Architect of the Sandhills

New Yorker Aymar Embury designed the Sandhills’ most iconic buildings

By Bill Case

By 1911, 31-year-old Aymar Embury II was already regarded in metropolitan New York circles as a superb architect of “country homes.” A steady stream of commissions had come his way from upper-middle-class clients impressed with the Princeton grad’s uncanny ability to design floor plans containing generously proportioned rooms despite modest square footages to work with.

While employed as a draftsman for an architectural firm in the city, Embury entered a 1905 Garden City, Long Island, architectural design competition. He submitted two plans and won both the first and second place prizes. His layouts received favorable mention in publications like Ladies’ Home Journal, and he succeeded in parlaying the public attention into commissions for 10 new home designs. This uptick in fortune enabled Embury to open his own architectural shop in 1907, and he doubled down on his newfound notoriety by writing a book in 1909, One Hundred Country Houses: American Examples. It was the first of numerous architectural tomes he would author.

Notwithstanding this success, Embury resented being pigeonholed as a specialist in country house architecture. As the first decade of the 1900s came to an end, he yearned for more challenging assignments involving bigger buildings. His initial opportunity to build a major public edifice came from an unexpected location — 560 miles south in North Carolina’s Sandhills.

The resort town of Southern Pines needed a new hotel after its largest, the Piney Woods Inn, burned to the ground in 1910. John Boyd, whose family owned vast Sandhills acreage, formed a corporation for the purpose of constructing a grand new hotel that would overlook the downtown from a vantage point high on a ridge at the eastern end of Massachusetts Avenue. Several locals joined Boyd as shareholders in the venture.

How Aymar Embury, a New York-based country house designer, persuaded John Boyd and the other investors to retain him as the architect for the Highland Pines Inn in 1911 is uncertain, but the Ivy League may have been involved. Like Embury, John Boyd and his two sons, Jackson and James (the celebrated novelist), were all Princeton alumni. So was the project’s landscape architect, Alfred Yeomans.

Regardless of how he obtained the commission, Embury’s efforts resulted in an eye-popping Colonial Revival structure. The magnificent white exterior of the 200-foot-long structure featured linear columns fronting spacious porches, three front entrances, 100 bedrooms, and 60 baths. The hotel’s modern amenities included its own electric and steam plants, and a laundry. The Highland Pines became the town’s social center and a favorite haunt of the foxhunting set.

Embury also designed several guest cottages for the inn and three private homes, all within easy walking distance of the grand hotel. Then, John Boyd’s sister Helen Dull (founder of the Southern Pines Civic Club) hired Embury to draw up plans for her prospective residence on Valley Road. Dull would unostentatiously call the place “Loblolly Cottage,” but the 1918 finished product, with its hipped triangular roof, numerous gables, diamond-shaped brick facing and seemingly unending width, appeared more like a majestic manor house befitting a duchess.

Though Embury’s Sandhills projects were expanding his architectural portfolio, that undivided attention to his work had exacted a personal cost. “I had not had a day off, even Saturdays or Sundays, since I had left college, not even for sickness,” he wrote. “Perhaps that is one of the reasons my wife (Dorothy, whom he had married in 1905) and I could not get along.” Parents of three sons (Edward, Carl, and Peter), the couple separated in 1913 and ultimately divorced.

Just as the 38-year-old began receiving recognition for talents stretching far beyond the design of country lodgings, America entered World War I. Embury became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stationed in France as part of Gen. John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force. When the Signal Corps failed to implement a plan to use artists to depict the life and activities of the AEF to boost morale in the field and support for the war back home, Capt. Embury asked if he could. He was given the go-ahead and the unit that was formed ultimately included eight artists, traveling freely, often to the front.

An excellent artist himself, the captain was responsible for designing both the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal. Embury only mentioned one of the awards in his resume, saying of the other that he did not “like the form in which the citation is written, and while it is complimentary enough, it makes me a little tired.”

After 14 months of military service and a ticker tape parade for Pershing’s returning doughboys, Embury reopened his New York City office and was promptly deluged with new business. The building boom of the Roaring Twenties created high demand for name architects like Embury, and the Boyds (James and Jackson, since their father passed away in 1914) were among the clients first in line.

James Boyd had decided the Sandhills would be the ideal place to pursue his dream of writing novels, and in 1920 he retained Embury to plan a home resembling that of Colonial planter William Byrd of Westover, Virginia. The result was Weymouth House, a rambling, mostly brick structure situated on high ground above Connecticut Avenue. In 1921 Boyd moved in, and four years later would write the Revolutionary War saga Drums. A surprise bestseller, the novel catapulted Boyd to the upper ranks of American writers. The house now serves as home for the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Boyd was not the only Southern Pines resident to hire Embury. Homes in the new Weymouth Heights development were sprouting up faster than spring dandelions, and Embury designed many of them. Admirers of his work found it easy to identify an Embury-designed home but were often hard-pressed to classify the house’s style of architecture. Elements of English cottage, Federal, Georgian, Norman, Colonial Revival and Dutch Colonial were frequently blended within the same house. Stuck for a label, locals began referring to his architectural creations as “Sandhills style.”

Though he employed modern variations to classical design concepts, Embury was critical of the genre of “modern architecture” itself. “Modernists believe that the essence of their work is to do something that has never been done,” he ruminated. “I suppose some of the architects do not use buttons or neckties when they dress!”

When asked his views regarding the work of acclaimed modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, he would pithily respond, “No closets!”

Opportunities for designing commercial structures also abounded in the Sandhills. After an April 1921 fire destroyed many of the wooden buildings on West Broad Street in Southern Pines, Embury prepared plans for several of the replacement structures, including the U-shaped, old-English style Citizens Bank building, and Dr. Mudgett’s office at 140 S.W. Broad St.

Both Southern Pines and Aberdeen needed new schools. The peripatetic architect drafted blueprints for both. According to Embury, the Southern Pines Town Council passed an ordinance requiring that he be hired as architect for all new commercial buildings on Broad Street. The measure was rescinded at the architect’s request.

One of Embury’s favorite Sandhills projects was the planning of the Southern Pines Country Club’s clubhouse. Architectural writer Russell Whitehead praised it as “the loveliest small clubhouse in America,” with its “sandy buff stuccoed walls, accents of sandstone, and red brick.” Regrettably, the building would succumb to fire in the 1960s, mirroring the fate of the Highland Pines Inn that burned in 1957.

In Pinehurst, Leonard Tufts contemplated the expansion of his mini-empire by building a second golf resort on Midland Road. He formed a stock company that engaged Embury to design a combination hotel and clubhouse to serve the Mid Pines Country Club and its Donald Ross-designed course. Embury submitted plans for a three-story edifice containing 100 bedrooms, all with private baths. The proposal called for a 500-foot-wide, crescent-shaped Georgian structure. The February 2, 1921 edition of The Pilot reported that “the first half is being started at once. When membership warrants it, the second half, in harmony with the first half, will be added to make a perfect whole.”

When the hotel and course were finished, it was evident that the Ross-Embury pairing had created something special. For nearly 100 years, the venerable inn has provided a spectacular backdrop for golfers playing their uphill approach shots to the 18th green. A golfer himself, in April of 1921 Embury captured first prize in the third flight of Pinehurst’s Mid-April tournament.

