Three Decades of Soothing Sounds

THREE DECADES OF SOOTHING SOUNDS

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The interactive gardens of Star Ridge Aquatics

By Amberly Glitz Weber   •   Photographs by John Gessner

      

Photos Above: Star Ridge Aquatics

In the cool of the morning, as the sun rises over the neighboring crop field and before the dew has burned away in the heat, a misty veil settles around Star Ridge Aquatics. The traffic sounds fade into the background as you roll onto a groomed gravel drive that carries you from Star Ridge Road to the center of the property. It circles an Ohio buckeye tree standing well over 40 feet tall with a beautifully rounded canopy. A rare find so far south, it’s likely the only buckeye tree for miles and miles, yet the transplant has put down deep roots and thrived in its unique habitat.

The same can be said for the man who planted it, Joe Granato. A tall man with a determined expression, Granato founded the aquaponic garden store Star Ridge Aquatics over 30 years ago. A transplant himself, he moved to Moore County in 1990 at age 19, following his parents when new employment brought them south. At the suggestion of a landscaping foreman, the young man looked into the horticultural program at Sandhills Community College.

At the time, SCC’s program was ranked second in the nation, and the Hillside Stream exhibit in the botanical gardens was mid-construction. As a student, Granato participated in the build, which remains a distinctive feature of the 27-acre estate. At the end of the program, he undertook an apprenticeship in a Maryland aquaponics nursery, where he was offered a job.

But Granato wanted to open his own nursery back in North Carolina. After a lengthy search for the perfect property, in 1993 he settled on 6 acres in Carthage, and Star Ridge Aquatics was born.

    

Photos Above: Gary & Sue Howell

Though his skills were honed at SCC, Granato has always had a love for water and the outdoors. “Growing up, he was always outside, bugs crawling all over him,” his mother, Jane Granato, says. “His dad did azaleas and rhododendrons as a hobby. But aquaponics — that was all Joe. In eighth grade he’d design gardens for people and he’d put fountains and water gardens in, which was not common. He was well ahead of the times.”

When Granato opened Star Ridge there was only one other aquatic nursery in North Carolina. It’s not hyperbole to say he was a pioneer in the industry. “In the early ’90s we had 10 or 12 nurseries doing azaleas, rhododendrons, crape myrtles. I wanted to do something different, and water, aquariums, fish, that was always something I liked,” Granato says.

“In a regular garden, there’s no noise, no movement, it’s not interactive,” he adds. An aquaponic garden proffers the babbling sounds of a mountain brook set against underwater uplighting. The gardens are unique, constantly changing, and moving. Waterfalls that rush in summer develop ice on the sides in winter, contrasted by a heated pond.

Granato’s granite demeanor softens, his face lights up and his voice changes as he talks about this special place. Like the constant-motion gardens he designs, Granato is always moving on to the next project. Walking around the property, he shares his plans for the future.

Photo Above: Gary & Sue Howell

“I’m trying to make this more of a destination,” he says. “People travel hours to come here to buy plants and fish, but not everyone has a water garden.” The population influx to Moore County has brought a sharp rise in customers. Granato has been busy diversifying, adding farm fresh eggs, local produce and pick-your-own gardens. Kiwi, muscadine grapes, blueberries, blackberries, tomatoes, pomegranates, peppers and his own honeybee hives grow in harmony on the property. The Farm at Star Ridge was officially branded in 2020, but this year was the first for peak harvests.

“Our blackberries did well this past summer,” he says, pointing out new growth on a biennial cane. One hundred amber jars of honey were bottled, along with homemade jellies put up by Joe’s wife, Rebekah. With the various U-pick fields cycling across the seasons, there’s a draw to visit throughout the year. Families come for the blueberries, too, but once there it’s impossible not to stop and ogle the colorful fish darting playfully around their sale ponds, or the lilies opening into brightly colored blooms.

Many of Granato’s earliest aquaponic gardening clients are now selling their homes or moving to retirement communities, and the still-intact ponds become a feature of the sale. “We do a quality job that lasts,” he says, and new homeowners are eager to continue to care for and improve their backyard aquatic garden.

“The younger clientele is social, they want to create a beautiful, interesting conversation piece with sound, for gathering,” he says. And an aquaponic garden is not simply a conversation piece. “It’s soothing, it’s relaxing. Many people view their fish as pets. When you come out to your pond, your fish swim up to you. They come over to be fed.”

   

Even the humblest of gardeners can imagine being greeted by the welcoming sights and sounds of water trickling through a fountain in their backyard, though for the working stiffs there never seems to be enough daylight hours left to enjoy your hard work. Turns out, there’s a lily for that. Night bloomers, grown in shades of pink, red and white, open at 6 p.m. and close between 8 – 9 a.m. the next morning. Suddenly the scales tip toward a backyard pond and you’re picking out koi colors. For those intrigued by the concept, Granato recently completed a design in the FirstHealth Cancer Center Healing Garden, where a visit to the public space can inspire you to incorporate water into your own serene escape.

Newlyweds Gary and Sue Howell were first introduced to Granato’s designs at a friend’s home, where they had installed a fountain, sans pond. Avid gardeners themselves, the two knew it was a concept that would enhance their current design. “Sue and I are both lovers of flowers and gardens, and we justified the expenditure — which is not inconsequential — because we used to travel a lot,” says Gary. “Now we stay home, enjoying the pond and toddies.”

A retired design engineer, Gary had a number of ideas about the new construction, but he’s adamant the completed design was all Joe’s. He mentions Granato’s skill in combining personal requests, such as the Howells’ desire for a walkway and patio, and crafting them into something truly unique. “There’s a considerable amount of labor that goes into this. It’s very strenuous. There’s no way to design these ponds and waterfalls without placing it all by hand,” Gary says.

After a backhoe and excavator finished the initial stage of clearing, “Joe came in, arranging these rocks of 50-100 pounds himself. He is an artist,” Sue says. “I just like seeing all the nature together, the rocks and the water — the fish have added something unexpected.”

Gary agrees, admitting that their goldfish “have become our critters; we named them and talk to them.” His favorite part, though, is auditory: “There’s something so soothing about the natural sound of the waterfall.”

After three decades in business, Granato says “it’s been fun, it’s been enjoyable,” and he has a lot more planned, from his koi fish and exotic lilies to 7,500 pounds of grapes. “I just need more land,” he says. When he bought this property it was “nothing more than a tobacco field. No trees, no buildings.” Now, standing in the cool shade of towering oaks and the unexpected buckeye, it’s incredible to see what one man’s drive can accomplish.  PS

Aberdeen resident Amberly Glitz Weber is an Army veteran and freelance writer. She’s grateful for every minute spent out of doors, rain or shine.

Location, Lights, Action, Art

Location, Lights, Action, Art

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When The Color Purple came to visit

By Lu Huntley   •   Illustration by Gary Palmer

It begins with a surprise phone call.

In early January 1985, Bill Arnold, appointed by Gov. Jim Hunt as North Carolina’s first film commissioner, called my father, H. Harry Huntley, seeking permission to bring a guest to his Black Angus cattle farm in rural Anson County. The 650-acre property west of Rockingham on the other side of the Great Pee Dee River featured a double-pile, Greek Revival house with a two-story porch, circa 1835, known as the James Charles Bennett plantation house. Used by my father for storage after he purchased the land in the 1960s, the house was unoccupied, with no electricity or running water.

The guest that day was Kokayi Ampah, Steven Spielberg’s location manager. Later that month, an entourage of 14, including Spielberg, came to visit the farm to walk the land and see the house that would become the location for the movie made from Alice Walker’s third novel, The Color Purple, for which she won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Everything about this meeting was as secretive as a spy thriller.

My mother, Bettie, and my father played host to the Hollywood executives in a primitive cabin we call The Buddy House, a part of the property that remains in the family to this day. (My father sold the farm in the 1990s to a couple from Tennessee who completely renovated the James Bennett house and use it as their private residence.) Negotiations securing the use of the farm as the locale for the movie take place inside this rustic, cozy house, warmed by the rebricked double fireplace.

While The Buddy House never appears in the film, it played a vital role, becoming Spielberg’s command center. Once home to a schoolmaster in the late 1800s, it got its name from Buddy Teal, who lived there sometime before my father acquired the property. When Hollywood and crew take over, the primitive house becomes Mission Control. Spielberg has six additional phone lines installed. The dailies are viewed there, and a sizable catering outfit pitches its tent next to it for the actors and crew to take their meals. It’s a happening.

In that hot, muggy summer of ’85, the Black Angus farm is transformed. Epistolary novels — stories conveyed in letters — do not fit a conventional storyline, so an old carved piece of red cedar becomes a mailbox, the device that delivers the narrative in Walker’s tale as it spans 30 years in the life of Celie Johnson, played by Whoopi Goldberg. Those familiar with the movie may remember when the character of Shug Avery (Margaret Avery) retrieves mail from the mailbox at the same time a bad lightning storm blows in. Shug stops in her tracks when she discovers letters to Celie from Celie’s sister, Nettie (Akosua Busia), postmarked from Africa. Shug realizes what has been going on. Albert, or Mister (Danny Glover), has been hiding Nettie’s letters. Shug and Celie discover the cache of letters under a loose floorboard. They begin reading them and piece together the story of Nettie’s life in Africa. Soon Celie pivots toward her truth. We see on the screen the metamorphosis of an abused female bearing unimaginable hardship to a knowing woman with her own desires and dreams.

