Omnivorous Reader

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Putting the Pieces Together

Frances Mayes takes a tour of marriage

By Anne Blythe

Ever wonder what it takes to make a good relationship great or how to keep a great relationship from becoming average? Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, gingerly guides readers through such questions, and more, about the nature of relationships in her new novel, A Great Marriage.

The 84-year-old author has generated an extensive list of bestsellers in the nearly two decades since her memoir about purchasing, restoring and living in an Italian villa became the basis for a Hollywood movie starring Diane Lane. Her forte — travel and food writing — is evident in A Great Marriage, a love story based largely in fictional Hillston, a North Carolina town with similarities to Hillsborough, where Mayes and her husband spent many years in a historic home along the Eno River.

Whether it’s through a Lowcountry seafood boil on fictional Indigo Island, a pub meal, too much Scotch on a drunken night in London or accounts of homes, streetscapes and waterscapes scattered throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, San Francisco and London, Mayes’ descriptions have transportive power.

A Great Marriage opens in Hillston at a lavish dinner party celebrating the whirlwind romance and engagement of Dara Wilcox, a well-to-do aspiring law student who grew up in the quaint town, and Austin Clarke, an affable young British architect working temporarily in New York. The two met at a New York art gallery when Dara was visiting from Washington, D.C., for the weekend. “They looked at the contorted, deflated gray balloons glued to a manhole cover for a full minute, then at each other,” Mayes wrote. “They started laughing.”

While it depends on which character is doing the storytelling to be sure who picked up whom, there’s no question that Austin and Dara are drawn almost instantaneously to each other. They fall feverishly in love, determined to make their lives together work even though they live in different cities and are at different stages professionally.

When a glass of red wine is spilled at the bountiful meal Dara’s parents prepare for their spirited daughter, her genial and well-mannered fiancé, friends and family, it does more than make a mess. Not only does the wine stain the white tablecloth and napkins, it splashes onto Austin — and portends turmoil ahead.

Shortly after that night, Austin gets tumultuous news from London that changes his life and the trajectory of the romance that had seemed destined for the wedding aisle. He’s about to be a father. Adding more drama to the mix, the mother-to-be of the child conceived after a night of heavy Scotch drinking has a potentially fatal medical condition.

Suddenly the engagement is off.

Austin moves back to London, unsure of what fatherhood will look like for him.

Dara is gobsmacked and seeks solace from her parents in North Carolina, her grandmother on the South Carolina coast, her good friends in San Francisco, and a crew of artists with whom she spends a summer helping to give new life to an old seaside motel.

There’s an assemblage of characters that Dara and Austin call on as they go their separate ways; some better fleshed out than others. We meet many of them in the opening pages during the engagement celebration, but sometimes it can be difficult to take them all in. It can feel as though you’re at a dinner party where you barely know the hosts or the guests and you’re constantly trying to figure out how they’re connected to one another.

Stick with it. As the story unfolds, the connections become clearer and it’s easier to distinguish the incidental characters from those who are key to the plot line.

Dara’s mother, Lee, a university professor in Chapel Hill who spent her career writing a book about William Butler Yeats, and her father, Rich, a journalist who gets plum travel assignments, have one of those marriages that seems in balance. Dara’s grandmother Charlotte, or Mimi, as she calls her, has had more than one marriage, but is so well-versed in the trials and tribulations of the institution that she has written two books on the subject — The Good Marriage, which sold millions of copies; and The Good Divorce: It’s Never Too Late, also a bestseller. Austin’s father, Michael, and his sister, Annsley, are booksellers in London who come to his rescue as he ponders life without Dara.

Life lessons are dished up throughout the book about the meaning of marital vows and what makes a great marriage. Mayes is deft at showing the many angles of the predicaments Austin and Dara have found themselves in, making it possible for readers to empathize with each one.

Some might find it difficult at times to relate to Dara, who has the freedom to stay with friends for weeks at a time and travel here and there, seemingly without responsibility. There’s a bit of a fairy tale feel to the book.

But if you’re in the mood for some armchair travel and a glimpse into a world where people have the luxury of hopping across a country or an ocean in search of happiness, A Great Marriage offers a great escape.

Five for the Hall of Fame

FIVE FOR THE HALL OF FAME

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Archives: October 2024

Five for the Hall of Fame

The new inductees to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame include two bestselling novelists, a famed author-educator, a world-renowned master of haiku and a former North Carolina poet laureate. Ron Rash, Kaye Gibbons, Anna Julia Cooper, Lenard Moore and Joseph Bathanti will join the pantheon of North Carolina’s most celebrated literary voices in the biannual induction on Sunday, Oct. 6, at 2 p.m., at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. The festivities are free of charge and open to the public.

Anna Julia Cooper

It has been 60 years since Anna Julia Cooper departed the world at the age of 105.

Consider for a moment the breadth of her life: Born into slavery in Raleigh in 1858, three years before Fort Sumter was fired upon, Cooper was the youngest child of Hannah Stanley, a woman enslaved by the man who was presumably Anna’s father. On Feb. 27, 1964, Cooper died in her sleep in her Washington, D.C., home, just 17 days after the Civil Rights Act passed in the United States House of Representatives, and a few months before Lyndon B. Johnson would sign it into law.

“It isn’t what we say about ourselves,” she told an interviewer on her 100th birthday, “it’s what our lives stand for.”

The life of Anna Julia Cooper — educator, essayist, poet, scholar, cultural critic and theorist — was the subject of a recent play, Tempestuous Elements, written by Kia Corthron and performed at the Arena Stage in D.C. “Yet for all her accomplishments,” said a review in the Washington Post, “Anna Julia Cooper remains a relatively obscure figure. Kia Corthron’s Tempestuous Elements . . . gives Cooper the Mount Rushmore treatment she so richly deserves.”

As another reviewer remarked, “My main question is, why didn’t I know about her until this play?”

In 1867 Cooper was among the first students admitted to St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, an Episcopal school founded in Raleigh to educate those freed from slavery. Even there she bristled at excluding women from courses in theology and the classics. In 1877 she married George A.G. Cooper, a teacher at St. Augustine’s who was 14 years her senior. He would die two years later.