After the Mid Pines job, Tufts kept Embury busy on numerous Pinehurst projects. One of the most challenging involved shoehorning the new Pinehurst Theatre building into an awkwardly shaped lot. He solved the difficult quandary by devising a hexagonally shaped, vaguely Byzantine structure seating 500 people. The theater opened in 1923 to rave reviews and achieved recognition as one of the premier Southern movie houses. Tufts also asked Embury to plan a new business block in downtown Pinehurst, and several Embury-designed metal-roofed commercial buildings — including an annex to the Harvard Building — grace Market Street today.

The omnipresence of Embry structures caused the Moore County News to remark that he had “set his sign manual so persistently on Weymouth Heights, as well as on Knollwood and Pinehurst that the Sandhills country is becoming an Embury dream.”

Still, the ambitious architect did not land every commission. After getting wind in 1924 that Tufts was contemplating building a third Sandhills golf resort (ultimately the Pine Needles Inn), Embury made a direct pitch to Tufts for the business, unabashedly writing, “Don’t you think you would like to have me as your architect for this job?” But this was one project that eluded his grasp. Instead, Tufts chose family member Lyman Sise of Boston as the architect for Pine Needles’ massive English Tudor hotel and clubhouse (now Pine Knoll at St. Joseph of the Pines).

This slight bump in the road did nothing to hinder the spreading of Embury’s reputation for architectural excellence to other Southern locations. He obtained multiple commissions for homes in Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead neighborhood, and designed clubhouses for Hope Valley Country Club in Durham, Charlotte Country Club, and Mountain Brook Club in Birmingham, Alabama. According to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Embury undertook additional responsibilities on the Mountain Brook job, selecting the club’s “silver, linen, men’s uniforms, etc.”

By the mid-1920s, Embury was also engaged in major commercial projects in the North. Architectural work for churches, libraries, banks, apartment buildings, hotels and country clubs flooded his East 61st St. office in Manhattan. His son Edward joined the firm and became a respected architect in his own right. The son learned close up how his father used formidable artistic skills to impress prospective clients. In the course of an hour-long meeting, the senior Embury would freehand an attractive and detailed sketch of the structure contemplated by the owner. The depiction usually wowed the prospect, and Embury would be retained.

Doors to another segment of architecture opened for Embury during the ’20s. He segued into a go-to designer for college buildings at the University of Virginia, Wesleyan College, Hofstra College, Williams College, and Kalamazoo College. Eventually, Embury’s alma mater, Princeton, would seek him out for design work on numerous projects, including West Hall, a war memorial at Nassau Hall, and the gargoyle-guarded Dillon Gymnasium — still the university’s all-purpose athletic center.

It is mildly ironic that Princeton would hire Embury, given the dismal academic record he posted during his time at the university. At the urging of his father, an attorney and Columbia University graduate, he entered the Ivy League school in 1897 at the age of 16. A year later, Embury sneaked away from Princeton and enlisted in the military, hoping to fight in the Spanish-American War. The Army promptly sent him back to school after his age was discovered.

Embury described his four undergraduate years as “good the first year, fair the second, poor the third, and awful the fourth.” The civil engineering student’s marks for the final semester of his senior year matched the report card of John “Bluto” Blutarsky of Animal House, 0.0. “I suppose” Embury confided, “that I am the only person who graduated from a decent American college who failed in all subjects second term senior year.” He passed those subjects upon re-examination and received his degree in 1900.

Despite this unimpressive performance, Princeton accepted him into a fellowship program entailing a year of study in architecture. He would credit fellowship professor Allan Marquand for inspiring a newfound passion for learning. “He fired (me) with an enthusiasm,” Embury wrote in 1938, “for the beauty, not only of antiquity, but of common everyday things that has been a guide and a way to me these forty years.” His turnaround during the fellowship led Princeton to hire him as an instructor in architecture. Embury moonlighted in that position during his early years laboring in the trenches of New York architectural firms.

After Embury’s parade of successes during the 1920s, he possessed sufficient resources to indulge in the good life. He moved to a house on E. 62nd St. that enabled him to stroll from home to office in minutes. He wed again, marrying noted landscape architect Ruth Dean, and the two collaborated on projects. A daughter, Judy, was born to the couple. Embury acquired a spacious getaway home in East Hampton on Long Island and played golf regularly at the posh Maidstone Club.

Another of Embury’s pastimes was researching his family’s genealogy. His ancestors were French Huguenots who, for religious reasons, fled their native country in 1665, settling first in England and then Ireland. In 1758, several Embury family members immigrated to New York, and his great-great grandfather’s brother, Philip Embury, was an early founder of the Methodist Church in America.

Though an old-line, socially prominent family, Embury’s connections were not enough to keep his lucrative income stream flowing once the Great Depression hit in the 1930s. Commissions for projects in the Sandhills terminated altogether, and new builds in metropolitan New York slowed to a trickle. The sudden death at home of wife Ruth compounded Embury’s mounting distress. In 1930, he was appointed to a government gig as the New York Port Authority’s consulting architect. Still, the workload was light until New York City’s new Parks Commissioner Robert Moses asked him to serve as lead architect for the new Central Park Zoo in 1934. The financing for the project was coming from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal agency vital to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to revitalize the national economy through federally funded public projects that put men who would have otherwise been unemployed to work.

Moses commandeered the Central Park Arsenal and converted it into the Parks Department’s new home. Conveniently, the Arsenal was located adjacent to the site selected for the new zoo. To assist Embury, a platoon of out-of-work, but nonetheless capable, New York architects was hastily hired. Most did their work on drafting tables set up in a garage at the Arsenal. The architects were paid $80 a week, a manna-from-heaven windfall at the time.

Sixteen days after starting the assignment, Embury handed Moses blueprints for the zoo’s nine new buildings. Producing quality work at a frenetic pace did much to cement the working relationship between the two men. Embury received some favorable, albeit humorous, press from the zoo project. During the planning of the monkey house, former New York Gov. (and Democratic presidential candidate) Al Smith sent the architect a note requesting that his pet monkey Joe get good quarters. It seems that Joe had once been the governor’s house pet before being transferred to the old zoo (called the “Menagerie”), where Smith visited the ape regularly. According to an article in The New Yorker magazine, Embury played along, stopping by the Menagerie to show Joe the monkey house blueprint. The chimp promptly slapped it away. When the ex-governor was informed, he advised Embury not to worry because Joe “used to live in a mansion in Albany and he is too particular.”

For both Moses and Embury, the Great Depression’s hard times began creating opportunity. They would become involved in building hundreds of projects in the city financed just as the zoo had been. The politically astute Moses figured out how to be first in line to receive the millions of dollars doled out by the WPA and other federal agencies. To manage the funds, he arranged to have various public authorities created, and placed himself in sole charge. All types of public works eventually fell within Moses’ purview, and he exercised nearly dictatorial control over them.

Though never elected to public office, the megalomaniacal “master builder” held more power in New York than any politician. From his post at the Arsenal, Moses supervised an army of 1,800 professionals and workers who scurried to satisfy the micromanaging commissioner’s every whim.