The mailbox in Spielberg’s movie has a history of its own. Danny Ondrejko was the director’s greensman — the person on a film responsible for obtaining and taking care of anything green or natural on a set. My brother, Bill Huntley, kept a workshop on the farm where he made nature-carved wood sculptures. A gnarly piece of red cedar caught Ondrejko’s eye, and he wanted to know if Bill would sell it. Bill found it in Durham in the spring of ’72 on a walk in Duke Forest. The dead cedar was rooted in the creek bank, and Bill came back with his Disston D-23 crosscut handsaw, squared it off and carried it back to Anson County, where he mounted it on a board. Rather than parting with the piece, Bill told Ondrejko he could use it, as long as he returned it. It becomes the Johnson mailbox, the central prop, in the movie.

In a YouTube special about the making of the film, Spielberg explains how the mailbox becomes its own character, supporting the plot and assisting the transitions. Once the movie wrapped, true to his word, Onkrejko returned Bill’s Duke Forest find. As a thank-you, he gives my brother the postmaster’s (the character is named Mr. Huntley) authentic Rural Free Delivery government issue leather satchel. The old mailbox and mailbag have stayed with my brother ever since. Several years ago, it was plain the bag needed a little tender loving care, so I took it to JDR Leather Works near Whispering Pines, where the satchel with its fading insignia was restored by J.D. Rymoff, a spirited Marine veteran with a love for all things leather.

The first time we see mail delivery in the film, it’s by horse and buggy. The Color Purple, as motion picture, involves fitting anything and everything into a period drama spanning the years 1909 to 1947, including transitioning from horses to horsepower.

As a side note, my grandfather William Henry Huntley’s business in Wadesboro, the county seat of Anson County, began as Huntley Livery in the late 1800s. In 1914, as automobiles became more widely available, my grandfather and some friends took the train to Detroit and drove back early models for hire or to sell. Huntley Livery morphed into Huntley Motors. The business would survive for nearly a century, run by my grandfather, my father (until he acquired the farm) and my brother.

At some point Spielberg, or someone else, learned this part of Huntley family history. Though I do not know who decided to name the postmaster Mr. Huntley, the move from livery to automobile appears in the movie. In a town scene filmed in Marshville — one county over — a brick building in the background is identified as Huntley Livery, Motors and Service. In the foreground townspeople mill about in period dress; vintage wheels debut.

In fact, being on-site on the farm during the sweltering summer, I see all manner of antique autos. I still wonder how these got all the way out there in prime condition and where the beauties may have traveled from. But if I learned anything from the experience of the farm undergoing a complete transformation from a rather large Black Angus cow-calf operation to a full scale Hollywood movie set, let’s just say Hollywood gets what it wants down to the tiniest detail. It’s no surprise some cars in this movie possess movie star status of their own.

I know Grandaddy Huntley would have been in awe of the motorcar lineup. Anyone would. And there is that unforgettable moment when Celie leans out the back of a yellow 1935 Studebaker President Roadster, points two fingers, and up close tells Mister, “Everything you done to me already done to you.”

Shug tells Celie, “Get in the car.” Then Celie leans out farther and declares, “I’m poor, I’m black, and I may even be ugly, but dear God I’m here. I’m here.” And the Studebaker stirs up dust rolling down the long dirt driveway.

Another postal delivery twist happens when I first see the movie in a Charlotte theater and recognize the bells attached to the postmaster’s horse, jingling his arrival. In a later scene when the postmaster delivers by automobile — a 1936 Ford V8 Deluxe Tudor sedan — once again the bells are affixed to the front of the vehicle to signal the post is on the way. I originally found the bells at a Raleigh flea market in the 1970s and quite purposefully placed them on the back side of The Buddy House. Where the bells have ended up, who knows? They are now merely part of Buddy House lore.

The sequel to The Color Purple, will be in theaters this year. The original, nominated for 11 Oscars, left behind a stretch of road near Jones Creek now officially named Hollywood Road, a masterpiece of filmmaking and some rich family memories, bringing to mind a favorite Alice Walker quote: “Expect nothing; live frugally on surprise.”  PS

LuEllen Huntley, associate professor emerita from the UNCW Department of English, lives in Pinehurst. She is originally from Wadesboro, Anson County, N.C.

Four Seasons of Harmony

Four Seasons of Harmony

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Strolling through the Gardens at Sunny Mount

By Claudia Watson   •   Photographs by Laura L. Gingerich

   

The experience of walking through the Gardens at Sunny Mount is like taking a tour of a stunning plant-filled archipelago. Set into the native landscape of pines and wiregrass, Kyle and Mary Sonnenberg’s garden is filled with surprises and a spirit of experimentation. The couple moved to the nearly 7-acre property off a rutted road in McDeed’s Creek in 2016 with the lifetime dream of building a garden without limits.

Kyle’s interest in gardening began as a young boy working alongside his father, mainly doing yard work. Still, he says, it was enough to get him interested.

“When Mary and I married, we had a little house in Texas with a little garden that was mostly vegetables because we had so much sun,” he says, recalling how he enjoyed the connection of taking a tiny seed, nurturing it and watching it grow.

Over the years of his career in city management, they frequently moved to homes with conventional-size lots — small canvases for Kyle’s creative style. But the lack of space didn’t stop him from carefully considering a plant’s texture, form and color when creating their outdoor oasis.

“Now our home sits in the middle of the property and has lots of windows, so the garden needs to look good each season. I work very hard to find plants that bloom each season, so there is always color,” he says. “I gravitate toward the unusual and exotic, and I push the climatic zones.”

Freed from the constraints of an established landscape and rule book, Kyle eagerly began to revive their property. First, he took on the entry by creating circular driveways and paths, and transplanting wiregrass.

“It was a laborious project that included two managed controlled burns to remove brush and deadwood,” he explains. “Suddenly there was an abundance of green. The wiregrass popped back. Then, I found dwarf huckleberry (Gaylussacia dumosa), goat’s rue (Galega officinali), and a small native dwarf iris (Iris verna). It was an education. I understand why the burns are necessary for the preservation and restoration of the longleaf forests.”

   

Fortunately, they also inherited an arc of mature magnolias, hollies (Ilex) and wax myrtles (Morella cerifera) at the side and the rear of the lot, planted by the previous owners. These provide a privacy screen and a dense green backdrop for the unfolding kaleidoscope of color.

As each season unfolds, the garden gradually changes character, shifting from summer’s vibrancy to autumn’s fiery shades of orange and yellow and cooler tones of blue to winter’s delicately faceted silhouettes and spring’s colorful exuberance.

“I love so many plants, especially perennials and shrubs, but as nice as it is to have the repetition of plants and swathes of the same plant and color, I wanted this garden to be different. I use as many different plants as possible — so it’s a bit of everything, wild, exotic and colorful. And the best way to experience it is to stroll through it,” he says, gesturing the way.

The property’s meandering paths encourage exploration of the garden rooms focused on an item or plant theme. Three-dimensional art and tropical-looking plants are the focus of the front garden. There, a metal unicyclist with a glass head announces the garden’s entrance. Giant metal insects prowl the mixed beds of perennials and exotic shrubs. Sabal palms and ornamental Chinese dwarf bananas (Musella lasiocarpa) are considered winter hardy in our 7B planting zone and are grown for their bold-textured foliage. The yellow flowers look like an unworldly lotus. You’ll get a banana only if you’re lucky.

Pretty Copper Canyon daisies (Tagetes lemmonii), discovered on a mountain in Arizona, brighten the garden in late fall with a profusion of golden flowers. A firecracker vine (Manettia cirdifolia) climbs through the branches of a sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana). It bursts with orange and red blossoms that look like miniature firecrackers in the fall.

A garden bench near the home’s entrance is paired with the unlikely — an old, galvanized bathtub. Discovered in a warehouse in Asheville, it serves as an aspiring cocktail table. Unsuitable for setting a tipple, it provides plenty of conversation since it’s a home for native carnivorous pitcher plants and Venus fly traps that eat insects. It also includes terrestrial orchids and rain lilies (Zephyranthes candida) with tiny white star-shaped flowers and upright grass-like foliage that add structure.

   

It’s a relaxed garden. The areas around the home are framed with broadleaf evergreen and deciduous shrubs, native grasses and flowering perennials, creating a sense of enclosure. And Kyle gives plants space to develop and do their own thing. 

His enthusiasm for shrubs is evident, though he does not care for conifers. “They grow those up North, but I’ve been in the South for a long time and am used to these camellias,” he says, adding that deer damage is taking a toll. “I may need to change my ways and try some conifers that taste bad to deer or have unpleasant needles.”

The entrance to the rear gardens features a trough garden — named for the old stone troughs used to feed and water horses — discarded by farmers with the advent of modern plumbing. Now rare, Kyle discovered a cache of look-alike troughs made of soapstone that served as chemistry lab sinks.