In 1881 Cooper enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the U.S. to admit both Blacks and women. Even there Cooper had to fight, successfully, to gain admittance to the “gentlemen’s course” of study. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1884 and followed that with a Master of Science degree in mathematics in 1887. Shortly thereafter she was invited to join the faculty of what would become known as M Street High School, later Dunbar High School, in Washington, D.C. In 1892, Cooper authored A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, a collection of essays credited as the first discourse on Black feminism.

At the beginning of one chapter, Cooper mentions a book titled Shall Women Learn the Alphabet, which proposes that such a thing should be prohibited by law. “Please remember this book was published at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Cooper continued. “At the end of its first third, (in the year 1833) one solitary college in America decided to admit women within its sacred precincts, and organized what was called a ‘Ladies’ Course’ as well as the regular B.A. or Gentlemen’s course.

“It was felt to be an experiment — a rather dangerous experiment — and was adopted with fear and trembling by the good fathers, who looked as if they had been caught secretly mixing explosive compounds and were guiltily expecting every moment to see the foundations under them shaken and rent and their fair superstructure shattered into fragments.”

So, yes, this was a woman who could write.

In the wake of the international success of A Voice from the South, Cooper addressed the World’s Congress of Representative Women held in conjunction with the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. In 1900 she was on the executive committee of the first Pan-African Conference in London and was the only woman ever included in the American Negro Academy.

In 1902, Cooper became the principal of the M Street High School, and it is her five-year stint there, confronting the racial and gender inequities of the Jim Crow era, that serves as the basis for Tempestuous Elements.

Cooper insisted on a college prep, classical liberal arts curriculum. M Street sent graduates to Harvard, Yale, Brown and Oberlin. She invited W.E.B. Du Bois to address her students. It was her bristling refusal to dumb down the curriculum that led to her confrontation with a white-dominated board of education that was insisting on a “colored curriculum.”

According to Shirley Moody-Turner, the editor of The Portable Anna Julia Cooper, “The tactics used to discredit Cooper followed a recognizable pattern: public shaming, presumed incompetence, questioning her professional judgment and other innuendoes used to cast doubt on her fitness to lead.” This included rumors of a liaison with John Love who, along with his sister, was taken in by Cooper after they were orphaned and continued living with her into adulthood.

Lastly, Cooper was accused of insubordination, of which she was profoundly guilty. She was dismissed from her position in 1906. “When Cooper arrived for the first day of school, the janitor barred her from entering the building,” writes Moody-Turner. “Police officers observed from across the street. They were ordered to arrest Cooper if they deemed she was creating a disturbance. With her students watching from the windows, Cooper — always a model of dignity and decorum — exited the school grounds.” Her curriculum, however, survived her.

After the M Street debacle, Cooper taught for four years in Missouri before returning to M Street to teach Latin. Following the death of the wife of a nephew (according to the Oberlin College alumni records), in 1915 Cooper adopted their five children: Anna, Regia, John, Marion and Andrew.

When the children were old enough to be enrolled in boarding schools, Cooper continued her academic pursuits, obtaining a degree from the Sorbonne in Paris at the age of 67, the fourth African American woman to receive a Ph.D. there. Following her retirement from teaching, she became the second president of Frelinghuysen University, an institution that educated Black adults while they continued to work.

Appropriately, Cooper may have written her own epitaph in that long-ago interview on the day she turned 100: “I don’t remember ever having taken anything just for myself.”

Joseph Bathanti

Believing that the study in his home was in such a state of cyclonic disarray that meeting there would be an impossibility, or at least an embarrassment, Joseph Bathanti and I sat together in the humble space — roughly the size of a mini-storage shed — reserved for a professor of English at Appalachian State University.

He was on crutches, though this sounds worse than it was. His tendons, ligaments and joints were taking a breather from long-distance running. On the desk near his phone is an autographed copy of the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It’s separated by a pile of books, a pair of scissors and whatnot from a copy of Howl. On the wall is a photograph of Roberto Clemente, a hero, beside a flier cordially inviting the public to follow the crowd to see and hear Sen. John F. Kennedy in October 1960.

The bookcases — there are exactly as many as the space will accommodate — are filled with volumes standing up, lying down, stacked and tilted, the top shelf crowned with baseballs, bobbleheads, photos of kids and more books. Joan Didion is near Gay Talese, who’s not far from Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, which is right above Becoming a Writer. The chair I occupy beside his desk is covered in garish Picasso-chic fabric. Against the wall behind it is an enormous playing card, the jack of hearts, which served as the cover of his book The High Heart.

Named North Carolina’s poet laureate in 2012, one of Bathanti’s go-to lines is, “Pittsburgh is my beloved hometown, but North Carolina is my beloved home state.” He has taught in our prisons and colleges, been to our hospitals, our shelters, our daycare centers and our soup kitchens. In actual fact, he is Pennsylvania’s gift to us.

Bathanti grew up in East Liberty, an Italian working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh. “My dad was a steelworker, my mother a seamstress. They’re union people. They just work and work and work and work, so my sister and I can have this kind of life,” he says. He came to North Carolina as a VISTA volunteer, fresh out of grad school. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I had a ponderously long list of things I couldn’t stomach the thought of doing,” he says. The first thing he did was meet the love of his life, Joan Carey, also a VISTA volunteer, in the same ballroom that was a set piece in Gone with the Wind.

“Jean Paul Sartre said somewhere that he pretended to be a writer until he became a writer,” says Bathanti. “I think that’s how we go about our lives. We pretend to be a father until we become a father. So, I just stayed with it. I continued to write badly, but I wrote less and less badly.”

He became a teacher at Central Piedmont Community College. “I made a living teaching,” he says. “I haven’t made a living on my writing at all, which most writers don’t. They have a straight job, as I like to say, so they can pay the rent, the gas.”

He fell into North Carolina’s community of writers. Kay Byer. Tony Abbott. Sam Ragan. Ron Bayes. Fred Chappell. Lee Smith. Too many to mention them all. “They invited me to their tables. They talked to me. They read my stuff. Initially you think everything you write is incredibly brilliant like, wow, I just reinvented the wheel. I got more objective about my work, kind of blue collar, shoulder to the wheel, pigheaded, hang in there with it, which is sort of my method. There aren’t a lot of long runs, let’s put it that way. Three or four yards at a crack. But that’s OK,” says the former four-sport athlete at Pittsburgh Central Catholic High.