Though Embury characterized working at the Arsenal during the New Deal period as “a madhouse,” he relished the challenge. As Moses’ favorite architect, he put his personal stamp on over 600 WPA public works projects in the city, including schools, hospitals, marinas, police and fire stations, museums and athletic facilities. Many were parks; 11 were city swimming pools. During the summer of 1936, temperatures in New York reached 106 degrees, and Embury’s pools provided welcome relief to the sweltering masses.

The facilities were designed to evoke images of faraway places. Called “palaces for the poor,” Embury structures that resemble Romanesque fortresses and Norman castles still grace city pools today. He also planned the New York City Building (now the Queens Museum) for the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Embury handed Moses a set of complete blueprints with elevations for the latter project just four days after being requested to prepare them. According to Embury, “They were adopted on the spot.”

But in New York, Embury is best remembered for his design work on bridges. Prior to the 1930s, ferries were often necessary to travel to and from the various islands comprising the city. Working frequently with the noted engineer Othmar Ammann, significant Embury projects included the massive Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), the Lincoln Tunnel, Marine Parkway Bridge, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Henry Hudson Memorial Bridge, and Jamaica Bay Bridge. His civil engineering training at Princeton, while rudimentary, helped him establish rapport and a “spirit of collaboration” with Ammann, the engineer — something of a rarity at the time.

If Embury’s work activities were occasionally chaotic during the ‘30s, there was also upheaval in his personal life. Two years following Ruth Dean’s 1932 death, he married Josephine Bound, but the union did not last and soon he was single again. In his mid-50s, he still cut a dashing figure. The New Yorker described Embury as “young-looking, brown-haired, sort of Jimmy Walkerish [a stylish New York mayor of the era] man.” According to grandson Philip Embury, Aymar was a “Renaissance man” who carried himself with a confident, patrician air — sort of a male version of movie star Katharine Hepburn. In 1940, he married fourth wife Jane Shebbehar, a woman half his age who worked in the office.

Though his accomplishments in the Sandhills were years behind him, Embury kept tabs on developments in the area. The Pilot reported that Embury was advised by a friend in 1936 that the federal government was funding a new post office on Broad Street in Southern Pines. Embury replied that he would submit “a sketch to the Supervising Architect of a building which would conform to the state of architecture here.” The government waived its usual requirement of using its standard exterior post office design and adopted Embury’s plan featuring a diamond-paned window over the entrance. Soon after, he designed an adjoining building for a new library (now housing the Southern Pines utilities operations). An Embury-designed wing was added to the library in 1948 and dedicated to the memory of his early benefactor James Boyd, who had passed away four years before. Embury donated the plans for the wing “in token of his friendship” with the novelist.

With the advent of World War II, the furious pace of public works construction was channeled instead into defeating the Axis powers. After the war and easing into his 70s, Embury stayed as busy as he wanted to be but gradually delegated business affairs to son Edward. He and his wife enjoyed traveling abroad. Jane would later tell the grandchildren that tears would come to her husband’s eyes when encountering ancient, classically designed structures that once had inspired his own designs.

In 1955, Embury decided to sell his E. 62nd St. residence. The eventual buyer was film star Tallulah Bankhead, a woman known for her promiscuity as much as her acting. Embury family lore, related by Aymar’s grandson Edward Embury Jr., says that Embury, then 75, gave Ms. Bankhead a personal tour of the home. While inspecting the bathroom, the architect and star lingered inside the generously sized shower to discuss the advisability of converting the area to a bathtub. Thereafter, Embury would puckishly regale friends about the time he shared a shower with the adventurous “Tallu.”

Embury’s grandchildren, Philip Embury, Edward Embury and Dottie Statts, and Jane’s nephew Michael Brennan remember happy times visiting Aymar and Jane in East Hampton in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Aymar organized games and swimming contests and would fork over quarters to the winners.

Embury passed away in 1966 at age 86 after a protracted illness. Jane would remarry Robert Benepe. After her death in 1995, family members attending her funeral in New York were treated to a guided tour of Aymar Embury-designed buildings, bridges, pools and parks. The gentleman conducting the tour was Adrian Benepe, the son of Jane’s second husband. Coincidentally, Benepe was then employed by New York City as its Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses’ old post.

The New York Times covered the family gathering, making a belated but fitting tribute to Embury, writing, “As chief architect for Robert Moses, he did as much as anyone to bind the city together and to help it dig its way out of the Depression.” Fashioned during its formative years, Embury’s footprint in the Sandhills — a land without soaring bridges or commuter tunnels — may have been just as great.  PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.

Hometown

From Otis to Opie

The ultimate Carolina classic

By Bill Fields

I was only 16 months old when the first episode of The Andy Griffith Show aired Oct. 3, 1960. It’s safe to say in the six decades since, I’ve made up for what I missed from Mayberry that Monday evening.

If I had to classify my fandom for the classic situation comedy, I would put the needle somewhere between devoted and rabid.

I don’t have a handmade Mayberry sheriff’s uniform hanging in my closet. My car antenna is not of the whip variety like that on the squad car driven by Andy and Barney. I have never made a pilgrimage to Mount Airy, Andy Griffith’s North Carolina hometown and inspiration for the fictional Mayberry.

However, I have scared a few folks through the years with my TAGS knowledge. I wouldn’t win a trivia contest with a true diehard — someone who can quote everything Ernest T. Bass said in his appearances — but I wouldn’t lose in the first round. A loser wouldn’t know the two characters Allan Melvin played who threatened to beat up Barney (Fred Plummer) and Howard Sprague (Clyde Plaunt). A loser couldn’t recall that the long-sought fish, “Old Sam,” was a silver carp. A loser wouldn’t know, as if quickly recalling a first cousin, that the pen name given to teacher-turned-children’s author Helen Crump was Helene Alexian DuBois.

The show ran eight seasons, a total of 249 episodes — the first 159 filmed in black and white, and the remaining 90 in color. Some devotees dismiss the three seasons of color shows because they lacked Don Knotts as Barney (except for a few guest appearances) and seem stale compared to earlier seasons. The Nielsen Ratings — and I — disagree. The show, never lower than seventh in the ratings, went out in 1967-68 (Season 8) at No. 1. The only other TV shows to bow out on top were I Love Lucy and Seinfeld.

No doubt Knotts as Deputy Fife was the genius character in the series. Knotts played Barney to perfection, a bumbling but lovable character whether he was getting locked in a jail cell or was on a date with Thelma Lou in his salt-and-pepper suit. Griffith knew Knotts was the show’s comedic engine, and after Season 1 the sheriff shelved hayseed ways — including an extreme Southern accent — in order to be a straight man offering counsel and comfort to Knotts’ character when he inevitably screwed up. Barney and the other characters wouldn’t have resonated as much as they do without strong writing either. It was smart.

Anyone my age or younger — I was 8 when the final episode was broadcast — basically knows The Andy Griffith Show through reruns, DVDs and now, streaming services. About 130 hours of TAGS were filmed. It has given me many multiples of that time in pleasure. Beyond the comedic value, North Carolinians always felt pride that the show depicted the Old North State despite being filmed in California. (And a clip of Seattle was used to portray Raleigh in one episode where Andy and Barney visited the state capital.)