Trough gardening is an ideal way to manage collections of plants that have specialized cultural requirements, such as succulents and cacti. His 10 troughs display a cactus garden where stunning dwarf Korean firs (Abies Koreana), with dark green needles and silvery white undersides, mingle with dianthus and yellow cacti.

Ground covers and flowers spill down the berm on the winding path, creating a seamless landscape.

“It’s my homage to Chanticleer Garden,” he remarks, referring to a public garden outside Philadelphia that serves as his garden muse. His eyes survey the large garden anchored by an aging flowering dogwood (Cornus florida). The tree sat alone in the landscape in its younger life, but is now the centerpiece of the garden’s pond. 

Clumps of Stokes asters (Stokesia laevis), rudbeckia, phlox, columbine and the crested white roof iris (Iris tectorum ‘Alba’) thrive on the sunny side of the berm and far from the tree’s canopy. 

   

The shady area under the dogwood is home to shallow-rooted plants that thrive in either part or full shade. Here, hostas, hellebores, ferns, Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum), toad lilies (Tricyrtis hirta), lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis), and the tiny crested iris (Iris cristata) grow together. Low-growing ajuga and green and gold (Chrysogonum virginianum) glue the planting together. All were planted in the tree’s native soil and amended with a small amount of compost to accommodate, not bury, the tree’s roots, creating a healthy environment for all.

The pond is the work of noted landscape architect Vince Zucchino and a sparkling expression of gardening. Carefully placed boulders edge the 3,000-gallon pond and mature plantings tumble over the margins, blurring the water’s edge, making it a place Mary likes to dangle her feet on a hot summer’s day.

An essential design feature is the waterfall. “I didn’t want a gushing waterfall, but one that was weeping and makes ripples in the water,” explains Kyle.

Dragonflies and little aquatic beetles skim the water’s surface, and an abundance of bird life converges on the area guarded by a stone fawn purchased on a trip to the Toronto Botanical Gardens. Calla lilies (Zantedeschia sp.), turtlehead (Chelone spp.), white spider lilies (Hymenocallis latifolia), sedges and pickerel rush (Pontederia cordata) grow in the boggy area of the pond where fish take cover.

Kyle removes the tropical water lilies (Nymphaeaceae) in late autumn and overwinters them. “I put them in buckets with water and stick them in a cool closet, and they return each year.”

Dry gardens surround the pond where the sunlight is intense, and the soil is dry. It’s planted with drought-resistant plants — including cactus, sedums, agave, yucca and Engelmann’s daisy (Engelmannia peristenia), a long-stalked perennial with yellow-petaled flowers and fuzzy green leaves.

Kyle’s secret weapon is a 24-foot potting bench he made several years ago and tucked to the side of the dry garden area. 

“I buy plants small and grow them up in pots. It takes time, but they are less expensive, and they get acclimated and have well-established root systems before they are planted,” he says. “I bring the orchids out for the summer and all the plants I bought that I haven’t planted yet. I didn’t realize how handy it would be until I built it.”

 

At the highest and sunniest location on the property, The Mount, a small lawn with a working sundial flanks an extensive fruit and vegetable garden. Eighteen raised beds offer blackberries, raspberries and a variety of annual vegetables. Espaliered apples and pears line one side; nearby, blueberry, mulberry, native persimmon and pawpaw trees appreciate the sun.

On one side of the lawn is a patio and a crevice garden. It’s a rock gardening style that uses flat stones pushed vertically into the soil from the top. The vertical stones are closely spaced, leaving deep, narrow soil channels for planting xeric plants. “It looks like a mountain range if viewed from the far side of the lawn,” says Kyle.

He does all the garden work and says it takes planning, endurance and patience. “At times, it would be helpful to have a gardener to assist, not a landscape maintenance person, but someone who gardens and knows about plant care,” he says. “I’ve learned my ambitions are greater than I have time to devote to them, at least as far as this garden goes.”

A red metal windmill clanks in the soft breeze above multiple perennial beds as we talk. The effect is magical in the late summer, and it’s a breathtaking place to linger with colors that clash, contrast and harmonize — constantly moving the eye around. It’s a pollinators’ haven with penstemon, coreopsis, echinacea, hemerocallis, salvia, crinum and a lovely scented Thérèse Bugnet pink rose. 

“We often sit out here later in the day when the sky is clear, and we can smell the flowers and hear the hummingbirds as they whiz by,” he says. “It’s peaceful and makes us feel far away from everything.”

The years of work offer moments of harmony. The unexpected diversity of the Gardens at Sunny Mount is a living version of a painter’s palette and perfect for an autumnal stroll through a horticultural paradise.  PS

Claudia Watson is a longtime contributor to PineStraw and The Pilot and finds joy each day, often in the garden.

A Touch of Glass

A Touch of Glass

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The embrace of new minimalism

By Deborah Salomon

Photographs by John Gessner

    

There it stands, beyond contemporary, a stark union of planes and angles. A symphony by Stravinsky. A guitar by Picasso. A figure by Giacometti. Might this be a Tibetan temple? A modern art gallery? The home of a Japanese diplomat?

No, no and definitely not, says Neal Jarest — although he admits people stop, stare and ask questions about his stunning residence in Forest Creek, itself an enclave of diverse architectural styles.

Linear, geometric, composed in black and gray, concrete, metal and glass, this is exactly what Neal and Tanda Jarest wanted — a complete turnaround after years in a 5,200-square-foot, two-kitchen family home bordering Lake Pinehurst, which Tanda describes as “red, green and golfy.”

   

Their motive, however, was familiar. “We wanted to downsize,” Tanda explains. The move offered the opportunity for a unique architectural statement: 3,200 indoor square feet, another 2,000 square feet with a roof overhang. “We wanted outdoor living space, where we could cook and eat around the pool,” she says.

Most furnishings are understated. No kitsch in the kitchen. Cabinets there, in the master bedroom and elsewhere are topped with white countertops, all bare, conveying serenity.

The Jarests call their residence 109 Porte, meaning “gate” in Portuguese, French or Italian. They cite Frank Lloyd Wright as inspiration. But only their architect, Doug Byce, summons the correct words: “An interpretation of Prairie Style . . . married to the ground with long, low, horizontal lines . . . asymmetrically anchored to the Great Room core . . . a massive hip roof floating on a clerestory ribbon window . . . an 18-foot stacked stone chimney surrounded by glass walls. Monochromatic exterior colors anchor the home to the ground . . . and allow it to become a shadow among native longleaf pines,” he writes.

   

Add pivoting doors, polished concrete and walnut floors, and floating ceiling fixtures of the Saturn genre to complete the effect. Visible beyond those half-inch, double-paned glass walls in the great room are a 30-feet by 16-feet pool, hot tub and bocce ball court surrounded by man-made turf, where grandchildren frolic.

“I love to come home from work, have a glass of wine and jump in the pool,” Tanda says. Work is “opulence” itself, the name of the business the Jarests own in downtown Southern Pines offering the world’s finest Egyptian cotton linens, Duxiana beds and residential accoutrements fit for a pharaoh, with sister boutiques in Raleigh and Florida.

      

Neal, from Rhode Island, and Tanda, from Georgia, arrived at Fort Bragg in 1996. She opened Opulence in 1997 in a remodeled gas station. Neal retired from the Army in 2005 and joined her in the business. They played golf at Forest Creek, made friends there — a logical choice for their project. Byce was the architect for Duxiana stores worldwide, with a passion for residential design. He stayed with them for a time, absorbed their tastes and requirements, both structural and decorative: clean lines, no moldings or trim, door sills, or thresholds. They agreed on a floor plan embracing a master suite wing with door opening out to the pool, and a guest wing with two bedrooms, a bathroom and sitting room, with glass door closing off the area but not the light. They broke ground in 2020 on a level, 1-acre site on a quiet cul-de-sac. Move-in date: February 2022.

 

   

Innovations begin just inside the massive front door, where a control room monitors all systems. Down a hallway, the sunken kitchen/dining/great room, with its soaring chimney and 30-foot ceiling, informs visitors that this house pushes boundaries. Once accustomed to the vastness, eyes are drawn to the custom-made dining table, where a vertical slice of native pine, ragged edges intact, is embedded in a black base, creating a 3-D effect that begs touching. Two utility pantries and a laundry room (with a shark-sized goldfish painting) service the kitchen, although Neal cooks most evening meals, burgers to paella, on the Big Green Egg charcoal grill on the veranda.

Two architectural details of the master suite set it apart: a long, narrow window over the built-in drawers overlooks the great room, while the wall separating bed from bathroom ends a foot shy of the ceiling. Automatic blinds provide privacy.