Having authored over 20 books across various genres, Bathanti has accumulated virtually every plaudit his adopted state has to offer — poet laureate, the North Carolina Award in Literature, the Order of the Long Leaf Pine and on and on. But the Literary Hall of Fame is on another level.

“It means everything,” he says. “I’m terribly grateful that a Yankee interloper, a son of Italian immigrants, has entered the pantheon. To me, it’s about my mom and dad. I’m taking Joe and Rose into the Hall of Fame with me, in a lot of ways. My whole family of immigrants, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, all those people who work so hard, so selflessly. I show up here at age 23, a volunteer to work in the prison system who wants to be a writer but has never written a bloody thing except English papers. I would have never thought that something like that was possible. It was the very beginning of everything happening. It was kind of a magic portal I feel like I stepped through.”

Into our land. Into our literature.

Lenard Moore

It would be ironic if it weren’t so profoundly true that Lenard Moore has used the smallest of nets to capture, in stark and stunning detail, the chaos of our lives and his. A master of haiku and its many associated forms — tanka, senryu, renku and on and on — Moore was the first Southerner and first Black president of the Haiku Society of America, and the author of too many poems to count. He has been published in over 30 genres and translated into more than 20 languages.

With the pockets of his dapper sport coats stuffed with tiny notebooks, Moore doesn’t just write every day; he writes everywhere.

“I write all times of the day,” he says. “I write in the morning. I write at night. Walk through the woods, I write. Go to the beach, I write. In the mountains. It doesn’t matter. I go to basketball games, I always have a journal on me. I might have three.” In 1982, sitting in a Western Sizzlin’ all day, drinking a pitcher of sweet tea, he wrote 1,447 poems, and has stopped counting ever since.

Twenty years ago Moore lost his only child, his daughter Maiisha, a student at East Carolina University, in a car accident two weeks after her 22nd birthday. Her self-portrait is on the wall of his bedroom. There are Chinese fortune cookies wrapped in cellophane on the coffee table in his living room next to his daughter’s dictionary, its well-worn pages marked with as many yellow sticky notes as there are bees in a hive. On the shelf of an end table nearby is Maiisha’s Bible.

“That’s the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s kind of devastating. I went to the library about every evening for a year,” he says. “I wrote about her. I challenged myself. Writing is healing. If you go through tragedy, trauma or whatever, writing is there to help you.”

hot afternoon
the squeak of my hands
on my daughter’s coffin

It became one of Moore’s best-known haiku. “That poem kind of haunted me. At the burial I was the first one they called up to put a rose on the casket,” he says. “I put my hand on the coffin, maybe my hands were sweaty, I don’t know. I remember my hands slipped down the side and there was a loud squeak. It probably was about three days before I wrote it down. The poem just haunted me so I had to write it.”

Born in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in 1958, Moore grew up in rural Onslow County, the eldest child in a large family. He was priming tobacco by age 13, “climbing the tier poles; hanging the tobacco; in the field, on your feet; walking those long, long rows; sunup to past sundown.” He and his brothers chopped wood for his grandfather after school. “I think I got a knack for writing from listening to my grandfather tell stories. I’m sure that had something to do with it. I think if you write your truth and you document it and you try to have structure to it, you will be able to get an audience — if you tell the truth in that work. Emily Dickinson said, ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant.’”

In athletics he excelled on the track team, when he was known not as Lenard (pronounced Len-ARD) but as Dwane. He ran the mile relay for White Oak High School, and he and his sister, Angela, cleaned up at local dance competitions in the ’70s. “Sports helped me,” he says. “I don’t give up.”

He won his first poetry prize in 1981 as a member of the 139th AG Postal Company stationed in Stuttgart, Germany. Back in the States, looking for that “audience,” he made sure he had “52 envelopes out at all times” to publications large and small.

Much of Moore’s work shares a kinship with the blues and jazz, his tight language giving form to genres that can expand and contract with the very lack of it. “I’ve performed a lot with jazz musicians all over the country, Canada, too. Hopefully, that’s a trademark of my work. Music,” he says. He writes about Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Nneena Freelon, John Coltrane and Nina Simone, but also of the clubs, as in the last two stanzas of “Girl Tap Dancing.”

She clicks, pats, taps

Shoes shocking the floor,

Arms swirl, whirl,

Legs stamp, swing,

Feet notes smoke, beat

The floor, the floor.

She taps, clicks, pats,

This sister firing the floor,

Arms encompass endless circles,

Legs slide, glide,

Displace air, filling space,

Black feather bobbing as she taps.

“This great community of writers, I’m humbled and honored to be a part of them,” says Moore of his induction into the Literary Hall of Fame. “It means a lot when home celebrates you. Home appreciates your work. Home gives you a nod to what you’re trying to do. Trying to document, write about the natural world, write about family, write about relationships, write about music. It makes me feel good that North Carolina appreciates that.”

Kaye Gibbons

Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina, in 1960, to Alice Dorothea Gardner and Charles Batts, a tobacco farmer. After their deaths, she lived with different relatives before settling in with her brother and his wife in Rocky Mount, where she graduated from high school in 1978. She attended North Carolina State University before transferring to UNC-Chapel Hill to study Southern Literature with Louis Rubin. In 1984, she married Michael Gibbons, a landscape architect.

That same year, at the age of 24, Gibbons wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster, published by Algonquin Books, the company Rubin founded in 1982. Praised as an extraordinary debut, Eudora Welty described the work as possessing “the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word.” Walker Percy said, “Ellen Foster is a Southern Holden Caulfield, tougher perhaps, as funny . . . a breathtaking first novel.” In 1987, the novel won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, the Louis D. Rubin Writing Award, and other major awards. Now considered a classic, it is taught in high schools and universities, alongside works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. The book has been widely translated and was produced for CBS television’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, starring Emily Harris and Jenna Malone.

Gibbons’ second novel, A Virtuous Woman, also received wide praise in the United States and abroad. The story, told in the voices of a dying wife and her widowed husband, was dubbed “a small masterpiece” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Both Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman were chosen as Oprah Book Club selections in 1998 and led the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks.

