. 12 -3pm JULY CLASSES Please refer to our website for class descriptions and dates.

FALL WORKSHOPS Oil or Acrylic - “Impressionist Figure Painting” Seth Haverkamp • View his website @ www.sethhaverkamp.com • September 1, 2, 3 Oil or Acrylic - “Between Realism and Abstraction” Chris Groves • View his website @www.cgroves.com • September 28, 29, 30 Watercolor - “Watercolor Loose and Fast” Ryan Fox • View his website@ www.rfoxphoto.com • October 5, 6, 7 129 Exchange St in Aberdeen, NC • www.artistleague.org • artistleague@windstream.net

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A L M A N A C

July n

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By Ash Alder

eeks ago, before what felt like endless days of rain, two flats of tomato plants mysteriously landed on your porch (how’d they get there?), and so you planted them deep in the sunniest patches of your garden.

A Cherokee Purple here; two Lemon Boys there; a Park’s Whopper by the lush trough of sweet and purple basil; and sundry grapes and cherries scattered about in various pots and planters.

Now, the earliest fruits are ripening, and each new tomato is simply miraculous. One catches the sun, drawing you near — an heirloom cherry among a small cluster of green and yellow fruits.

You hold it gently between your thumb and forefinger, can almost feel the life force pulsing inside. Days from now, that tomato will be ready for harvest. Patience, the garden whispers, and you know it’s true: Nature never rushes.

On the other side of the yard, where the Cherokee Purple is soaking up the earliest rays of light, you admire how strong and healthy the plant looks — how fully supported. The advice you were given echoes back like a dream: plant deep; don’t be afraid to bury a few of the leaves; the stem will sprout new roots.

Plump fruit heavy on the vine, you contemplate, is the gardener’s crystal sphere. It tells of the future, yes (tomato pies and homemade salsas). But it also tells of the past — the sunlight and rain; the good fortune; the “invisible” strength, growth, and magic that took root beneath the surface.

Patience, you whisper, reminding yourself that you, too, have much to offer, even if you can’t yet see it. Sunshine or rain, there is wisdom taking root. Be generous with yourself.

Allow whatever space, care and time you require.

The cicadas have mastered this art form.

Seventeen years underground, and here they are, screaming out in glorious ecstasy. Not a moment too late or too soon.

Homegrown Gourmet

If you find yourself with two pounds of homegrown tomatoes, and none of the following ingredients make you shudder (flour, mayonnaise, milk, cheese and butter), do yourself a favor and look up Laurie Colwin’s Tomato Pie. Summer supper seasoned with scallions and chopped basil, and can you say leftovers?

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A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins. — Laurie Colwin The Goddess Tree

On more than one occasion, I have gasped at the crape myrtle’s likeness to a Greek goddess. The smoothness of its multicolored bark. How its trunk and slender branches seem to embody such poise and grace.

Now through September, the crape myrtle blooms, its bright pink flowers fragrant in the thick, summer air.

Although its English name derived from its myrtle-like leaves and crinkled, tissuelike petals, this ornamental tree is native to China, where its name means “hundred days of red.”

While the crape myrtle is not a true myrtle, the myrtle is known as the flower of the gods, and is specifically associated with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.

Makes perfect sense to me.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought. — Wallace Stevens

The Grand Emergence

If you happened to hear — or are still hearing — the deafening hum of the million-plus “Brood IX” cicadas predicted to emerge in our state per acre after 17 years underground, then you have witnessed one of the fullest, most jubilant expressions of life on Earth.

Sometimes we forget how miraculous it is just to be here. And how wild.

This dreamy month of summer, when the Earth is pulsing, buzzing, screaming with life in all directions, we remember. Ripe peaches and wild blackberries.

Cornsilk and crickets. Butterfly weed and hummingbird mint.

It’s all a gift.

The garden is ripe for harvest, and everything we need is here. Our only requirement, from time to time, is to celebrate our great fortune.

Happy Fourth of July, friends. PS PineStraw

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Arts Entertainment C A L E N DA R

Frida Kahlo Film

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

JOY OF ART STUDIO. Celebrate Your Creative Self begins with Art in the Park for all ages. Join in for creative fun. Classes are held at Joy of Art Studio, 139 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Suite B, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 528-7283 or www. joyof-art.com or Facebook link www.facebook. com/Joyscreativespace/ for a complete list of events this month.