   

Black, gray, sandy beige and white, integral to contemporary interior design, require relief. The Jarests enjoy traveling to sunny environs — Portugal, the Caribbean. In Mexico Tanda discovered Otomi, a native art form that provides splashes of color. These handcrafted embroidery panels depict stylized plants and animals against a neutral cotton background. Tall vertical panels framed in walnut to match the floor overlook the hallway, great room and kitchen. Tanda created other bright spots with paintings by local artist Jessie Mackay. In the master bedroom a trompe l’oeil rendition of a gently draped sheet once hung in Opulence. Portraits of landmark buildings in Germany and elsewhere echo their trips abroad. Not above a touch of whimsy, Tanda lines an open shelf with straw hats and includes skulls — the trademark of Hispanic Day of the Dead celebrations — on throw pillows. Area rugs, few but custom-made in traditional patterns, are carryovers from the Pinehurst house.

   

Throughout the building/furnishing process, husband and wife concurred on most decisions, though Neal concedes, “Tanda has her lanes and I have mine.” When the workout room off a three-bay garage proved a tight squeeze, instead of making do, Neal enlarged it. His décor contributions include a leather sofa in orange, his favorite color, also from their previous home, and a chaise covered in shearling. “That’s from my father’s house,” he says. “I can remember sitting on it with him when I was a little boy.”

“Our tastes have developed over time,” Neal says. “This is where they are now.”

Viewed from any angle this house and its grounds represent a leap from the past into the Jarests’ present — and a stunning personal “gate” into the future.  PS

SPLIT

SPLIT

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Fiction by Valerie Nieman Illustration by Jenn Hales

Andi hadn’t been startled awake for several nights, ever since the contractor fixed that foundation problem, but now she sat straight up in bed. Something was wrong. The house, her new home in a new city, remained quiet, all that groaning and cracking having been eliminated by the repairs. It was that other silence — no hum of cars passing on the street, no sounds of a city waking up. And, she realized as she stared into total darkness, no streetlight glow filtering around the blinds.

For a while, she heard nothing. Gradually, light began to show and she heard a chorus of shrieks and whistles — birds? She got up, shuffled to the back door and opened it on a bright dawn, cornfields stretching flat and green in every direction. The rows came right to her steps, tassels waving well above her head. Blackbirds wheeled in huge flocks.

Her house had moved. And she had moved with it.

Even as she tried to make sense of it, speculating that this looked like Iowa — must be, maybe, everyday, common Iowa — nothing to be afraid of, the rest of her brain was rabbiting around the bonkers impossibility of her situation.

She had loved the cottage from the moment the realtor opened the door, but, after moving in, she came to realize there was an uneasiness about it. Day and night, floors creaked and popped without the weight of a footstep. When she reached to put something in a high cupboard, the top of it did not line up with the ceiling. Everything was slightly off one way or another, but that’s the way old houses were. They settled year by year, in a long, uneven conversation with the ground.

She didn’t miss her previous home. It wasn’t that, at all. When her ex abruptly went away (for good this time), and shortly after so did her job, she’d decided she needed something smaller to meet her changed circumstances. Something older, solid, with its own history.

Stay, or go. It hadn’t been a difficult choice. Her former home had no longer felt like home. It just felt like him, his house, cold all the time.

Three different construction dates — 1921, 1927, 1928 — were listed variously on deeds, descriptions and reports. It made no sense. A house was completed or not in a certain year. The cedar-shake cottage had been moved sometime in the 1970s and new sections had been added, a porch, a deck. Extensions that almost seemed to buttress the square main building, pushing out on three sides.

Andi had become fascinated by the idea of house-moving. It wasn’t unusual, of course; houses were moved out of the path of development all the time. Even lighthouses were raised up on rollers and carried inland, away from the encroaching sea. She remembered reading about a town in Minnesota that was hauled away from mining damage by horses and tractors and a steam engine. Elsewhere in North Carolina, the former village of Avalon had been moved when its mill burned down, the little houses incorporated into the neighboring textile town of Mayodan.

History was like that, for a house or a person — gaps in the record, mysteries.

The recommended contractor came within a week — the benefit of a small town, Andi supposed — and rang the doorbell with his ball cap off, gripped in his hands like he was entering a church.

“Miss Andrea?”

“Andi.”

“Miss Andi. I am pleased to meet you.” He paused and glanced inside. “What were you needing done?”

“I’d like you to look at the foundation.” It sounded too — something — to say she heard strange noises. “I understand the house was moved. Is it well supported? The home inspector didn’t mention anything.”

“Well, you are spot on about the move. I remember when they did it. Quite the show, with traffic held up and all. They put an office building where it used to be.” He kept talking as she led him back to the utility room and the trap door to the crawl space, wondering if a man that old (he had only a fringe of white hair around a polished dome) was agile enough to get around under the joists. But she needn’t have worried — he was quickly out of sight, banging around beneath the floor, and it wasn’t long until he came up out of the hole.

“Found your problem.” He turned off his flashlight, dusted off his hands. “The main support beam, a steel beam at that, has been cut in two.”

“What?” That sounded terrifying, as if the house might bend at the center like a cardboard box and fold itself flat.

“Yep. Might have been part of moving it, I don’t know.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No, no, there’s plenty of support pillars. Just . . . strange.”

She hadn’t been able get the vision of a collapse out of her mind. “Can you put it back together?”

“I can do that, sure. Have to come back with some tools, bolts and such. And good steel.”

And so it was done.

Two mornings after the cornfields appeared, she awoke to the mooing of cows.

She hadn’t ventured into the tall corn, featureless as a sea. Now she looked out on new fields that rolled away over little hills, fields bounded by hedges instead of fences. Brown and white cows. She looked out of windows on each side of the house. Far away she could see a steeple and what appeared to be a castle.

England?

The house did not move on a regular schedule. It stayed in the same place for days, even weeks, then she would hear the wind moaning from a new corner of the eaves and look outside to see — what was that?

She was cautious. When the house set down in a populated area, no one seemed to notice. People apparently could not see the house, but once she stepped off the porch, they could see her. The first time she’d tried, somewhere under a hot, pale sky, black-haired children clamored at her and she ran back inside. They stood for a moment, wide-eyed, letting the stones drop from their hands, and fled.

Did she appear suddenly, popping into view? Was she floating in a bubble like Glinda? No way to tell.

The movement of the house in space and time became wider and wilder. One day she might look out on a Japanese seaside town with little boats and a pagoda, and a couple days later, she’d be in the United States, far to the north, in a logging town at the edge of a redwood forest. The house, severed from a permanent base, had no utilities, but Andi did have a large supply of candles. And a rain barrel that had been strapped to one of the additions.

I am resourceful, she thought. I am doing fine.

Turn and turn and turn again.

The days were long and the nights longer in the wandering house. She missed her friends, especially Nicole, a coworker who had stayed close through both the divorce and her early (forced) retirement from their employer. Nicole had always teased her for overly careful preparation, cautious decision-making. What would she say about this?

Andi even sort of missed her ex. He had been a familiar problem, at least.

She learned how to gather food in exotic places, covering her foreignness with a long, hooded cloak, a souvenir of her role in a college Shakespeare production. Where there was a store, a souk, a market cross, she waited and watched, moving in when the crowds had thinned and the leavings were cheap. The smell of cooked meat made her ravenous.

She could barter jewelry and small items to merchants. Gestures were pretty much universal. As her hair grew unruly and her scrupulously kept-up color faded to salt-and-pepper, with her head down and a hand upturned, she could sometimes gather alms from passersby. No need to speak. Maybe she couldn’t any longer.

Andi fell asleep with the house settled someplace that was high and cold and empty, a steppe. She woke to find it beside a long lake clasped by dark-forested mountains. Well down the shore was a cluster of thatch-roofed cottages.

Hunger drove her to the village and, as she looked for someplace to get food, she was relieved to realize the people were speaking a sort of English. It wasn’t market day, but a house displayed a bush over the door. That meant beer was available, she remembered from a long-ago advertising class.

She nodded to the woman inside, dressed in a bodice and full skirts, her hair covered.

“Beer,” she ventured.

The woman, stout as one of her casks, looked oddly at her.

“Ale?” Andi mimed drinking.

The woman responded by shaking a bucket at her.

Ah. Medieval takeout. She had no pitcher, bucket, anything with which to carry the beer away.

Andi put her hand on a pottery pitcher and indicated that she would buy it. She produced a piece of jewelry she’d brought to trade, an alloy ring decorated with the figure of a nude dancing woman.

The woman backed away, eyes wide, and whispered something that sounded like “elf.” Or “help.”

A man came from outside and she pointed to the ring where it lay. He picked it up and turned it in his dirt-caked fingers, squinted at her, and then spoke to the woman, who hustled off to get someone, a priest, a soldier, someone that Andi didn’t think she should meet.

She gathered up the skirts of her cloak and ran.

The house didn’t move that night, or the next, or the next. She wished it would.

Andi did not go back to the village, fearing people who feared her. Andi imagined the townspeople might think she was something supernatural, in league with the Devil. She also considered that maybe the stylized figure of a naked woman on the ring had offended them. People went past the house, on their way to fields or driving herds of sheep along, without even a glance.

Then a man as dark as a devil stopped right in front, turned and stared into the window.

“I spy a lass, through the window,” he said.

She hid behind the curtain.

“There thou be, though how this house came hither I dinnae ken.” The man began to walk away, and she thought he’d gone until he emerged from the other side, having circled the house. He stepped up onto the porch and came to the door.