In 1989 Gibbons received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a third novel, A Cure for Dreams, published by Algonquin in 1991. Writing about three generations of women, she used transcripts from the Federal Writers’ Project of the Great Depression, housed at Wilson Library in Chapel Hill. Gibbons said she discovered for the first time “the voice of ordinary men and women as a pure form of art and force of nature.” The Los Angeles Times Book Review described the novel as “full of unforgettable scenes and observations, characters drawn surely and sharply, and writing that is both lyrical and lightning keen.” It won the PEN Revson Award for the best work of fiction published by an American writer under 35 years of age, the Oklahoma Homecoming Award, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, and the Nelson Algren Heartland Award from the Chicago Tribune.

When Charms for the Easy Life was published in 1993, it became an instant bestseller. The novel takes place between 1910 and 1945 in the home of three generations of highly intelligent and forthright eastern North Carolina women. It was followed by Sights Unseen, published in 1995, and a winner of the Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Chronicle.

The following year, her sixth novel, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, was a story set during the Civil War. The Orlando Sentinel found it to be “a muscular narrative that humanizes all sides of that bloody conflict — North and South, Black and white, male and female.” Gibbons was described as “one of the most lyrical writers working today” by Entertainment Weekly.

In 1996 she became the youngest writer to receive the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, recognizing her contribution to French literature. She spoke at the Pompidou Center in Paris and at the University of Rennes. In 1998, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature and, in 1999, North Carolina State University awarded her the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. She also received the Carolina Alumni’s Distinguished Young Alumni Award and was invited to become a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She served as a judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards and wrote the introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Other Stories.

Divining Women, published in 2004, is set during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Gibbons also wrote The Other Side of Air that year, which was left unfinished after the death of her close friend, the writer Jeanne Braselton. The sequel to Ellen Foster — The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster — was published in 2005.

Gibbons is currently working on a memoir about the intersection of mental illness and creativity in her work, and has spoken and written about the need to remove the stigma from illnesses, like bipolar disorder, which she was diagnosed with in 1981.

— Adapted from the N.C. Writers’ Network

Ron Rash

Finding Ron Rash’s home is easy enough: Bear left at the tethered goat and keep climbing. Both a resident and chronicler of the high country, Rash is praised for his portrayals of the struggles and grit of the common and uncommon folk — from whom he is descended — of the Appalachians. A teacher, first in high school and then in a community college, Rash achieved his first critical success as a poet. His debut collection, Eureka Mill, draws on the experience of his grandparents’ generation, migrating from the mountains to find work in the cotton mills and the cultural upheaval attending it.

Though Rash has become internationally known as a novelist, his work stayed home in the mountains. His bestselling 2008 novel Serena is the story of a newlywed Northern couple, George and Serena Pemberton, and the full-blooded ruthlessness of the title character as the couple cause multiple tragedies in their pursuit of riches. The book was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, Rash’s most recent novel, The Caretaker, was selected by The New York Times as one of its best books of 2024. “I set this novel on my grandparents’ farm between Blowing Rock and Boone because the happiest time of my life was spent on that farm,” says Rash. “The cemetery (appearing in the novel) is up there. Everything is the way it is in the book. I’ve always wanted to write about that place and finally did.”

Rash’s writing life, in a sense, began with a pulled hamstring — a poet in disguise with a soft tissue problem. Tall and fit, he was a more than serviceable track star running the 800 meters in high school and college. “I’m a terribly obsessive person,” he says. “I’ve never been interested in being well-rounded. I was training one day in the winter and it gave. Sometimes those things can heal but this one wouldn’t. I’d been dabbling with writing but then it was, what now?”

What now became poems and short stories. “I tried to write a couple of novels when I was in my 20s and another one when I was about 30,” he says. “They were terrible. I burned them. Did a service to the world. They were really bad but that was OK, I was learning. I didn’t try to write another novel until I was in my mid-40s. That was One Foot in Eden. I read it and thought, this is something I can have my name on and not be ashamed of.”

By his own admission, Rash’s nature tends to be solitary, and it shows in his workday. “I’m repetitive, structured, ritualistic. I eat breakfast, exercise for an hour, get a big thing of unsweetened tea. Get my pencils laid out. Everything kind of has to be in the right place. I like to write in my office (at Western Carolina University) because it’s so monastic.”

The session may last an hour or six. “When I was working on Serena I’d go 10 hours a day at times,” he says. “The part I love is editing. I hate first drafts. What I love is getting to the last stages. That’s when I’m just listening to sounds. The writers I love, when you read them you’re gliding. You don’t have those stumbles where the sentence is awkward or the word just seems to be wrong.”

In The Caretaker, Rash writes:

As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.

If Rash showed early symptoms of a man who would lead an author’s life, those signs didn’t come solely in the form of an 800-meter race. “As a child my father had severe mental problems. He had to be institutionalized at times. I would go to my grandparents’ farm,” he says of the land occupied by The Caretaker. “It was peaceful. I could go out in the woods. In a way, I found solace in nature — no TV, no vehicle — and just wander. The land borders the Blue Ridge Parkway. I was like Huck Finn. I was just kind of daydreaming.”

Selection as a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame is particularly poignant for a writer whose work lives so organically within the state. “So many of the writers who have inspired me are in there,” he says. “Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, they’re the generation that showed me the possibilities, and how to do it right. Each of them taught me something different. I think Fred gave me a sense of the possibilities of humor. Robert Morgan really showed me the possibilities of the details, the significant details of a place, knowing the landscape. Lee opened up the possibilities of writing stories. A wonderful sense of storytelling.”

His list of mentors, real and spiritual, unwinds as he talks: Thomas Wolfe; Robert Penn Warren; a bushel of European writers introduced to his universe by Chappell.

To the extent to which such honorifics are capable, there is one thing the Hall of Fame can do. “I am drawn to things that can be forgotten,” says Rash. These five inductees will not be among them.