Most of the actors who brought Mayberry to life and have made us laugh for so long are gone now. Betty Lynn (Thelma Lou) is in her 90s and lives in Mount Airy. Ron Howard (Opie Taylor) is 66, having grown up from child actor to big-time movie director.

When I was in college at Carolina, Griffith, one of the school’s celebrated alumni, returned to Chapel Hill as University Day speaker. I arrived early at Memorial Hall to make sure I got in. He worked in a couple of Duke jokes and had me laughing, the way his show still does when I watch it on my phone — so many years after the unseen Sarah worked the switchboard in Mayberry.  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.

The Kitchen Garden

Fall Gardens

The reward for sticking out the summer

By Jan Leitschuh

It’s hot out. Maybe you’ve noticed.

Do you need a weed-eater to get through your tired summer garden? Is your current output a very few puny, battle-scarred, malformed green remnants drooping from your sprawling, blighted tomato plants? Are you doing the September fire ant dance?

Squash, cukes and melons are long over. Who in their right mind wants to think about rooting around in the dirt right now, battling bugs, heat, humidity hell-ants and salty, eye-pickling sweat?

Have I sold you on fall gardening yet?

You might consider it. That homegrown Thanksgiving cornucopia doesn’t appear by magic.

Fall gardens in the Sandhills are nature’s reward for sticking it out during the summer. Your mature eggplant and peppers breathe a sigh of relief, throwing out more blossoms and setting abundant fruits in the cooler evening temps. Okra offers a last generous gasp before succumbing to the dried decorations of autumn. Pumpkins and winter squash ripen. Some fall-sown crops — like spinach, garlic, kale, chard, arugula and collards — may grow well into winter, pause, and then spring back next year with vigor. While the fire ants do kick into gear, in September the remainder of the biting/stinging bugs declines rapidly. Mind your step.

Best of all, as the temps finally cool, we remember once again why we love to garden and grow fresh produce for our tables. We actually like being outside. And some lovely floral garden additions, such as poppies, calendula and larkspur, prefer a fall planting for garden glory next spring.

Garden prep is the first step. Pull out and destroy those pathetic tomato vines. Make a note of anywhere you planted tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers this year, because you will want to rotate those crops to different areas next year to avoid disease buildup.

Now is the time to pull your soil samples. You can get a free soil test kit and directions from Moore County Cooperative Extension. Add needed nutrients, often just lime and sulpomag, a magnesium/potassium/sulfur additive. It’s also the time to till in some rich compost. Any greens you plant will need a nitrogen boost, so work it in now. I like feather meal or blood meal early on, but as the weather cools, these nutrients aren’t as readily available because the breakdown slows.

Save your raked leaves, by the way. I ask my husband to bring home the bags of crape myrtle and maple leaves he acquires in his work. These small, thin leaves break down quickly. I often use them lightly for a little early garden mulch, or I spread them atop beds that will be fallow over the winter, to be tilled under by worms or our tiller in the spring.

Waxy, tougher leaves like oak and magnolia can work, but will need to be run over with the mower or otherwise shredded or broken down. I’ll also mulch the blueberries, blackberries, grapevines and fruit trees with fall leaves.

What can you plant in your fall garden? Believe it or not, if you hustle, you can still plant a mess of bush snap beans through, say, mid-September, and cross your fingers. Look for a variety that matures in 50-55 days. Likewise, carrots need to go in immediately. Beets, spinach and chard, often planted in August, could still go in during the first two weeks of September. If you enjoy dill, toss some in, as well as a few transplants of parsley for winter-long greenery and flavor. Fresh parsley in homemade chicken soup is scientifically proven to cure what ails you, right?

We all know about tougher stewing greens — collards, chard and kale — and while those are nice, even wildly nutritious, they don’t excite the imagination as much as, say, an experimental patch of sugar snap peas, or a bed of carrots that, if covered with straw before a hard frost, provide a long season of cold storage. (Just uncover and pull a fresh handful for that night’s stew or roast pork.) Some gardeners lay a board over their newly watered carrot seeds to encourage germination. Check daily and remove the board when the seeds sprout.

Spicy radishes are satisfying to sow, as they spring up almost immediately. They’re as near to instant gratification as a seed-packet garden gets. Plant a few each week in succession for a continuous addition to fall salads and veggie roasts — yes, you can roast them, and they sweeten up in the oven. Bulb onions can go in now, and add their savory healthfulness to most any meal.

If you want cabbages, broccoli, bok choy, parsley or cauliflower, you would do well to start with plants from a garden center or local farmer who grows them. Garlic cloves can be planted in the latter part of September for a May harvest for green garlic, a June harvest for full heads. You can seed many different types of lettuce. Black-seeded Simpson is a loose-leaf, cold-hardy old favorite. Cut-and-come-again loose-leaf lettuces are popular and colorful. Likewise, mustard greens, spicy Italian arugula, turnips, parsnips, spinach, rutabaga, kale and chard can be seeded right now.

Seeds that normally germinate in spring’s cold soils may need a little indoor help in fall’s early scorch and drought. You can wet sturdy paper towels, sprinkle your seeds on top and roll the towel up like a cigar. Fold it in half and tuck it into a paper cup, labeling the seed. Stick in your fridge for a couple of days, checking carefully after the second day to see if dormancy has broken. Keep the paper towel moist until it does.

If you don’t care to fill up your summer beds with fall produce, then by all means clean up the old plants and stakes, and till those leaves in. Or consider sowing a cover crop such as vigorous winter rye — the roots of rye burrow down deeply for good distances, automatically enriching your garden beds with organic matter. Mow them in spring and turn under for a green manure.

Finally, our favorite winter cover crop, the vibrant crimson clover, can be found at local farm stores. So striking in spring, crimson clover is often used in bouquets, vibrating its scarlet blossoms against spring green foliage. Besides adding nitrogen and green manure to the soils, the blossoms are beloved by bees and makes the best honey, in my opinion.

If you are done with 2020 gardening, no judgment. It’s been a weird, buggy year, and there is local produce about. But I’d be willing to take bets that when the January seed catalogs roll around in early 2021, we will have left the memory of heat and bugs long behind.  PS

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

Bookshelf

September Books

FICTION

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix

When is a bookseller more than simply a person who sells books? When they are one of the left-handed booksellers of London, of course. And Merlin, a mythical-creature-explaining, weapon-at-the-ready, failed bookshop clerk, is one of the most legendary left-handed booksellers of them all. When budding art student Susan Arkshaw wanders into Merlin’s path while searching for her father, her life may never be the same. Quirky, fast-paced, fantasy fun just perfect for fans of Night Circus, Caraval and Jackaby, this little gem is going to be at the top of the recommendations list for the fall.

The Talented Miss Farwell, by Emily Gray Tedrowe

Miss Farwell is the bookkeeper for a small town when she discovers her love of art. Moving funds around, she “borrows” to acquire art, then sells it for a profit, repaying the “loan.” But things begin to get out of hand. Will she get caught? It’s amazing how hard it is to change your ways when you’ve been having so much fun!