“How can you see this house?” she asked, almost whispering into the gap between the old door and the frame.

“Metal calls to me, shaped in some cantrip-time.”

Andi opened the door but stood behind the screen as though that bit of protection would be sufficient to keep out this brawny man. A blacksmith, she realized, his skin and clothing darkened by the smoke of the forge.

“The house moves,” she confided. “It was cut apart underneath and then, when it was fixed, it began moving.”

He cocked his head as he listened, the way a dog turns its head as it tries to tune in its person’s unfamiliar words. “The house is magiked.”

She nodded.

“Gie me leave then to see?”

Andi opened the flimsy door and stood back. The whiff of fire and charcoal came with him. He looked around the room, bemused (What did he make of the black slab of the television, photographs on the wall?) then followed her to the access. Like the old contractor, he moved with the assurance of someone who dealt with problems all the time, physical problems that could be addressed with tools and skill.

He was quickly back up, head and shoulders out of the trap door. He tried to explain the situation, and now she was the one who couldn’t put all the words together. However, she came to understand that he had found the steel beam bridged by the contractor’s plates and bolts.

“Can you fix it?”

“Fixt? Your house is scarcely that,” he said, a smile opening his sooty face. “I’ve a gift from the Fair Folk to forge steel that will nae break nor blunt at the bite. Aye, I can do this task. A wandering heart can be put aright, house or lass alike.”

He heaved himself out of the crawl space. She pulled back, away from his seared hands and leather apron.

“If you do, if you fix — unmend — it, what will happen?”

“The heart was cut in twain to end the wandering. If I take away the clampar, ’twill rest again.”

She thought about the various recorded dates of the house’s construction. Had it skipped from year to year, somehow, appearing and disappearing until it was tamed?

“But where? Where will it be?”

“Why, here, lass! I canna make it skip the sea from one shore to another like a stane from the hand of the giant Benandonner,” he said, laughing. “Here this house stays, and thou with it, or else be ever a-wandering like Will-o’-the-wisp.”

She looked out at the dense forests and the long silvery lake. She was aware of the interest in his merry eyes. And the able heft of the man. Solid, he was.

“My folk will thee like. There’s much eerie hereabouts, m’self not least, though we’ve never seen a lass sa conveyed.”

He offered his fire-marked hand.

“Andi,” she said, as she took it.  PS

A former professor at NC A&T State University and editor for the Greensboro News & Record, Valerie Nieman lives and writes in Rockingham County. Her novel, In the Lonely Backwater, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for 2022.

Don’t Let Them Eat Cake

Don’t Let Them Eat Cake

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Fiction by Brendan Slocumb   •   Illustration by Mariano Santillan

He smelled like the cake factory: frosting, the yeasty stench of batter and butter, but more than anything else, sugar. Baked sugar, tangy and sweet, that coated the back of his tongue and the inside of his eyelashes. Leaving the factory at the end of the shift, he could feel the sugar aroma around him like a coat or a fog, always moving with him. Of course, his friends started calling him Bon Bon. He’d hated the nickname, but by now it had hung on him so long that he didn’t mind it.

He ordered another beer and checked his watch. His buddy, Tig, was late, as usual. Meet me at the bar at 6:30 and DONT BE LATE, Tig had texted him. SERIOUS!!!

Now it was 6:49, and he’d finished the first beer and ordered a second. Why Bon Bon had believed Tig that this time actually was urgent, Bon Bon didn’t know. He’d shown up in his work clothes without changing back into his street clothes, the King Arthur Brand cake flour misting up from his pant legs every time he shifted on the bar stool. 

“You makin’ me hungry, buddy,” Alan, the bartender, told him for the third time. “What do you think of carrot cake? You a big fan?”

“I figured you for a chocolate cake man,” Bon Bon said. “That was your wife in the shop the other day, wasn’t it? She bought the 14-inch and the 18-inch. Double chocolate.”

“Wife loves them,” Alan said, buffing the bar and looking away. His A-shirt, with dozens of stains on it — bourbons, whiskeys, wines — barely covered his paunch. Seemed like Alan loved those chocolate cakes, too.

Bon Bon nodded politely, tried to squeeze out a smile and looked again at the door.

“You must get sick of cakes,” Alan said. “All them sweets. That vanilla confetti cake is my favorite.”

“Never touch the stuff,” Bon Bon said. “I only eat salty stuff. You got more of these?” He pushed the empty dish that had contained pretzels and peanuts towards Alan. The first few months at the factory, Bon Bon had eaten so many pastries that he became nauseated by the sight of anything with sugar in it. 

He looked at the clock. It was 6:54. If Tig didn’t show by 7, Bon Bon was out of there. Home, out of the sugar-stenched clothes and into the shower. He imagined hot water sluicing over him, the powdered sugar circling the drain and disappearing. He fumbled in his pocket for his wallet, looking for a ten, when a familiar voice said behind him, “You stink like the inside of a fat woman’s purse, you know that?”

Tig. Of course. “What?” Bon Bon asked him. “What does the inside of someone’s purse smell like? And where were you?”

“They keep cake in them,” Tig said. “The ladies.”

“Nobody keeps cake in their purse,” Bon Bon told him. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard you say.” And he’d heard Tig say plenty of stupid things over the years.

“Come on, let’s go.” Tig was already heading toward the door.

“Go where?” Bon Bon said. “Why did you want to meet here? Now we’re leaving? What’s going on?” Bon Bon grabbed a handful of the peanut-pretzel snack from the newly replenished dish, thanked Alan with a wave and trotted to keep up with Tig, who was already outside

By the time Bon Bon caught up with Tig, he was almost to his car, a beat-up dark green Chevy Malibu, whose passenger door had gotten side-swiped years ago and was missing the side mirror and most of the chrome trim. Tig was what Bon Bon’s mother referred to as “a character.” Overalls, sleeveless shirt, dirt-and-oil-coated John Deere trucker cap, Reebok tennis shoes so faded and stained with oil and dirt that their color would forever be a mystery. 

“Get in,” Tig said.

“Where are we going? When will we be back? I can’t just leave my car — ”

“GET IN,” Tig said, almost an order this time.

Bon Bon never knew why he got in the car that night. Maybe because he’d done other stupid things with Tig in the past and this was just par for the course. You wouldn’t believe what Tig just did, Bon Bon imagined texting his friends later tonight. It would be fodder for conversation for days to come.

The car stunk of cigarette smoke and chaw. A spit cup sloshed in the dashboard console. Bon Bon shoved McDonald’s wrappers, Entenmann’s boxes, Dunkin’ bags and miscellaneous trash off the seat, and got in. Before he could even buckle his seat belt, Tig spun the tires and headed out of the parking lot toward the highway.

“What’s this about?” Bon Bon repeated, swallowing the last of the pretzels.

Tig smiled. Drove for a minute, enjoying the power. Then, dramatically, he said, “I’m about to make us rich.”

“No,” Bon Bon said.

“Yep.”

“OK,” Bon Bon said. “Let me out. Turn around. Stop this piece-of-crap and let me out. I told you before. I’m not getting involved in any of your messed-up money-making — ”

“It’s guaranteed cash and you’re already in it,” Tig said without missing a beat.

“Stop the car. I mean it.” 

“Too late. You’re going to thank me in about 12 hours.” 

“What the hell are you talking about? Twelve hours? What did you do? What are we doing?”

“I just made you 23K. I get 27K, you get 23K.” 

“For what?” Bon Bon asked. Frustration and fury boiled in his gut the way it often did when he had to deal with Tig. “You just handing me 23K for sitting here?”

“For coming with me, yeah,” Tig said, darting a glance at him. Bon Bon couldn’t decipher it. “All you gotta do is drive when I get sleepy.” The highway spooled out before them, the endless ripple of white lines bisecting the night. Few cars were out this late, and all seemed to be going in the other direction.

“Hell no. I don’t know what kind of craziness you’re getting into, but I’m out. I gotta work in the morning. Turn around. Take me back to my car.”

Tig laughed. “Bro, they won’t miss you at that cookie house. Besides, in 12 hours, you’ll have enough money to quit that job and do something that doesn’t leave you smelling like a giant cupcake. Lose that dumbass nickname. Grown man named Bon Bon. I’m doing you a favor.”

“Screw you. Dammit, I knew I should have just gone home.” 

The car banked around a wide curve, then through a series of up-and-down humps in the road. If you drove fast enough, it was like riding a roller coaster. For an instant, you could lose your stomach as you crested the rise.

On the descent, a thump came from the trunk.  

“What was that?” Bon Bon looked in the back seat, stacked neatly with big square boxes: Macbook Air, read several. UN3481, read others, with the logos of a battery and a flame. They were all laptop computers. The back-seat floor was the usual sea of fast-food wrappers, napkins and trash. Nothing moved.

The thump came again, as if whatever was back there shifted back to its original position.

“What’s going on?” Bon Bon asked. He couldn’t hide the note of nervousness now in his voice. “What’s in the back seat? Is that stuff stolen? You raid an Apple Store or something?” He tried to imagine how many laptops would be worth $50,000. There’d have to be at least twenty-five, maybe more.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” The car was going faster now, well over 80 mph. 