Poem

POEM

Home
Archives: October 2024

October 2024

The Doorman at the
Washington Hilton

Regal in his red cap and Nehru tunic,

he summons with a silver whistle,

depended from a silver tassel

around his neck,

a taxi for Jacob,

our first-born –

mere minutes to make his train

to Philadelphia, then another

to New York, and the plane

to Dubai, then Zambia.

How can it be that you raise children

for the world and they rush off to it,

places and people you’ll never see.

Is that your son, the doorman asks.

When I am unable to answer,

he tells me of his son, in Iraq,

his fear of the telephone

he can’t bear to answer.

All week, this man has held doors for me,

hailed cabs,

smiled as if he did not have such a son.

    — Joseph Bathanti

Out of the Blue

OUT OF THE BLUE

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Archives: October 2024

The Perfect Month

Farewell to heat; bon voyage to humidity

By Deborah Salomon

October. Not a mellifluous word. Unlike April, May and June, not a name for a baby girl, either. But oh-so-welcome.

Looking through hundreds of columns from a dozen publications, I see a pattern: In my life, seasons call the shots, index the memories. Subjects range from Cape Cod Julys with three kids and a cranky basset hound to skiing in March, when a warm sun turns powder to slush. May means dreaded hay fever. Gray, raw November finds Tom turkey thawing on the screened porch. August is when denim blue ring binders and black and white-splattered composition books fill the stores.

But for me, the most beautiful, the only perfect month, is October — even though here, the feel of October may not arrive until the calendar says it’s the early days of November. I’ll know it’s October because one morning I’ll wake up to air squeezed dry of humidity and temps beginning with a 5, not a 7. The afternoon sun may fall low on the horizon but our pines don’t respond by turning a New England red, yellow and orange.

Years ago, I found one scrawny maple bordering Dollar Tree on Brucewood Drive. Its few leaves were bright red. I make a pilgrimage to it every October.

These autumn allusions result from living most of my life in New York, Vermont and Canada — also Asheville, which puts forth a decent October although nothing as pungent as MacIntosh apples being pressed into cider. The finest French pastry cannot compete with October’s first cider doughnut. But watch out. Every rose has a thorn. This process attracts yellow jackets eager for a last sting before the first frost.

Without October, hooded sweatshirts would be superfluous: too hot for September, not warm enough for November. All summer I daydream about fleece against bare skin. That and football, from the days my son was the high-scoring running back on his high school team. Otherwise I’m cool on football — a brutal sport, difficult to understand, painted in mud, blood and sweat on the evergreen turf.

Corduroy and flannel appear on autumn’s fashion runway. Nobody rakes leaves in Yves Saint Laurent.

October, I’ve noticed, reverses summer’s deleterious effect on appetites. Soup and stew reappear with chewy sourdough for dunking. Oatmeal regains its stature, in bowls and cookies. Beer is celebrated, as though it needs a fest. After months of grilling, cooks fire up the oven for a meatloaf to create thick sandwiches on rye for Saturday’s tailgate with real football folks.

I looked up holidays assigned to October; most are silly and commercial except for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, when pink rivals Halloween orange and black. One year KitchenAid marketed a bright pink stand mixer.

In colder climates October stands as the bittersweet portal to winter. Not here, where golf is played on Christmas Day and nobody buys snow tires. But to me, month number 10 will forever remain the glorious conclusion, the reward for surviving June, July and August when the electric bill is more dreaded, even, than the bugs.

So, once again, welcome, October. I am so ready.

Art of the State

ART OF THE STATE

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Earth Is at the Center

Christina Lorena Weisner’s art explores new frontiers

By Liza Roberts

Christina Lorena Weisner’s art emerges from her deep connection to the earth, to its systems and rhythms, its elements and mysteries. She studies the planet like a scientist and discovers it like an explorer, venturing to its far ends to record its extremes in person, to live within its phenomena. She turns her insights into art she hopes will inspire awe for our planet’s grandeur and empathy for its vulnerability.

Her latest fascination is the North Pole, where she spent two weeks immersing herself last spring with an expeditionary art and science residency called The Arctic Circle. “I can only describe it as the most impactful experience of my life,” Weisner says. “I’ve been interested in water for a long time, and I wanted to immerse myself into this landscape of glaciers in order to better understand it.” 

The expedition’s ship, which carried 30 fellow resident artists and scientists, took Weisner and others to the Svalbard Archipelago by outboard Zodiacs twice a day, always surrounded by “a triangulation of guards with guns” to protect them against polar bears. While ashore, Weisner planted an orange safety flag in the icescape, making it a recurring motif in her photos. She also used a drone to shoot video from above and collected plastic. 

“You’re in a land that you know is changing, you’re looking at a glacier that might not be there in 100 years. You’re looking at history,” she says. That history was evident in other ways, too, like a massive pile of whale bones left behind by 19th century whalers, and the detritus left behind by scientific explorers of that time. “There were many instances where I was thinking of human history as it relates to geological time,” Weisner says. 

The trip “was the catalyst for a whole new body of work,” says Weisner, who is headed back next May. That work includes still photography of that mythic frontier, sweeping video and installations that incorporate pieces of plastic she collected in and around Svalbard.  

Recently, her work was in Surface and Undercurrents, a group show at Dare Arts in Manteo, and this month she is part of a group exhibit at Emerge Gallery & Art Center in Greenville. Next April she will be featured in a group show at Central Connecticut State University on climate change in the Arctic, and in June her work will be exhibited in a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Arlington, Virginia. 

A native of Richmond, Virginia, Weisner says she can trace the beginnings of her work as an artist to a job she had with Nag’s Head Ocean Rescue in her early 20s. When she wasn’t saving swimmers, she stared out at the ocean for 10 hours a day. “I would watch the sun move across the sky and the moon come up,” she says. “I was very aware of these bigger processes — these large-scale movements, like waves coming over from the coast of Africa — that we’re not often aware of.

Other little-seen influences in her work come from her wide-ranging education, which includes an MFA from University of Texas at Austin and separate undergraduate degrees in both world studies and fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. The interplay between humans, time and the planet has long been a theme in her work. As a former competitive swimmer and regular runner and biker, she experiences the world in a visceral way, creating art that is informed by the way we live within the world and the way the world lives with us. 