Monogamy, by Sue Miller

Annie and Graham have a comfortable life and a comfortable marriage in Boston. She is a photographer, and he owns a bookstore. Her personality is rather reserved, while his is loving and larger than life. They have two adult children, a son from his first marriage, and a daughter together. They enjoy a close relationship with his ex-wife. When Graham dies suddenly, Annie is at a complete loss in her grief. She also finds herself grappling with rage when she learns that he was unfaithful to her in the days leading to his death. This is an intuitive study of a marriage, friendship, family and how to come to terms with a loved one’s fallibility.

The End of the Day, by Bill Clegg

Told in two different time periods and with three main characters and their families, this is a fabulous tale of coveting what someone else has, making assumptions without knowing all the facts, and making decisions whose ramifications affect many others.

The Evening and the Morning,
by Ken Follett

Thirty years ago, Follett published his most popular novel, The Pillars of the Earth. Now, his masterful prequel, The Evening and the Morning, takes us on an epic journey into a historical past rich with ambition and rivalry, death and birth, love and hate, that will end at the dawn of the Middle Ages, where Pillars begins.

NONFICTION

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History, by Jennifer Dasal

ArtCurious is a colorful look at the world of art history, revealing some of the strangest, funniest and most fascinating stories behind the world’s great artists and masterpieces. Through these and other incredible, weird and wonderful tales, ArtCurious presents an engaging look at why art history is, and continues to be, a riveting and relevant world to explore. Dasal is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and host of the independent podcast ArtCurious, started in 2016 and recognized as one of the country’s best podcasts by O, The Oprah Magazine and PC Magazine.

Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, compiled by Shaun Usher

In the volume on cats, Florence Nightingale sends care instructions to the woman who has just adopted her angora tomcat, Mr. White. T.S. Eliot issues a rhyming birthday party invitation to all Jellicle cats for his 4-year-old godson. Jack Kerouac’s mother grieves at the death of the family cat. In the volume on music, Keith Richards tells his aunt about bumping into a former schoolmate named Mick Jagger, who also loves Chuck Berry. Yo-Yo Ma wonders whether Leonard Bernstein remembers introducing him onstage as a young boy. A Harvard psychiatrist begs CVS to change their on-hold music. Riffing on their passions and surroundings, the artists and entertainers in this volume candidly reveal the sources of their inspiration, what music means to them, why they create it, and so much more.

Our Tarot, by Sarah Shipman

Jane Addams, Benazir Bhutto, Lucrezia Borgia, Anne Frank, Frida Kahlo, Beatrix Potter, Florence Nightingale, Nefertari, Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Marie Curie, Zora Neale Hurston, Sophie Scholl, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ida B. Wells are all featured in this traditional yet most unusual tarot deck. From 1300 BCE to the late 20th century, the women depicted in the deck represent many ethnicities, creeds, socioeconomic classes, sexualities, ages and abilities and have all influenced their world.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Ty’s Travels: All Aboard, by Kelly Starling Lyons

The first in a brand-new “I Can Read” series from the Coretta Scott King award-winning author, Ty’s Travels is perfect for those readers just beginning to read on their own. With family, adventure and creative play, Ty is really going places, and young readers will delight in reading along as they turn the page to see just where Ty may end up next! (Ages 4-6.)

How to Read to a Grandma or Grandpa,
by Jean Reagan

In bookstores and in libraries, with voices quiet or voices LOUD, books are best when shared with someone — and even more fun when that someone is a grandma or grandpa. In this latest installment in her super cute “How To” series, Reagan shows how wonderful books can be when shared with someone you love. This is the perfect title for Grandparents Day, Sunday, Sept. 13. (Ages 3-8.)

Wild Symphony,
by Dan Brown

Yes, that Dan Brown. There’s more to life than meets the eye, and there’s more to Wild Symphony than just a simple picture book. There are poems (20 of them), adorable animals (bouncing kangaroos, clumsy kittens and a cheetah chase), and even an animal orchestra! Most importantly, though, there are short asides to remind readers to “listen to nature,” “slow down and enjoy today,” and “get back on your feet when you fall down.” The perfect gift for anyone of any age from the author of The Da Vinci Code. (Ages 4-6.)

The Similars, by Rebecca Hanover

Emma’s life was torn apart last summer when she found her best friend, Oliver, dead. Now she has to return to school without him. Her high school, Darkwood Academy, prides itself on its diversity and, because of this, they are the first school to allow clones to attend alongside the “Originals.” One of the clones is of her dead best friend. Throughout the book Emma works to uncover secrets about the “Similars,” discovering surprising twists about Oliver’s death, and learning that she may be more similar to these Similars than she could ever have anticipated. (Ages 14 and up.) (Review by Ella Pate.)  PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally

Out of the Blue

A Square to Spare

Roll Out the Charmin

By Deborah Salomon

When all is said and done, when the tragedies have subsided and coronavirus has faded, this icon of the pandemic will survive: toilet paper.

Raise a glass to Quilted Northern. Chisel Charmin in marble. Curtsey to Cottonelle. Whatever happened to Kimberly-Clark’s Delsey, the industry standard for decades?

Whichever you choose, don’t call it “paper.” The correct appellation: bath tissue. I could not find a single brand bearing the word “toilet,” either.

My first reaction to the shortage was . . . what genius predicted it and started hoarding? Pre-hurricane, pre-snowstorm and pre-asteroid collision, bottled water, milk, bread and diapers disappear from shelves. Yet threatened with a lockdown, somebody thought: Wait a minute; no office or school, restaurant or store restrooms. Boo-hoo for the loo. In other words . . . going, going, gone. That prognosticator then multiplied homebound persons by five or so daily “gos,” calculated how many sheets per visit per gender, tossed the calculator and dashed to Walmart.

Math wasn’t my favorite subject. But whatever the, er, bottom line, the solution was HOARD.

The second mystery was the shortage itself. Manufacturers assured a panicked population that their stockpile had not been . . . wiped out. Truck drivers weren’t on strike. The raw materials needed to produce reams were plentiful. Yet not until late June were stores, uh, flush with supply.

Peanut butter a-plenty. Ditto PopTarts. Two-ply, scarce.

Right about now I usually investigate the history of my subject, for perspective. I did. You don’t want to know. Not even the Romans with their public latrines and marble residential potties had TP. Paper, remember, was a highly prized commode-ity reserved for manuscripts. By the 14th century the Chinese produced scented paper wipes for Imperial tushes. But not until 1857 did American Joseph Gayetty market “medicated paper for the water closet,” exorbitantly priced at 50 cents ($16 today) for 500 folded sheets. The first rolls appeared about 1890, initiating that still-unsolved conundrum: pull from under or over?

Since then, the industry has spun off more flavors than Oreos.

Remember the swipin’ ’70s when TP was a décor item? Colors ranged from violet to blue to green before being discontinued when dyes were cited as irritants. Prints included flowers, bunnies, stars. Etsy still offers custom messages and seasonal imprints, including “Hap-pee Holidays.”

Which reminds me: In 1970, while touring the Tower of London, I experienced the results of English tea overconsumption. A guard pointed me to the nearest WC. Not only did the TP (in folded sheets, from a dispenser) feel like waxed paper but upon it was imprinted some royal seal. Then, in 1994, The Grateful Dead played a concert near the Vermont town where I lived. We were warned: Deadheads would swarm the environs, stay for weeks, sleep in parks, beg for grilled cheese sandwiches, smoke weed and steal toilet paper from public restrooms.