GIVEN BOOK SHOP. The Given Book Shop is taking ”to-go orders” requesting books. A book request form can be found at www.giventufts.org/ book-request-form/. There is no admittance to the store except for pickup. Book shop hours will be Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. until further notice. Donated books cannot be accepted. The Given Book Shop, 95 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst.

Info: (910) 585-4820.

GIVEN MEMORIAL LIBRARY. Given Memorial Library is taking ”to-go orders” by phone or email.

Go to the online catalog at www.giventufts.com and under the Library drop-down menu select Catalog.

Check for availability and then call (910) 295-6022 or email info@giventufts.com for book requests.

Staff will fill the requests and contact you with instructions when requests are ready for pickup.

There will be no entry to the library building until further notice. All library programs and events are on hold. Given Memorial Library, 150 Cherokee Road, Pinehurst.

SUMMER READING PROGRAM. All ages are invited to register for the Summer Reading Program on the library’s website or through the Beanstack

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App. Keep kids engaged and reading by logging minutes read online to earn entries for prizes. Virtual programs and social-distancing scavenger hunts add to the fun this year. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

LITTLE READERS. Little Clips for Little Readers features fun rhymes, songs and literacy tips for children aged birth to 5 and their parents and caregivers. Look for these videos posted weekly on SPPL’s Facebook and YouTube channel. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

ARTISTS LEAGUE. The gallery will be closed during July; however. the public is welcome to visit the artists’ studios Monday through Saturday. Check the website for future events, classes and workshops at www.artistleague.org.

Wednesday, July 1 STEAM. Kids in grades kindergarten through fifth grade are invited to pick up a STEAM Grab and Go Bag at the library. These bags will feature all the materials and instructions for activities based on science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Limited availability: call the library to reserve your bag. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net.

NAILED IT CHALLENGE. Three recipes will be posted on Facebook on July 1. Pick your favorite recipe and submit a picture of your creation to lib@sppl.net by July 30. For kids in grades 6 - 12. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 6928235 or www.sppl.net.

Southern Pines Public Library Book Club

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Saturday, July 4

FARMERS MARKET. 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. We will have everything someone could need or want for their holiday weekend celebration. The market will be filled with fruits, vegetables, flowers, cheese, meats, breads, desserts, handmade soaps, pottery, wood crafts, local wine, beer, cider, coffee and more. Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst.

Monday, July 6 SUMMER CAMP. 9 a.m.–12 p.m. E-I-E-I Oops, a barnyard musical. On farmer MacDonald’s place, the whole barnyard is singing. For rising first through third graders at the Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. Performances are Friday, July 10 at 5:30 p.m. and Saturday, July 11 at 11 a.m. For more information go to www.sunrisetheater.com or call (910) 692-3611.

Tuesday, July 7 FILM. 7 - 8:45 p.m. Enjoy an engaging film on artist Frida Kahlo. Cameo Art House Theatre, 225 Hay St., Fayetteville. Info: www.cameoarthouse.com/art-on-screen. Tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Wednesday, July 8 LIVESTREAM STORYTIME. Special guests from the Southern Pines Fire Department will read a story and discuss the tools and equipment firefighters use every day. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

Saturday, July 11 EQUESTRIAN EVENT. 8 a.m. - 3 p.m. WHES HT, CT and D. Carolina Horse Park, 2814 Montrose Road, Raeford. Info: (910) 875-2074.

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CA L E N DA R EQUESTRIAN EVENT. 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. WHES Schooling Day. Carolina Horse Park, 2814 Montrose Road, Raeford. Info: (910) 875-2074.

COCKTAIL CLASS. 4 - 5 p.m. Join Make & Muddle for a virtual cocktail class as they take you through some amazing brunch cocktails. Tickets are available for purchase at www. ticketmesandhills.com.

CONCERT. 7:30 - 10 p.m. The Contenders will kick off the BPAC Troubadour Series with a concert. Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info and tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Sunday, July 12 EQUESTRIAN EVENT. 8 a.m. - 3 p.m. WHES HT, CT and D. Carolina Horse Park, 2814 Montrose Road, Raeford. Info: (910) 875-2074.

FILM. 1:30 - 3:15 p.m. Enjoy an engaging film on artist, Frida Kahlo. Cameo Art House Theatre, 225 Hay St., Fayetteville. Info: www.cameoarthouse.com/art-on-screen. Tickets: www.ticketmesandhills.com.

WRITING GROUP. 3 p.m. Interested in creating fiction, nonfiction, poetry or comics? Connect with other writers and artists, chat about your craft and get feedback on your work. All levels are welcome.