From her home in Kitty Hawk (she’s soon to move to Duck, two Outer Banks towns away), Weisner rides a bike or runs along the beach every day to note its transformations. “It’s the same beach, but it’s completely different, the water color, the form of the waves, the temperature of the wind,” she says. Sometimes she finds objects to incorporate into sculpture as she goes. 

Waves and wavelengths — audio, seismic and light — all inspire her. A meteorite impact crater in Southern Germany was the subject of sculpture and installation art she created with the Fulbright Grant she was awarded in 2013; she used seismometers to record earthquakes as part of a Mint Museum installation in 2018.

One early morning in March 2022, I had the chance to witness her in action. On the shores of Kitty Hawk Sound, I watched as she zipped up her wetsuit, assembled a series of floating sculptures, and waded with them into the frigid waters. The sun wasn’t fully up, the air was barely 40 degrees and the art she was wrangling was bigger than she was. Weisner took it all in stride. In a matter of minutes, she’d glided 50 yards from shore and her art was floating all around her.

The largest of the three pieces of art with her that morning was one she’d attached to her outrigger kayak and towed 275 miles down parts of the Eno and Neuse Rivers and through the Ocracoke Inlet in 2019, recording audiovisual information and environmental data (including a panther sighting) along the way. Two smaller works included discarded beach chairs from one of her regular oceanside jogs.

Her approach with every subject, Weisner says, is to embrace what she doesn’t know, and to let her new knowledge as well as her material guide her. 

“I’m still a process-oriented artist,” she says, one focused on “openness to material and play, not taking my work too seriously . . . and not being too pigeonholed.” She thrives when she can employ all of her senses in the making of her art, especially work that involves nature. And she loves making connections across time and place. 

When the polar vortex winds of 2022 washed an old canoe up on the side of the road near her house, for instance, she picked it up and brought it home. “It had beautiful layering on it,” she says. “The water had rotted holes into it. I think it had been submerged in the sound for a couple of years.” 

The fact that winds from the Arctic dislodged it and brought it to her North Carolina shore fascinated her, she says, and that canoe has become part of her latest Arctic-inspired installations. “No place is an isolated place,” says Weisner. “Everything we do — everything that happens in one geographic location — impacts other geographic locations.” 

Birdwatch

BIRDWATCH

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They’re a Hoot

Keep a sharp ear out

By Susan Campbell

Listen . . . an eerie trill or spooky shriek from out of the darkness at this time of year just might indicate the presence of an eastern screech-owl. Territorial adults readily use a mix of screams, tremolos with different pitches and long trills to advertise the boundaries of their home range. Their vocalizations are remarkably loud for such small birds: Screech-owls only stand about 8 inches high. They can be found in forests all over North Carolina, especially in thick pine stands, so much of our Piedmont habitat is great for them. Furthermore, they are with us year-round.

Eastern screech-owls can be either a dull gray or a rich rufous color. Dark splotches and vertical striping on the breast and belly provide excellent camouflage against tree bark, where they can be found roosting during daylight hours. Tufts of feathers on the head give an eared or horned appearance. They may be sitting close to a tree trunk or peering out of a cavity. As is the case with most raptors, females are larger than males. Nonetheless, females have higher pitched calls. Rarely are they seen, unless crows or flocks of songbirds signal their presence by frenzied flight and raucous calling.

This species is found throughout the eastern United States as well as along the Canadian border and in easternmost Mexico. Although they may wander somewhat outside of the breeding season, eastern screech-owls are not migratory. These diminutive owls breed in the springtime. Pairs, who usually stay together for life, nest in cavities, utilizing old squirrel or woodpecker holes as well as purple martin houses and wood duck boxes. Not surprisingly, pairs of screech-owls will readily take to boxes made to their exact specifications. A female simply lays up to six white eggs on the substrate at the bottom of the cavity. Incubation takes about a month, and then the young birds take another month to develop before they fledge. During this period, while the female remains on the nest, her mate will hunt nightly for the growing family.

Eastern screech-owls eat a wide variety of prey. Rodents are a large portion of their diet, but they also readily catch frogs, large insects and other invertebrates, including crayfish and even earthworms. They have been known to feed on roosting birds and the occasional bat. Screech-owls are very much at home feeding on mice, rats or voles that can be found around bird feeders at night — as well as moths and beetles attracted to outside lights. These birds adopt a “sit-and-wait” strategy, then pounce on their prey and swallow it whole. Owl gizzards are specially adapted to digest the soft parts of the creatures they eat and then ball up the bones, fur and other indigestible bits into an oval mass that is regurgitated each day. Favored roost sites or nest cavities can be found by locating piles of these masses (or pellets, as they are referred to) on the forest floor. Unfortunately, screech-owls often hunt along roadsides and are prone to being hit by cars as they swoop low over the pavement to grab a meal.

Overall, however, eastern screech-owls are a successful species that has adapted well to the changes humans have made to the landscape. In fact, urban individuals tend to be more successful than their suburban counterparts, likely due to several factors, including fewer predators, more available prey and plenty of cavities in the landscape. So, spend some time outside after dark and train your ears for the trill or tremolos of our eastern screech-owl. No doubt there are one or two living in your neighborhood. These cute little birds are anything but scary once you get to know them. 

PinePitch

PINEPITCH

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Mi Me Ma Mo Mu

Warm up those vocal cords for the opening of the 18th season of the Metropolitan Opera at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 5, at the Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. The kick-off is in a tavern in Nuremburg, the setting for Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. For additional information call (910) 692-3611 or go to www.sunrisetheater.com.

Tempest Fugit

The penultimate First Friday of 2024 begins at 5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5, when Ashes & Arrows, a country/rock band hailing from Asheville and Arrowtown — one in the mountains of North Carolina and the other a gold mining town on the South Island of New Zealand — takes the stage on the grassy knoll next to the Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad Street, Southern Pines. For information call (910) 692-3611 or visit www.sunrisetheater.com

It’s Killing Us

Judson Theatre Company presents Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Nile beginning Thursday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m. at BPAC’s Owen’s Auditorium, 395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. The play is Christie’s own staging of her famous novel Death on the Nile, set on a paddle steamer cruising the Nile River in 1940s Egypt. The passengers aboard are abuzz when a famous heiress and her penniless new husband board the ship. There’s a spurned lover, a protective uncle, a troubled German doctor, and a host of colorful and mysterious characters adding drama and suspense to this classic mystery. Additional showtimes are: Friday, Oct. 18, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, Oct. 19, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; and Sunday, Oct. 20, at 3 p.m. For information go to www.ticketmesandhills.com or to judsontheatre.com.