“I knew it. I freakin’ knew it. What did you do? I’m not dealing in stolen goods, Tig. Stop the car.”

Tig groped in the driver side door. Bon Bon thought at first that Tig was looking for his wallet or maybe a soda bottle. But after a moment Tig retrieved a small triangular object that seemed to absorb the dim lights from the dashboard before it resolved itself into a gun. It glittered as if alive. Tig gripped the handle and then the muzzle was pointing, impossibly, at Bon Bon himself. 

“T, what the . . . ” 

“Just shut up,” Tig said. “I’m doing you a favor. Nobody is getting hurt. We walk away with more money than either of us has ever seen.”

Bon Bon had only seen Tig this erratic once before. It ended with Carl Simmons walking with a permanent limp and Tig spending three years in prison for aggravated assault. Bon Bon stared at the dark muzzle of the gun. His mouth had gone dry, the pretzel crumbs turned to gooey dust on his tongue. He wiped his hands on his pants and could feel the flour and sugar coating his palms. He wanted to scream. Instead he took a deep breath, looked out the window into the dark, trying to ignore the feel of the gun staring at him. “OK man, just tell me where you got all these computers from. And what we’re going to do with them.” 

“The less you know the better,” Tig told him. “Get some rest. You’ll take over in six hours. We gotta make the drop by 8 a.m.” 

Bon Bon had heard that Tig had gotten into some shady business while he was in prison. This whole scenario was making more sense. Tig, and now Bon Bon, were driving stolen electronics over state lines. He wondered if $23,000 was worth getting caught. If the police pulled them over —

Tig turned on the radio with an aggressive punch of his forefinger. Kellie Pickler’s “Red High Heels” deafened them. Bon Bon turned down the volume.

 Over the next two hours, Bon Bon sat in silence, thinking. Tig couldn’t be reasoned with, that was pretty clear. Bon Bon could wait till Tig fell asleep and turn the car around, but what would happen when Tig woke up? Bon Bon glanced down at the gun again, resting lazily on Tig’s thigh, and looked out the window. He could grab his phone and try putting it on mute and dialing 911, but the phone’s light would turn on and Tig would see it for sure. Bon Bon’s palms felt chalky from the mixture of sweat and cake flour dust. The damp, sugary smell from his trousers made him want to retch. 

“Hey,” he said when lights from the next exit glimmered on the horizon. Signs for gas, food, lodging. “I didn’t get dinner when I was sitting there waiting for you, and I’m starving. Do we need gas?” He pretended to stretch and stifle a yawn.

Tig kept his eyes on the road, but his grip tightened for an instant on the gun, then relaxed again. “OK,” he said after a minute. “I am, too. All right. I’ll pump the gas and you get us some food.” Tig took the exit too fast, the car almost on the berm before he overcorrected. Again came the thump from the trunk. “And don’t try anything, man. I’d hate to kill you, you hear me?”

The gas station was a half-mile down the road, its fluorescent lights bright and disorienting. No cars were parked at the pumps. A single beat-up Honda sat tucked against the building. Bon Bon had been hoping for a late-night police cruiser, an RV, anything.

After the car had come to a halt, Bon Bon got out, making sure his movements were slow and casual. He could run in, tell the attendant to call the cops, who could be here in minutes. He glanced over at Tig, who was staring hard at him. He looked away, pulled open the glass door. He could feel Tig’s eyes on him, even in the snack aisle. 

He picked up several bags of  Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, hot chili and roasted lime Takis, jalapeño Kettle potato chips, and honey barbecue and hot mustard pretzels. Then went to the refrigerators on the wall and pulled out four bottles of Pepsi.

At the cash register, Tig’s gaze brushed his shoulders as Bon Bon paid and the clerk stuffed everything in a plastic sack. Again and again, he contemplated saying something but then imagined Tig leveling the gun at them, the bullets spider-webbing the glass.

The door behind them jingled, and Bon Bon jumped. “You almost done, man?” Tig called in.

“Yeah,” Bon Bon said. The clerk put a handful of change on the counter, and Bon Bon swiped it into his palm. “You owe me 18 bucks,” he told Tig as he brushed past him out the door, out into the cool night and the waiting car.

“Oh you’ll get that and more soon, buddy.” Bon Bon could hear the relief in Tig’s voice. “You feel like driving now?”

“Yeah, I can take over,” Bon Bon said. “You eat up. Did you check on the trunk? On whatever fell over back there?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s fine,” Tig said. 

Bon Bon pulled out of the parking lot as Tig tore open the purple bag of Takis, stuffing a handful into his mouth. “Damn these are good. You want some?” 

Bon Bon shook his head. “In a sec.” He took a sip of Pepsi.

“These things are spicy,” Tig said, playing on the word spicy. “Whooo-eee.” He cracked open his Pepsi and drained half of the bottle. Bon Bon took a sip of his.

Tig didn’t tell him where they were going, just directed him once to turn south, toward the highway running to the coast. Tig broke into the potato chips and Bon Bon munched on pretzels. They passed city after city, and a rest stop in three miles.

“I’m thirsty,” Tig said when he was halfway through the Honey Barbecue Pretzels. “These pretzels are making me thirsty.”

“Seinfeld,” Bon Bon told him without looking over. He checked the rearview mirror. The boxes sat primly on the backseat, giving away nothing.

“What?” 

“Seinfeld,” Bon Bon said. “That was a running joke on Seinfeld.” The rest area illuminated the road. “Remember, George said it about 200 times during that show?” They passed the entrance, kept going.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You got more to drink?” Tig said. 

“There ain’t no more. We drank it all.” 

“That ain’t funny,” Tig said. “I’m seriously thirsty. We gotta stop.”

“OK,” Bon Bon told him. “Next place we see. I need to take a piss, too,” he added.

They passed a sign. “Next Rest Area: 28 Miles.”

“Damn,” Bon Bon said. “Another half-hour.”

“We can make it,” Tig said, staring out at the darkness. But after another 10 minutes he said, “I really gotta go.”

“So do I,” Bon Bon said. “Bad. I’m going to pull over.”

He eased the Chevy onto the shoulder, put on his flashers. “What the hell you think you doin’?” Tig said, spraying pretzel crumbs onto Bon Bon’s shirt. 

“What? You want me to piss myself in the driver’s seat? I didn’t shower after work because somebody wanted me to meet them at 6:30. So now I smell like cupcakes and if I piss myself I’ll smell a lot worse. That is not a good combination. So you’ve got a choice. Either stop yapping in my face and let me pee, or you can drive the rest of the way in a wet seat.” 

He hoped Tig would be too preoccupied to suggest that he pee in the Pepsi bottle. Tig was. 

“Whatever. Don’t do nothin’ stupid.” Tig got out of the car, slammed the door. Again the thump from the trunk, and then another. 

The car’s headlights beamed into the nondescript grass as Bon Bon climbed out, went around the front of the car. As he reached the berm, he stumbled, tripped, and fell. Then got up, close now to Tig.

“Clumsy idiot,” Tig said, laughing, transferring the gun from his right hand to his left, unzipping. “Next rest stop we’re gonna get something to drink. I’m really thirsty. We got how many miles? 15 or — ”

Wham. The rock that Bon Bon had just picked up struck Tig perfectly, right on the temple. Tig dropped, soundless, so quickly that Bon Bon thought for a second that he was pretending. 

But he wasn’t. A moment later he groaned, reaching for his scalp. Bon Bon lunged for the gun, grabbed it and sprinted back to the car.

In a moment, cinders flew and he was back on the highway, heart in his throat, going 70, 80, 90 miles an hour.

After a couple of miles he slowed slightly, pulse still pounding. The thump from the trunk came again. Bon Bon pulled over, popped the trunk, went around back.

Inside, a young boy lay wedged against tires and fabric, his hands and feet bound with zip ties. His eyes were bigger than any eyes Bon Bon had ever seen, with such terror and misery that Bon Bon couldn’t speak for a moment as he loosened the gag. The boy struggled away, a panicked bird.

“Hey, it’s OK,” Bon Bon said. “That piece of garbage can’t hurt you.”

He looked in the front seat for a knife, scissors, anything to cut the ties, but could find nothing. So he carried the boy to the front seat, tried to make him comfortable.  

“I’m taking you to the police,” Bon Bon told him as he adjusted the seat belt. “The bad man won’t hurt you anymore, OK?” He tried to sound as calm and nonthreatening as he could. 

“You smell like a cupcake,” he told Bon Bon accusingly, voice rough.

Bon Bon laughed. “Story of my life,” he said. “I get that a lot.”

The little boy eyed the bag of pretzels, tucked in between the seats. “Can I have some?”

Bon Bon reached past him for the pretzels, fed him a couple at a time.

“These are making me thirsty, “ he said.”

“Do you like Seinfeld, kid?” Bon Bon said as he pulled out his phone and dialed 911.  PS

Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb is a graduate of UNC Greensboro with a degree in music education. He is the author of The Violin Conspiracy and Symphony of Secrets. He is currently working on his third novel.