Why, nobody could figure out — for a while.

Presently, the emphasis is on quality, although I’m torn between very soft and very strong. Aren’t they the same? And do we need such explicit TV ads, usually around dinnertime? Sure, the cheeky Charmin bears look cute, but their app for bathroom games and Pooptastic emojis are rather . . . execrable.

This is a certainty: Squishy mega-rolls of snowy whiteness likened to clouds and kittens will forever remind Americans of the virus that sickened and killed millions worldwide.

A real bum-mer.  PS

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

The Omnivorous Reader

The Write Stuff

What makes memorable writing work?

By Stephen E. Smith

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” “The world will little note nor long remember . . .” “A date which will live in infamy . . .” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

The right words arranged in the best order have always served to rally us in moments of crisis, and although we have, of late, been inundated with words beyond number, no one has assembled the vocabulary that sums up our deep sense of frustration. Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020 revised edition) is the third volume in a series that focuses on words, metaphor, rhetoric and style in English usage, and although the author doesn’t address the present failure of language, he goes far in explaining what makes specific semantic patterns enduring.

Farnsworth’s approach is straightforward. He parses great writing by great writers: Abraham Lincoln, Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and many others whose eloquence survives even in our present circumstances — writers who understood the enduring principles of style but who were willing to violate those principles in the service of meaning and resonance.

Whereas most books on style offer formulas or impose a system for aspiring writers to follow, Farnsworth illustrates by use of example, citing short, familiar quotes to explain how memorable passages work. It is up to the reader to translate the lessons implicit in the writings of Lincoln or Churchill or in the King James Bible into a form that is acceptable in our times. Therein lies the benefit — and for the less disciplined reader, the rub. If you aren’t enthralled with language and its possibilities, the book is little more than a cure for insomnia. If, on the other hand, you’re a lover of words, Farnsworth’s latest offering might be just what the doctor ordered in the heart of a pandemic — a self-reflective occupation with the written word.

The opening chapters focus on word derivation with attention to the effects of Saxon and Latinate words, and how they shape meaning when used in opposition. “There are two ways to say almost anything in English: with little words or big ones,” Farnsworth writes. “More precisely, you can say most things with older, shorter words that have Germanic (or ‘Saxon’) roots, or with longer words that came into the language more recently — perhaps six or seven hundred years ago — from French, and before that from Latin.” Examples: ask/inquire; break/damage; luck/fortune; come/arrive, etc. Saxon words are short, direct, often one syllable, while Latinate words take prefixes and suffixes and are less likely to create an image in the reader’s mind — the visible vs. the conceptional.

Admittedly, there’s little new in this observation, and Farnsworth quotes English historian Thomas Macaulay, who detected, more than 100 years ago, the Latinate fault in the work of Samuel Johnson: “All his (Johnson’s) books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which nobody ever thinks . . . ” Thus he cleverly employs Macaulay’s critique as both explanation and example.

Beyond this obvious observation, the reader is introduced to the more obscure nuances of word usage, demonstrating that the best writing — the most powerful writing — is a mix of Saxon and Latinate words, and he supplies and analyzes numerous passages from the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Lincoln: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s . . . .” “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hands?” “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff,” etc.

Many of the most recognizable passages begin with Latinate words and end with a strong series of Saxon words, as with Patrick Henry’s “I conceive it my duty, if this government is adopted before it is amended, to go home” — emphasizing the power created by word arrangements that stand in opposition to one another while keeping the demands on the reader (what Farnsworth calls “the cognitive load”) at a minimum.

The book’s central chapters explicate active and passive voice, sentence variations, and esoterica such as metonymy, anacoluthon, right- and left-branching, and direct and indirect approaches to the audience and situation, all of which are, despite the pedantic terminology, easily accessible.

The book’s final chapters, “Cadence: Classic Patterns” and “Cadence: Combinations & Contrasts,” which deal with prosody, the study of the stress and intonation in language, can be a trifle deadly — reminiscence of junior high English classes where you were tortured with scansions of Poe’s bouncy “The Raven” or Christopher Marlowe’s “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships. . . .” During a raging pandemic, who gives a rip about spondees and pentameters?

Still, Classical English Style is immensely entertaining, an indulgence for anyone wishing to escape the moment, and it’s worth a careful read, if for no other reason than it collects memorable quotes, a sort of Greatest Hits of clear and beautiful communication.

So where are the words we need to hear? Where is the unifying sentence or paragraph so necessary at this time in our shared distress?

It may have been uttered by George Floyd as he lay on the asphalt with a knee on his neck. Whether accidental metaphor or straightforward reality, “I can’t breathe” — a simple Saxon sentence that Farnsworth would find perfectly acceptable — may well sum up our collective state of mind, although it does nothing to lift us out of the funk in which we find ourselves.  PS

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

Good Natured

The Big Little Mineral

Lithium could power your life

By Karen Frye

Usually when we think of minerals, we think of calcium, magnesium, zinc and so on. But there’s a trace mineral, lithium, that could possibly change your life in wonderful ways.

Unfortunately, trace minerals are scarce in the food supply, often due to modern farming practices. That’s one of the reasons we put our faith in supplements.

Lithium is found in nearly all rocks and, as water flows over and through rocks and soil, it picks up small amounts of this trace mineral. When people drank regularly from springs and wells, they would get little doses of lithium on a daily basis. At one time, people — including Mark Twain and several past U.S. presidents — traveled to Lithium Springs in Georgia to collect drinking water because of its natural abundance in the mineral. Believed to have beneficial effects on people’s moods, it was at one time used to treat depression.

While most people drink treated water today — removing harmful substances as well as natural trace elements — more recent research reveals a wide range of health benefits associated with the use of lithium.

One of the important things lithium does is slow down the aging process by regulating the enzyme glycogen synthase kinase-3, GSK-3. Too much of this enzyme can lead to age-related conditions that we accept as part of growing old.

Some studies have found that people who live in areas with even modest levels of lithium in their drinking water tend to live longer. Even those who take low doses for medical reasons have lower mortality rates from diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Lithium is critical in slowing down the aging process, protecting the brain, and improving mental health. Small doses may be effective in slowing cognitive decline and conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Could it be the secret ingredient in the “Fountain of Youth” that we all seek?  PS

Karen Frye is the owner and founder of Nature’s Own and teaches yoga at the Bikram Yoga Studio.

Simple Life

Unexpected September

And the art of rolling with the punches

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago, my daughter took a new job and moved with her fiancé from New York City to Los Angeles, or as I try not to think of it, from the Covid frying pan to the Coronavirus fire.

If anybody can handle it wisely, on the other hand, it’s probably Maggie and Nate. Both are experienced travelers and savvy outdoor adventurers who’ve seen just about everything from the urban jungle to the wilds of Maine.