Two Fests in One

Pinehurst begins its Octoberfest celebration with Kinderfest from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26, at Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road W., Pinehurst. There will be music, crafts, a bubble artist and trick-or-treating among the participating village businesses. Then, when the kiddies are all worn out, the traditional Octoberfest activities break out from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. For additional information go to www.vopnc.org.

Art in the Streets

The annual Holly Arts and Crafts Festival on the village streets of Pinehurst begins at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 19, and lasts until 4 p.m. or all the pottery, blown glass, stitched art, lawn ornaments, handcrafted jewelry, metal sculpture and pretty much anything else you can think of that someone can make with their own two hands is sold. If that’s not enough, the downtown shops will offer sales and specials. The address is 1 Village Green Road W., Pinehurst, but, like Savoir Faire, it’s everywhere. For info go to www.vopnc.org.

If It’s Halloween, It’s Rocky

And now for something completely different. There will be outdoor screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday, Oct. 25, and again on Saturday, Oct. 26, at 8:15 p.m. on the square beside the Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St, Southern Pines. For information call (910) 692-3611 or go to www.sunrisetheater.com.

Opening Night

The Carolina Philharmonic opens its 2024-25 season with a performance of “Eternal Echoes” featuring American pianist Rachel Breen and the power of Beethoven, the beauty of Smetana and the passion of Rachmaninoff at 7:30 p.m. at BPAC’s Owens Auditorium on Saturday, Oct. 26. For more information go to www.carolinaphil.org.

Get Your Trotter On

Prancing Horse will host its 33rd annual Horse Farm Tour from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20. Guests take a self-guided tour of five of the finest equestrian facilities in the Sandhills. Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 on the day of. The address is Prancing Horse Tent, 6045 U.S. 1 N., Southern Pines and information can be found at www.ticketmesandhills.com.

The Embers on Fire

On Saturday, Nov. 2, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. the Moore Area Shag Society will host a fundraiser at Down Memory Lane, 161 Dawkins St., Aberdeen for the benefit of the Moore/Sandhills Coalition for Human Care. The music features the classic beach sound of The Embers with Craig Woolard. Tickets are $30 apiece and can be purchased by contacting Teresa Robinson
(919) 622-2829.

Paws That Refreshes

The Moore Humane Society’s fundraising auction and gala will have a virtual auction, raffle, music and dinner on Friday, Nov. 1, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Fair Barn, 200 Beulah Hill Road N., Pinehurst. Tickets are $125. For more info go to www.moorehumane.org.

Feel Free to Boo

Work both sides of the tracks when you trick-or-treat the downtown businesses in Southern Pines beginning at 5 p.m. and ending at 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 18. The evening includes hauling those bags full of candy to the Downtown Park, 145 S.E. Broad Street, Southern Pines, for Halloween games, crafts, activities and the best dog costume raffle. There’s no charge to get your multi-generational dress-up on. For more information call (910) 692-7376.

Focus On Food

FOCUS ON FOOD

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Haunted, Not Horrified

Eerie treats for Halloween

Story and Photograph by Rose Shewey

On All Hallows’ Eve, I want to be spooked, not nauseated. Every year, I cringe at the sight of gory Halloween paraphernalia. A matter of personal preference? Perhaps. Now that we are parents to a young child, I have mixed feelings about terrifying the innocent. No trick-or-treater should be scarred for life by a 10-foot-tall disemboweled animatronic zombie reaching for him as he walks up the sidewalk with a bag full of candy wearing a pumpkin suit. What’s wrong with the tried-and-true classics, like black cats, friendly ghosts and cackling witches?

This goes for food as well. In all my recipe-developing, food-styling and photographing years, I have successfully dodged making ghoulish treats for Halloween, goodies as ghastly as cream cheese stuffed “roach” dates, or zombie brain Jell-O shots. Thanks, but no thanks. Esthetics do matter. Unless you have lost a bet, you should not be subjected to red velvet brain cake, or worse — and it can get much worse. So let’s move on to a delightfully, frightfully, whimsical Halloween the whole family can enjoy.

For my part, I’m planning on casting a spell on my All Hallows’ Eve tablescape with chai spiced candy apples — no artificial dye needed, unless you want a deep crimson. I quite like the natural, organic glow of these apples, which retain coloring from the rooibos tea. I have also tested these with natural food coloring, which worked well enough. Keep in mind that at 300 degrees Fahrenheit — the required temperature to create a hard candy shell — most natural dyes fade; some more, some less. If you use red apples (pick your favorite variety), you might fall in love with the naturally tinted, glossy and traditional look of these slightly haunted — but not too much — candy apples.

Chai Spiced Candy Apples

Makes 6

INGREDIENTS

6 apples

400 grams (about 2 cups) granulated sugar

240 milliliters freshly brewed rooibos tea, or filtered water

1/2 teaspoon ground chai masala

1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice (to avoid crystallization)

Optional: India Tree red liquid food color (all natural)

DIRECTIONS

For best results, make sure your apples are unwaxed or remove wax prior to making the candy by dipping apples into boiling hot water for 5-10 seconds, then wipe off wax immediately with a kitchen towel. Apples may turn brown from this procedure but wax could cause unsightly air bubbles in the candy shell, so use this method as needed. Make sure your apples are completely dry, twist off stems and insert lollipop sticks or small but sturdy wood sticks. In a medium-small pot combine all ingredients (except for food coloring, if using) and slowly heat the mixture until it comes to a boil. Allow the sugar to boil gently until the mixture turns an amber color or a thermometer registers 300 degrees Fahrenheit — the hard crack stage. Turn off heat and immediately add food coloring and start dipping apples. Set apples on parchment or wax paper until the candy shell has completely hardened. Store in the refrigerator.