Doing It Their Way

Doing It Their Way

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Creating a little jewel box

By Deborah Salomon Photographs by John Gessner

   

Homes fall into categories: fixer-upper, starter, family, dream, downsized, retirement. In the 20-some years Mike Jones and his wife, Annie Hallinan, have lived in Southern Pines, two homes have added a category: ours. Defying trends, periods, heirlooms and High Point, they plot a floor plan, hang paintings and arrange furniture their way.

This method fits a couple that has traveled the world on larks or for business while employed by AT&T/Verizon. Annie is a petite Scottish lass who, as a cheeky 17-year-old, left home to find adventure, first in London, then New York. Mike, known as a pilot who flies his Cessna to the beach for the day, takes children for a ride or delivers rescued dogs to forever homes, grew up in Connecticut. They discovered Moore County on a 50th birthday jaunt, a look-see after rejecting Myrtle Beach, California and Arizona.

.  . 

“Pinehurst fit like a beautiful jacket,” Mike recalls. The Moore County airport sealed the deal.

While he was playing golf, Annie — retired on a buyout — bought a house at Talamore, which soon proved too small. So she replaced it with a 7,000-square-foot Italianate villa, once a mail-order orchid nursery, possibly the only residence anywhere with a kitchen door opening directly into the greenhouse.

Lemon basil, anyone?

Chimbly, named for the industrial chimney rising over an outbuilding, became a Knollwood showcase. From there Annie wrote children’s books, and Mike, when not aloft, managed his family’s industrial cleaning products business. After a decade, encapsulating seemed wise, hopefully in the neighborhood they loved.

“We wanted a little jewel box,” Annie says. How about directly across the street?

When its elderly resident vacated this adorable 2,000-square-foot cottage, Mike and Annie pounced. Never mind that it needed everything. For them, this was a plus, an invitation to create, indulge. Who cares if the contractor recommended demolition, then starting fresh?

      

“Nooo,” Annie insisted. “That would destroy the history, the character.” Instead . . .

“Let’s reallocate space.”

Start by moving the front door and ripping out the kitchen, which made room for an airy vestibule where a wood-paneled archway raises the ceiling and a huge lopsided compass covers the floor. Referencing Mike’s navigational prowess, the “N” arrow points true north, although the vestibule does not. A small rear porch was enclosed, fireplace and leather massage chair added. Now they had somewhere to eat dinner, read, watch storms roll in over the golf course and, Mike adds, “Enjoy each other.”

Let’s build: Annie and Mike named their project The Wee House for good reasons, tiny bedrooms being one. Solution: Convert the front-facing double garage into a master suite and L-angle a new garage which, with the circular drive and mature dogwood tree, channels a European courtyard. Then, add a deck across the back, loaded with flowerpots and a fountain. But don’t mess with the cream-colored shakes and blue roof, since they hint at imagination within.

Let’s cook: Mike does the honors, superbly. “When he’s gone I eat cereal,” Annie admits. The couple entertains often, most recently a party celebrating Mike’s newly minted doctorate in business administration, at 72. His open, flow-through kitchen centers the entire house. He chose bright navy cupboards; a painting over the sink; blue granite countertops uncluttered by appliances; a range placement that allows him to converse with guests while sautéing; the Rolls-Royce of French-door refrigerators; a steam oven for high-rise muffins, yeast breads and his signature salmon en croute; and a “canapé counter” for cocktail party tidbits. Here, like elsewhere, the ceiling fixture masquerades as suspended sculpture.

     

Let’s be practical: All the systems — heat, AC, plumbing, electrical, needed replacing. Doors were widened and bathrooms, including the shower, made wheelchair accessible just in case. A corner of the yard was fenced for three elderly rescue dogs, should walks become difficult. Annie and Mike each have an office; his, in the basement, hers in a small former bedroom, where Wee House’s only TV is located. Here, they start each day with coffee and the news.

Let’s have fun: Annie calls their quirky little touches “Easter eggs.” There’s Mike’s teddy bear collection, used during Angel Flights, sitting on a ceiling shelf; a second dishwasher in the laundry room/butler’s pantry; a suspended metal rod “toasting bar” running down the center of the dining room table, to clink glasses during dinner party toasts; shelves built to display Annie’s shoe collection; bathroom washbasins hand painted, in the Chinese mode, with serpents and other fanciful motifs, to complement similar wallpaper. But the premier egg has to be the bar Mike contrived from a hall closet opposite the living room, centered on a portrait of a Mexican woman. The walls, countertops, appliances, floor — are all black illuminated by flickering clear Christmas-tree lights. Here, Mike stores his single-malt Scotch.

Let’s gather: Only the living room retains some resemblance of the original layout. A stone chimney rises from the wood-burning hearth to the cathedral ceiling. Opposite it, light streams through 14-foot windows with wood-framed panes. Furnishings are comfortable, sparse, not to detract from the art. “I’d rather have art than furniture,” Annie says.

     

Let’s keep it simple: Clutter is not permitted at Wee House. Annie shudders at the mention. Before vacating Chimbly, she selected which furniture would cross the road, then invited friends to a giveaway. Habitat carted off the rest. “I call it Spartan, spare, no froufrou,” Mike adds. Most of their beloved, often huge, paintings survived the cut, including a nearly life-sized reclining female nude. Some pieces have animal themes, others suggest Modigliani or Chagall. Mike’s favorite is a tabletop-sized carving depicting a woman hugging her dog.

Renovations took more than a year, with Annie and Mike dropping in often. No thought was given to resale of this two-bedroom gem with a small living room but panoramic view of Mid Pines’ 12th fairway — and a kitchen positioned for cooking in the round. “We use every room, every day. We surround ourselves with things that make us happy,” Annie explains, including people, animals, art . . . and each other.  PS

Poem August 2023

Poem August 2023

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Washington as Count Dracula

Tryon Place, 1791

Washington comes in. He is wearing

black velvet with gold buckles at the knee

and foot,

a sword with finely wrought

steel hilt, in scabbard

of white leather,

a cocked hat with a cockade and a feather,

also black. His powdered hair

is gathered in a black silk bag.

His hands in gloves of yellow

clasp extended hands.

Above his head medallions

of King and Queen

flicker beneath dripping wicks, the little flames

in circles on the chandeliers

surrounded by bits of glass, like worlds

in the sky, the telescopes of astronomers.

The crystals like Newton’s prisms split

the flames, blue, yellow, red, violet.

As in the “The Masque of the Red Death”

the dance goes on in rooms, where colors

glint from rubies in women’s ears.

He bows deeply, his corneas

refract ideas: science

dances from tiaras, bracelets, rings.

The battle of Alamance

was lost. The Regulators’

defeat had finished the rebellion,

or so Tryon thought.

Washington’s eyes grow red.

He leads the minuet.

        — Paul Baker Newman

Will Rogers In Old Pinehurst

Will Rogers In Old Pinehurst

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The Cowboy Philosopher and American Legend

By David Sowell

In late March of 1928, a plane carrying one of the most popular and influential figures in America landed in Pinehurst. This gentleman had come to promote a sport. It wasn’t golf. In fact, he had once been at the forefront of those who held the game in disdain. Seemingly at every opportunity, he lampooned golf and those who played it. His name was Will Rogers.

Part Cherokee Indian, Rogers was born in Native American Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. His story was not a rags-to-riches one. It was more like riches to mega-riches. His father was a very successful rancher, but it appeared that Will was going to have a rough time equaling that success. He was a poor student and received a bare-bones education as he bounced from boarding school to boarding school.

His father hoped to give young Will a leg up by providing him with his own cattle ranch. Rogers soon sold it and went off to Argentina. He tried to make it as a rancher there, but in just five months, he was broke. Too embarrassed to write to his father for help, he took a job tending a load of livestock on a freighter bound for South Africa.

Once ashore, Rogers was hired by the ranch where the livestock were destined to go. The owner was a wealthy Englishman who was very demanding and boisterous, characteristics that didn’t match up well with Will’s laid-back attitude. Rogers quickly found himself on the move again. He hooked on with, of all things, a Wild West show. After a stint there, he moved to Australia, where he worked in a circus.

Rogers eventually returned to the United States and began appearing intermittently on the vaudeville circuit, doing rope tricks with his lariat and offering his humorous observations on the American scene. In 1904, he was one of the performers at a Wild West show at Madison Square Garden in New York City when a huge steer broke loose. The steer jumped over the guard rail and into the stands. Pandemonium ensued. The audience scattered. With his lariat in hand, Will and several of the show’s other performers were in hot pursuit. The steer reached the upstairs balcony where Rogers was able to rope it and guide it back onto the arena floor. 

His heroic actions made the front page of The New York Times, and Rogers’ career skyrocketed, eventually turning him into an early 20th century multi-media darling. He made motion pictures and wrote one of the most successful newspaper columns in that medium’s history. He toured the country doing live shows that sold out wherever he appeared.

Through his folksy commentary in his newspaper column, Rogers captured the hearts of ordinary Americans. The same could hardly be said for the game of golf. It had the look of an activity for those who also yachted as they summered. Two of the country’s most talked about golf zealots were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s two richest citizens. Carnegie’s name was bandied about as a potential president of the United States Golf Association, a nascent organization born three days before Christmas in 1894.