During the first few days of their residency in the hills east of downtown LA, in fact, Mugs (as I call her) sent me a photograph of a large rattlesnake. It was casually crossing the footpath of the nature preserve near their house, where she was taking an afternoon hike with a friend and her dogs. Being a gal who grew up in the woods of Maine, she didn’t seem particularly rattled by the encounter, as it were — just respectful. “It kind of freaked the dogs but we were on the snake’s turf, after all. We just let him pass.”

A few days later, she phoned to let her old man know she and Nate had awakened to a gently shaking house. “Our first earthquake,” she pronounced with a nervous little laugh. At week’s end, she phoned again to let me know they’d already put together an  “earthquake emergency kit in case the Big One everybody predicts may happen soon.”

Once again, she didn’t sound particularly vexed, merely bracing for whatever the world might throw at them — and us — next.

During a year in which a runaway killer virus has delayed, cancelled, locked down or put on hold every aspect of “normal” American life — whatever shred of meaning that phrase still holds — I’m impressed with my daughter’s coolness under fire, an ability to keep calm and carry on as British citizens were famously advised to do on posters in 1939 as their world dissolved into World War.

Factor in 2020’s long overdue racial awakening, massive social protests in the streets, a collapsed economy and a presidential election that is shaping up to challenge the very foundations of our representative democracy and you have a formula for — well, who can really say?

A friend I bumped into at the grocery store recently told me her daughter was depressed because her wedding has been canceled due to the virus. Somewhere I later read that almost half of the scheduled weddings for 2020 have either been postponed, rescheduled or simply canceled.

“It’s as if tomorrow has been put on hold until further notice,” lamented my friend. “God only knows what the future holds.”

It visibly perked her up a bit, however, when I casually mentioned that my own daughter’s wedding was in the same boat, a victim of these unexpected times — either proof that we’re all in this hot mess together or misery loves company, take your pick.

Mugs and Nate were to be married later this month at the lovely old Episcopal Church summer camp outside Camden, Maine, where she and her younger brother spent many happy summer weeks as kids. They’d rented the entire camp and we were planning to decorate its cabins for guests to stay in rustic splendor as an option to local pricey inns. Two families were looking forward to several days of feasting on local seafood, songs around the campfire and watersports by day, with yours truly all set to don a camp sweatshirt and whistle to serve as de facto camp director, my first summer camp gig since scouting days.

Instead, wisely, they postponed the blessed event until the same third weekend in September one year from now.

The date stays the same because September in the North Country is exquisite, probably “as good as life and weather get,” as my sweet former Maine neighbor lady used to declare every year around Labor Day.

During the two decades we resided there, in fact, I fondly came to think of September as the glorious “End of Luggage Rack Season” because as the weather cools and leaves turn, the summer tourists suddenly pack up and head for home — a brief respite before bus loads of elderly “leaf-peepers” begin to roll into the Pine Tree State for their annual October invasion.

However brief, the sense of relief is palpable and the gift to residents is twofold. Summer’s end means local merchants’ pockets are full of wampum, and locals can safely venture into town to see old friends or visit uncrowded restaurants where the cost of a decent shore supper sometimes drops by a third.

Back on our forested hilltop west of town, meanwhile, surrounded by 600 acres of birch, beech and hemlock, I always found September days to be among the most peaceful and productive of the year. These were times when I was at my writing desk by dawn’s early light and spent my afternoons mowing grass or tending to my late garden or finishing up my woodpile for winter.

I never missed a chance to pause and marvel at September’s golden afternoon light and the telltale scents of summer’s end. Sometimes, if I sat long and still enough on the bench of my “Philosopher’s Garden” at the edge of the forest, a small procession of local residents would appear, including a trio of wild turkeys and a stunning pheasant, a large lady porcupine and a family of whitetail deer.

Once, unexpectedly, a large iridescent green dragonfly landed on the back of my hand as I sat on the bench, a creature from Celtic myth, allowing me to examine him — or her — up close and personal. I remember asking this divine creature where it might be headed but got no answer. After a while, on a puff of early evening wind, like summer itself, it flew away.

It’ll be 20 years next September since my wife and I sealed our own summer wedding vows by holding our reception the same third weekend of September that Maggie and Nate scheduled for their wedding this year. Maine-loving minds must think alike.

Wendy and I calculated that late September — the autumnal equinox — would be the ideal time to invite far-flung friends and family from Carolina to California to come to Maine and help us finish our vows and kick up their heels beneath a full hunter’s moon. We hired a wonderful Irish string band and our friend Paul to put on one of his spectacular lobster bakes for an unforgettable evening on the lawn.

But something unforgettable and unexpected happened that September.

Ten days before the party, as I was buying chrysanthemums at my favorite nursery on Harpswell Road on a perfect September morning, chatting with the owner as she rang up my purchases, her face suddenly went pale. I asked what was wrong. She simply pointed to the small TV playing on the wall behind me.

It was 8:50 in the morning and smoke was billowing from the side of the North Tower of Manhattan’s World Trade Center.

“A plane just flew into the top of that building,” was all she could manage. I stood watching with other shoppers for a few minutes then drove home wondering how such a horrible thing could possibly have happened.

Ten minutes later, after I unloaded the flowers and went inside to turn on the TV, I got my answer, tuning in seconds before a second airplane flew straight into the South Tower of the Trade Center.

You know the rest of this story, the single deadliest terror attack in human history that claimed more than 3,000 lives and changed so much about this country.

Like Maggie and Nate, within a day, Wendy and I decided to postpone our wedding celebration for a year. We cancelled the Irish band and the lobster bake and phoned more than 100 friends to break the news. They understood completely. Not unlike this summer of Covid-19, travel was severely restricted and most Americans simply wished to stay glued to their TV sets in the wake of 9/11’s unspeakable horrors.

Something else unexpected happened, though. After days of numbing news-watching, our phones began to ring with friends near and far wondering if they could still come to Maine for a visit. The phones kept ringing, the list kept growing. The reception was suddenly back on — and evidently needed by all.

In the end, nearly 150 souls unexpectedly showed up that September night to share our vows in a circle of hands, to dance in the moonlight, eat steamed lobster and vanish every crumb of Dame Wendy’s amazing wedding cake (which, for the record, the groom never even got a taste of). At a moment when we needed it most, we were all there for each other, to laugh, cry, dance and simply be circled in love. It was an unforgettable night after all.

“Most people want to be circled by safety, not by the unexpected,” authors Ron Hall and Denver Moore write in Same Kind of Different as Me, the moving 2006 bestseller about an unlikely friendship between a wealthy international art dealer and an angry Fort Worth homeless man that transformed both their lives.

“The unexpected can take you out,” they note. “But the unexpected can also take you over and change your life. Put a heart in your body where a stone used to be.”

That’s my wish for all of us this unexpected September, by the way — to find a heart where a stone used to be.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Home by Design

Hello Kitty, Martha and Me

And the shattering fragility of life

By Cynthia Adams

My friend Martha “Mac” was a formidable woman; unceremonious, fiercely smart, irreverent. Standing 6 feet tall in her bare feet, she was what some might call “substantial” — think Julia Child in her later years. (That is, if Julia had never picked up a whisk and had become a business professor.)

Martha loved good design, but didn’t give a happy hoot for clothing.