Southwords

SOUTHWORDS

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CSI Veggies

There’s a fine for that

By Beth MacDonald

I’m usually the person others make an example of. So when I nervously moved to a very public apartment building in bucolic Pinehurst, I was anxious about all the rules I would accidentally break. If the complex had a yearbook, I’d surely be voted most likely to get fined.

Someone once told me to be less obvious about being awkward. “Don’t just throw it out there. Be more subtle,” they cautioned, as if opening my mouth didn’t give me away. I trip while standing still. I own being weird. I have tea towels that say “Don’t Trust Anyone Who Can Spell Gonorrhea On The First Try.” That’s gotta be a fine.

I adopted a sweet dog who is as clumsy as I am. It has already tried to clothesline me with the leash at least 6,475 times and pooped on the sidewalk. I wasn’t about to get fined for that so I found a new talent in scrubbing concrete. 

I learned that my precious large dog is afraid of tiny dogs. Very afraid. One evening a very small dog activated my dog’s Power Ranger mode. He took off, knocked me down, dragged me a few feet at the end of the leash (I mean, who’s leashed to who here?), and then disappeared. I got to my feet and proceeded to canvas the 745 witnesses. Which way did he go? Everyone pointed in a different direction. He had run straight home, jumped the patio fence, and was tapping his paw and wagging his tail impatiently waiting for me after my 30-minute search.

My lovely new complex (living, not psychological) has a putting green, dog park, pool, playground and courtyard. It also has a gardening spot. I didn’t know if it was a community gardening spot open to all or if it was specific to one or two tenants. I just knew that I passed it on my way to my concrete scrubbing job.

I do know I didn’t plant anything there. Much like a cornfield or cotton field one sees on a country road, I didn’t plant it, so I don’t pick it. I do have a few herbs on my patio. Legal herbs. I carefully planted them in little pots that say “Plant Coffin” and “Pray for Me.” Some people have a green thumb, I have the kiss of death. Often, it’s a quick end. Sometimes they linger, suffering a slow and painful demise after an overwatering torture ritual.

Today I passed the garden and there was a giant sign posted that said, “Food is not free, farmers tend to these gardens.” Apparently I am no longer the frontrunner in the neighborhood crime wave. Someone is going to pay a hefty fine for this, and it won’t be me. Yes! I decided to investigate, CSI Apartment-style.

By the looks of the hastily scrawled writing on the sign, the victim is very angry. Perhaps someone had absconded with a prize tomato destined for a promising caprese. You don’t just let something like that go. I even began to worry about the exposed basil on my patio. Was that in danger too? The sign is by the sidewalk. Was it a drive-by? A random act? I don’t think so. I think it was deliberate. I think it was an inside-the-courtyard job; this didn’t come from beyond the sidewalk. The perp knows what they’re doing. Have they been driven underground, maybe started smuggling their veggies out of Harris Teeter? Was this a hate crime? No. There aren’t any smashed tomatoes.

I know one thing: I need to find a hobby. I thought about writing something on the bottom of the sign:

Dog Walker Seeks Hobby

(Vegetable perp interested in socially constructive activities should contact woman conducting garden investigation for more details.)

Is that too obvious a trap?

I met the gardener in the natural course of my investigation. He is such a kind man! He didn’t deserve this. I also found out it was a pepper. He didn’t have a recent photo. The description was “green and shiny.” My basil might be safe.

It turns out this vegetable thievery is a recurring problem. Hooligans live among us. I have since started my own Neighborhood Garden Watch Program from my patio. I bought a pair of binoculars and some night vision goggles.

Between my dog fines and the CSI Garden crimes, I have gotten to know several neighbors. All of them are so kind. They have even forgiven me my tea towels.

Almanac October

ALMANAC

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Almanac October

By Ashley Walshe

October speaks through the beaks of 1,000 crows.

Can you feel them gathering? Murders of 20, 40, 60 strong, each bird like a sibyl gone mad.

“The sun is sinking, sinking, sinking,” they shriek, raspy voices harsh and urgent.

You know it’s true. The days are much too dark, too soon. And yet, right now, the sky is a cloudless blue; the maple is thick with yellow leaves; the light has washed everything golden.

Don’t let the raucous birds rip you from the moment: The warmth of sunlight on your face; the scent of wet earth; the swirl of amber leaves somersaulting through endless azure.

The crows kick it up a notch, throw back their ink-black heads, blurt their ghastly premonitions until their babble turns to laughter.

Dark and maniacal, their howling conjures a mighty wind. Do not be frightened by the glossy-winged seers. Let them rally in the shadows while the days are still honeyed. Let them pull you more fully into the luminous now.

Cock your head sideways as the crows do. Can’t you see? It’s all here — the freshness of the season; the bitter whiffs of sweet decay.

Notice that the crunch of dead leaves somehow enlivens you. “Yes, the sun is sinking,” you want to call back. “But . . . the air is alive! The leaves are turning cartwheels!”

A wild laugh rises from deep within you. The light is fading. The crows are cackling. As autumn picks at her own golden thread, even the dead leaves seem to snicker.

Patch v. Orchard

Nothing says wholesome autumn fun like a pumpkin patch. Adorable. But if you’re looking for a pick-your-own adventure with an edge, venture to an apple orchard.

Spend a quiet hour among the trees. Study the gnarled branches. Listen for the thud of ripe fruit knocking against the sleepy earth. Dance with the shadows.

About 75 percent of our state’s apple crop is grown south of Asheville in Henderson County. Should you head west to peep and marvel at the turning leaves, consider stopping by an orchard — or farm stand — for the freshest of the fresh. 

At the very least, snag a gallon of cider to-go.

I remember it as
October days are always
remembered, cloudless,
maple-flavored,
the air gold and
so clean it quivers.

— Leif Enger,
Peace Like a River

Color Crescendo

True leaf peepers will tell you that the best time to hit the Great Smoky Mountains or Blue Ridge Parkway for peak fall colors is the second week of October. Go a week early and be underwhelmed; a week late and you’ll miss it.

Whether or not you take the drive, the color show will surely find you — if not through leaves then through flowers. Kaleidoscopic chrysanthemums. Luminous marigolds. Tender snapdragons. Drifts of brilliant pansies.

And just watch how autumn light transforms every gorgeous hue.