This session will meet via Zoom. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. To join, email lholden@sppl.net.

Monday, July 13 SUMMER CAMP. 9 a.m.-12 p.m. SQUIRM! Spiders. Snakes. Bats. Worms. A creepy and fun musical. Listen carefully and you will learn how things that make us squirm can be OK. For rising second through fourth graders. Performances are Friday, July 17 at 5:30 p.m. and Saturday, July 18 at 11 a.m. For information go to www.sunrisetheater. com or call (910) 692-3611.

Wednesday, July 15 LIVESTREAM STORYTIME. Buildings and grounds staff members will share a story and talk

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Thursday, July 16 CIVIL WAR ROUND TABLE. 6:30 p.m. The guest speaker will be Jim Morgan with a presentation on “Southern Unionism.” Meeting starts at 7 p.m. Open to the public. This is a tentative date pending COVID-19 restrictions. Civic Club, corner of Pennsylvania and Ashe St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 246-0452 or mafarina@aol.com.

Saturday, July 18 EQUESTRIAN EVENT. TallBoots July H/J Schooling Day. Carolina Horse Park, 2814 Montrose Road, Raeford. Info: (910) 875-2074.

SIDEWALK SALE. The Southern Pines Business Association will host its annual sidewalk sale. Many Broad Street businesses will have sale merchandise on display outside of their stores. Regular business hours apply. Info: (910) 315-6508.

Sunday, July 19 EQUESTRIAN EVENT. TallBoots July H/J Schooling Show. Carolina Horse Park, 2814 Montrose Road, Raeford. Info: (910) 875-2074.

CRAFTERNOON. 3 p.m. Have you been crafting your way through the summer? Come hang out at the virtual Crafternoon on Zoom. Show off your creations, get tips from fellow crafters, and chat about ideas. This event will also feature a digital walkthrough of Creativebug, an online resource available for free for Southern Pines Public Library cardholders. To join, email lholden@sppl.net.

Thursday, July 23 MUSICAL THEATER. 7 p.m. Imagine Youth Theater presents Aladdin Jr. There will be another performance on July 24 at 7 p.m. Hannah Marie Bradshaw Activities Cente at The O’Neal School, 3300 Airport Road, Southern Pines.

Info: (910) 420-1025 or www.taylordance.org.

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about how they work to keep Southern Pines safe and beautiful. Southern Pines Public Library, 170 W. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8235 or www.sppl.net.

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Monday, July 27 SUMMER CAMP. 9 a.m.-12 p.m. Pirates! The Musical. A seafaring adventure with a salty crew of scallywags who hoist the Jolly Roger and sail for a mighty adventure. For rising third through fifth graders. Performances are Friday, July 31 at 5:30 p.m. and Saturday, August 1 at 11 a.m. For information go to www.sunrisetheater.com or call (910) 692-3611.

Tuesday, July 28 PAGE TURNERS. 10:30 a.m. Southern Pines Public Library’s newest book club will meet via Zoom. Can’t make the live meeting? Head over to the SPPL Page Turners Facebook Page to post your thoughts and interact with group members. Info: (910) 692-8235 or email lib@sppl.net.

UPCOMING EVENTS Saturday, August 22 BACKYARD BOCCE BASH. Join the fun at the 13th Annual Sandhills Children’s Center Backyard Bocce Bash. Prizes for team spirit and best tent decorations. Proceeds benefit children who have special developmental needs. Registration starts at $25 per player. National Athletic Village, Air Tool Road, Southern Pines. Info and registration: www.

SandhillsChildrensCenter.org.

WEEKLY EVENTS Mondays MASTER GARDENER HELP LINE. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. If you have a garden problem, a garden pest, a question, or if you want help deciding on plant choices, call the Moore County Agriculture Cooperative Extension Office.

Knowledgeable Master Gardener Volunteers will research the answers for you. The help line is available Monday through Friday and goes through October 31. Walk-in consultations are available during the same hours at the Agricultural Center, 707 Pinehurst Ave., Carthage. Info: (910) 947-3188.

Wednesdays FARMERS MARKET. 3 - 6 p.m. The Farmers Market in Pinehurst is back with a great variety of farmers and spring produce including strawberries, asparagus, lettuce, spring onions, tomatoes, grass fed beef, goat cheese, flowers and more. Village Green, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst.

FARM TO TABLE. Join Sandhills Farm to Table Co-op by ordering a subscription of local produce to support our local farmers. Info: (910) 722-1623 or www.sandhillsfarm2table.com.