Chief among her passions were American glassware, jewelry, antiquities, Mid-Century Modern furniture, British mysteries and biographies, travel, Kinky Friedman, Cook Out burgers, Duke U. and . . . Hello Kitty.

As the Sesame Street song goes, “one of these things is not like the others.” That unlikely thing was Hello Kitty.

Hello Kitty celebrated her 45th anniversary last year, bookending my friend’s final exit.  Martha, who died last May, would have hated missing the Hello Kitty Friends Around the World Tour, which kicked off last fall in L.A. I believe she would have been there.

She was a die-hard Pepper. As Martha’s health failed, she pivoted from Pepsi and Dr Pepper to diet Dr Pepper, but remained faithful as ever to the big plush feline with the pink hair bow.

Martha lived in stark contrast to Kitty, never one-dimensional, with the sort of intense presence that no one could miss. She did not suffer fools gladly. Martha’s academic achievements were serious but she adored understatement and devastatingly dry wit.

Also unlike Kitty, she was unpredictable. Martha once declared she would visit all the locales of books she enjoyed, including Franklin, Tennessee, where a Confederate widow buried nearly 1,500 dead soldiers. She sent me a postcard from the setting of Widow of the South. Typically acerbic, Martha scrawled on the back, “Lots of graves.”

She meandered on to the west coast of Florida, then wound up in Austin, Texas, where she earned her doctorate.

Another such junket led her to glass-making sites across the United States, stopping off in Weston, West Virginia, where she was a longtime board member of The Museum of American Glass.

At one time, she drove a two-seater Honda CRX, which required her to imitate a contortionist to get behind the wheel. Martha’s mind, formidably quick, far outpaced a body that slowed to a lumber.

Still, she traveled alone. “Intrepid” is the inadequate word that comes to mind.  The word “carapace” also fits. Martha had a protective shell.

An initiation preceded friendship. She allowed you into her world once you proved you were unafraid of her. My hubby succeeded by offering his delicious mashed potatoes in a pot straight off the stove. Delightedly, Martha plunged the spoon into the pot, declaring them the “best mashed potatoes ever.” They remained lifelong friends.

When Amazon evolved from bookseller to behemoth, Martha was an early adopter, and eBay became an obsession.

Both allowed her to indulge her Hello Kitty passion full on.

One Christmas, Martha gave me one of the most memorable gifts I have ever received: a padded Hello Kitty toilet seat. She kept a Hello Kitty toaster for herself.

The following birthday, Martha gave me a Hello Kitty notepad and a bag of assorted chocolates. Also, Keith Richard’s excellent autobiography, Life, which she had just hoovered down, as she did with books. The Hello Kitty gifts perplexed me given that I am a dog person.

She indulged a love of turquoise to the point she once bought a necklace — bigger than the coveted Squash Blossom design — and large enough to hoist a car engine with — but glassware was the thing that eclipsed all other passions.

The crematorium where her funeral was held last spring was beside a strip joint. As in strippers, not furniture refinishing. I smiled to myself as I parked, thinking how Martha would have appreciated the irony.

Friends and family gathered later at Martha’s townhouse, where she had slowly rid herself of the Mid-century Modern furniture, making room for more fragile collectibles. Now steel shelves and racks held hundreds of pieces of exquisite glass: antique, American, European, rare and some less so. Much of it was donated to the Weston museum where she had traveled often to pay homage to great glass design.

Sitting on lawn furniture among the glassware, we mourners sipped wine as a storm rumbled. Despite the gathering of folk with doctorates and high IQs, words failed. None of us was equal to the wit Martha’s remarkable originality demanded.

So, we shifted awkwardly on our webbed seats, swallowing down the bitter realization that there was no collectible so rare as our fine and fiercely original friend. 

Months later, invited to choose a piece of glass, I strained to admire an unfamiliar piece from a shelf top; it toppled and crashed as if pushed by an invisible finger.  “Oh, shit!” I exclaimed, stricken.

“Exactly what Martha would have said,” came the dry reply from Jim, her executor. 

Of course, I thought bitterly. 

Hemingway was wrong about the lucky growing strong at the broken places. I swept up the shards and took what remained of the piece home. PS

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to PineStraw and O.Henry. 

Almanac

September breaks you open with her golden hours, her wildflowers, her long, sweet kiss of transience. She is absolute radiance. Summer in her loveliest form. And one day, out of nowhere, she cradles your face in her tender hands, gazes into your dewy eyes, and tells you that everything will change.

September is the earliest fall leaves — yellow and burnt orange — dotting the trees like a Tibetan prayer flag strung across a verdant landscape. She’s the electric hum of cicadas, the pink glow of muhly grass in sunlight, blueberries on creeping crimson vines.

September is bewildering. Summer and autumn at once. She slows you down, asks you to savor what is right here, right now — treasures untold.

Look and see.

Pear trees heavy with yellow fruit.

Swamp sunflowers.

Monarch butterflies.

Eddies of tree swallows.

Here today, gone tomorrow. But such is the nature of September. Your face is in her hands now, and she asks you to watch closely.

You look up to the trees, notice the green and yellow leaves wave hello and goodbye as the first breeze of autumn passes through them. Just like that, summer is drifting beyond the veil, a transition that renders you both dizzy and tender.

September invites you inward. You aren’t looking for a sign per se, but you are open to one. A simple affirmation that all is as it should be; that you are where you should be, right here, right now.

It will take you by surprise.

Perhaps you will be on a walk. The path will be familiar, but today, on the stretch of trail that leads to the picnic bench in the woods, you will notice an arrangement of goldenrod and late summer flowers in a vase on the center of the table, the sun filtering through in such a way that the flowers glow. 

There is no one else around. You take a seat at the bench, and in this moment, all is well.

Everything will change, you think, but life is as it should be. Such is the nature of life and September.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. — Albert Camus

Signs of Autumn

According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, Native Americans had several names for this month’s full moon — the “Corn Moon” and “Barley Moon” among them. Other names include “Moon When the Plums Are Scarlet” (Lakota Sioux), “Moon When the Deer Paw the Earth” (Omaha), and “Moon When the Calves Grow Hair” (Sioux). Poetic, don’t you think? Whatever you’d like to call it — imagine the names you might contrive — this month’s full moon will rise in the wee hours of Sept. 2, when the swallows swirl as one, when the leaves begin to turn, when the apples are ripe for the picking.

Speaking of apples, Johnny Appleseed Day is celebrated this month — on Saturday, Sept. 26. Born John Chapman (1774–1845), this American nurseryman and missionary was the living legend known for introducing apple trees to the Midwest and northern parts of present-day West Virginia. Among the colorful stories collected about this gospel-preaching plantsman, Chapman was said to have had a pet wolf who began following him after he healed its injured leg. And while that wasn’t a mush pot on his head, he did wear a tin cap used for cooking during his travels. Another fun fact: Chapman’s trees grew tart apples believed to have been used for alcoholic cider, as the fruit itself was practically unpalatable. In Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire, the author dubs Chapman a “modern-day Dionysus.” Bet they didn’t tell you that in grade school.

I meant to do my work today —
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.— Richard Le Gallienne

What You Sow

As winter squash and late summer crops spill from the September garden, plant mustard, radish, turnip, onion and pansies galore.  PS