Saturdays FARMERS MARKET. 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. The Farmers Market in Pinehurst is back with a great variety of farmers and spring produce including strawberries, asparagus, lettuce, spring onions, tomatoes, grass fed beef, goat cheese, flowers and more. Village Green, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. PS

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The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

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Mart Dickerson lives in Southern Pines and welcomes 39 Hamilton for suggestions from her fellow puzzle masters. She can be reached at martaroonie@gmail.com.

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SOUTHWORDS

What’s in a Name?

A tradition like no other

When the eldest of the grand-

princesses was a wee thing, saying “grandpa” was something of a challenge. What came out, to the everlasting delight of my wife, the War Department, was a word that sounded a lot like “crappy.”

This prompted a dispiritingly large number of family members to engage in an inter-generational cabal for reasons that don’t need to be discussed in polite company. Let’s just say that the War Department did everything in her power to encourage the widespread use of the term and thus, from that moment on, whenever I’m in the presence of the grandprincesses — there are two now and one will be driving a car before long — my name is Crappy. That’s with a “y,” not an “ie.” The latter is a fish, for God’s sake.

It can be awkward. For a school assignment, one of the grandprincesses had to write a letter which she dutifully addressed: “Dear Grandma and Crappy.” Her teacher was, if not outright appalled, nonplussed. She attempted to correct my granddaughter, who quite calmly informed her, “That’s what we call him.”

“You call your grandfather Crappy?” the teacher asked.

“Well,” the grandprincess paused to mull the whole thing over, “sometimes I just call him Craps.”

July would ordinarily be the month our family gathers in a beach rental with not enough bathrooms and too many wasps to eat ribs, play goofy golf and pay homage to our expanding list of family traditions.

Unfortunately, the current circumstances make it impossible this summer. One of the traditions we’ll miss is the card game Spite and Malice.

It was introduced to me by my grandmother, a bridge grandmaster who taught that far more complicated game to guests in fancy resorts like the Belleview Biltmore in Florida and the Carolina Hotel in Pinehurst.

Once she tried to teach one of my brothers to play bridge. He made an opening bid. She said, no, you should say xyz because you have this, this, this and this in your hand, correctly identifying nearly every card he was holding. My brother looked at her as if she was possessed by the devil, put his cards down on the table and never came back.

Playing cards with my grandmother was strictly a cash proposition.

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In the case of Spite and Malice, the stake was a handful of pennies. Grandmother taught the game to me. My mother taught the game to my children. I’ve passed it on to the grandprincesses.

It’s a ruthless game whose finest redeeming feature is that it’s almost entirely serendipitous, meaning even the rankest beginner can slam dunk the rest of the table like Michael Jordan soaring over Moses Malone. It can be seriously good for a 5-year-old’s psyche. So can learning how to behave if you’re the dunkee, not the dunker.

However, the tradition that I, personally, will miss the most comes in the kitchen. I’m not well known for my culinary gifts. On those rare occasions when I’m called upon at home to cook something on the back deck, once the deed is done the War Department usually encircles the gas grill with crime scene tape. But, like the blind pig, there is one particular item for which I am justly, and I don’t mind saying, universally renowned — Crappy French toast.

Ah, the sheer cherubic joy of those tender young faces when, on our first full day of our beach rental, I begin morning reveille by rattling pots and pans. I can almost hear the Pavlovian groans now. The ritualistic breaking of the eggs, retaining just the right amount of jagged pieces of shell. The glup-glup of out-of-date milk. The whiff of vanilla and a whisking vigorous enough to give a man the forearms of a slugging third baseman.

The signature feature of Crappy French toast is how it manages to retain such significant amounts of what appear to be flaps of egg white.

I confess that over the years I’ve seen some large enough that, if two pieces were to be placed one upon the other, the short stack could have stayed airborne at Kitty Hawk at least as long as the Wright Brothers.

Crappy French toast should not, under any circumstances, be served al dente. This was pointed out to me one July by my son-in-law, whose first piece arguably should have spent a bit more time on the griddle; either that or it could have been used to culture flu vaccine.

In the fullness of time, the grandprincesses have convinced me that Crappy French toast is really nothing more than a vehicle for powdered sugar. Tradition, edible or not, is always rich. PS Jim Moriarty is the senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

The Art & Soul of the Sandhills

ILLUSTRATION BY MERIDITH MARTENS

By Jim Moriarty

“Gratitude is an art of painting adversity into a lovely picture” -Kak Sri

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