Golf’s deep connection to the nation’s upper crust resulted in much of the country’s rank and file looking at the game with contempt, if they looked on it at all. This contempt was fueled by the stance taken by one of America’s most popular presidents — Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was the quintessential man’s man. While president, he hunted. He boxed. He chopped down trees. On more than one occasion, he took winter swims across the Potomac. Roosevelt let it be known widely and often that he viewed golf with scorn. He called it a game for dudes and snobs.

After Roosevelt’s passing in 1919, Rogers took the point for the anti-golf crowd, drawing huge laughs about the game in his stage act and his writing. Some of his more notable barbs included:

Golf is good for the soul. You get so mad at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it’s called golf.

Rail-splitting produced an immortal president in Lincoln, but golf hasn’t produced even a good Congressman.

Golf antipathy even spilled over into the 1920 presidential election. During the Republican Party convention in Chicago, a deal was cut by the party’s bosses that gave the 1920 nomination for president to Warren G. Harding, a United States senator from Marion, Ohio.

Harding’s team decided that for the general election, they would utilize a “front porch” campaign. Instead of barnstorming the country, their candidate would remain close to home and let supporters and the press come to him.

This homey approach was augmented by a well-orchestrated use of print media and a thorough stroking of the newsreel distributors. (Newsreels were shown in movie houses before the main feature.) One of the first newsreels featuring their candidate showed Harding, adorned in fancy knickers, teeing off and putting at a golf course near his home.

As soon as the golf newsreel began to roll in movie houses around the country, the Harding campaign was inundated with negative reactions to it. One United States senator who was backing Harding said he’d been in a packed theater where the newsreel was shown and there was not one applauding set of hands in the entire place.

It was clear to the Harding team that they had ingested a huge dose of political poison. Desperate to get back on track, they hatched a plan involving baseball that would show the country their man was as mainstream as it gets.

In late August, the Chicago Cubs were on their way to another lackluster finish in the National League pennant race. Sticking to their front porch strategy, the Harding campaign’s plan was to bring the Cubs — whose owner was a Harding backer — to Marion, on one of their off days for an exhibition game.

The Cubs took on a team of locals and a crowd of 7,000 showed up at the rickety Marion ballpark to watch the game. The campaign sent out press releases a few days before chronicling Harding’s playing days as a bare-handed first baseman in his youth and detailed how he was once a major stockholder in a professional team in the Ohio State League. 

Harding arrived at the game with the newsreel cameras rolling and received a rousing welcome from the crowd. He then warmed up the Cubs starting pitcher, future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander. After the warm-up session, Harding threw out the first pitch and then whooped it up in the stands for the benefit of the cameras the rest of the afternoon. When the game’s newsreel footage reached the movie houses, the favorable reaction it received more than canceled out Harding’s golfing blunder. He won the election, handily defeating his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox.

Harding’s frequent golfing and the criticism he received about it would dog him all through his presidency. It started the first Sunday he was in the White House, when he skipped church and headed to the course. By 1922, it was a public relations nightmare, and it was about to get even worse because Will Rogers had rolled into town.

When Rogers arrived, he was extended an invitation to the White House to meet the president. His visit was cordial and friendly. Harding even expressed an interest in seeing Will’s show. Rogers’ golf and political jibes quickly became the talk of the town. After just a few shows, one of Harding’s aides went to see Rogers and asked that he not do so many golf jokes about the president because the newspapers were making too much of it.

Although surprised at the request, Rogers agreed to it and eliminated several golf jokes from his act. A couple of nights later, it was announced that Harding was going out to the theater — there were only two shows in town — and Rogers took this to mean he was coming to see him. When the curtain rose, Harding was nowhere to be seen. He had gone to the other show. The following night, Rogers turned the heat back up, putting the previous jokes about Harding’s golf back in his routine and adding more.

One turned out to be quite prophetic. There had been a fire that damaged the Treasury Department building, and Rogers used it for comedic effect. “The fire started on the roof and burned down to where the money was supposed to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it,” Rogers said.

Soon after Rogers’ show left Washington the biggest and most sensational scandal to hit American politics, to that point, broke: Tea Pot Dome.

In 1923, an effort was made to bring Rogers to Pinehurst for a show at the recently opened Theater Building. Due to other contractual obligations, Rogers doubted he could work Pinehurst into his schedule and, on the Pinehurst end, it was felt that Rogers’ fee of $500 was too mercenary.

Five years later, in the spring of 1928, Leonard Tufts, the owner of the Pinehurst Resort, footed the bill for Rogers to make an appearance, and the entertainer was more than happy to make the trip. It would involve two things he had become very passionate about: aviation and polo.

Rogers’ affection for aviation had turned him into the country’s first frequent flyer. Air travel was just what he needed to accommodate his demanding schedule. Paying by the pound, Rogers flew in mail planes to destinations across the country. He became good friends with aviators Charles Lindbergh and Billy Mitchell, regarded as the father of the United States Air Force. Rogers was flown to Pinehurst from Atlanta, where he was performing, by Pinehurst’s Lloyd Yost, a well-known aviator and the manager of the local airfield.

Rogers’ second passion, polo, was a sport every bit as highbrow as golf, the game he had mocked and made fun of for so many years. A fellow performer with Rogers in the Wild West show that fateful day at Madison Square Garden had a decade later begun training horses for polo in New Jersey. Rogers visited him and became hooked on a sport that allowed him to saddle up and get back to his cowboy roots. He became so “all-in” for polo that when he purchased the property for his ranch in Santa Monica, California, a polo field was laid out before the design for the ranch’s house.

Rogers hosted matches on the weekends whenever his travel schedule permitted. The regular participants were some of Hollywood’s biggest names: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Hal Roach, Walt Disney.

Rogers played polo with reckless abandon and had the broken bones to show for it. He once said of the sport, “They call it a gentlemen’s game for the same reason they call a tall man Shorty.” Los Angeles Times sportswriter Frank Finch wrote of Rogers, “He erased the tea-drinking, ‘High Society’ ideas about the mallet sport by appearing at swank polo clubs donned in overalls, cowboy boots, hatless and coatless, his $1.98 shirt open at the throat.”

The polo match in Pinehurst that Rogers saddled up for took place on the grounds of the harness track. The contest featured two local teams. Rogers took part as a member of the “The Yellows.” The match ended in a 3-3 tie with Rogers scoring all three of the Yellow team’s goals.

That evening Rogers put on his one-man show in the Theater Building. His appearance had been highly promoted with ads appearing in local newspapers since early February and was a sold-out performance.

Well before his trip to Pinehurst, Rogers’ jokes about golf seemed to be tapering off. The sport had turned something of a popularity corner. Another icon who, like Rogers, was a hero to the common man had become the country’s most high-profile golf fanatic — Babe Ruth. The baseball slugger’s exploits on the golf course flooded newspapers during the off-season.

And, two years prior to Rogers’ appearance in Pinehurst, Bobby Jones had been celebrated with a ticker-tape parade in New York City when he returned from winning the British Open and British Amateur. In 1930 Jones would collect all four championships in a calendar year — the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur, British Open and British Amateur  — to complete his Grand Slam, earning a second  ticker-tape celebration. Jones and John Glenn, the fighter pilot, astronaut and senator from Ohio, are the only people to have been so honored twice.

Over the next few years, Rogers developed a friendship with Jones. When Jones was in Hollywood to make a series of short films titled How I Play Golf, he spent time at Rogers’ ranch. Jones would hit golf balls around the ranch’s vast open spaces while Rogers accompanied him on horseback.

Rogers’ career continued to reach new heights. In 1935, he signed a movie contract with Fox Studios that would pay him $8,000 a week — the equivalent $176,000 in 2023. By late July of 1935, he had made four movies that were playing across the country and had just wrapped up the production of a fifth, titled In Old Kentucky. After that stretch of moviemaking, he was ready to get back to traveling.

Two weeks later, near Point Barrow, Alaska, an Eskimo man made a rapid trek on foot, covering 15 miles over rugged terrain in three hours to reach the Army Signal Corps station. So exhausted he could hardly speak, he told the personnel that a plane had crashed and its two occupants were dead. The pilot of the plane was renowned aviator Wiley Post. His passenger was Will Rogers.  PS

David Sowell writes about golf history. He has written for the USGA’s Golf Journal and he is the author of the book The Masters: a Hole-by-Hole History of America’s Golf Classic. He moved to Pinehurst in 2020.

Butterfly Highway

Butterfly Highway

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A neighborhood creates a pollinator pitstop

By Jan Leitschuh

    Left: Dez MacSorley

If you have lived five or six or seven decades, you remember the abundant orange and black monarch butterflies of your childhood. Hardly a summer day would pass without seeing one, if not scores of them.

Today, if you see one, it’s Facebook- or Instagram-worthy because of the butterfly’s rarity. There are a number of reasons the population has crashed in the last couple decades, but crash it has.

One neighborhood in Southern Pines is fighting back. A dedicated group of neighbors is working to transform their long street into a connected and welcoming pollinator paradise, not just for monarchs but all declining butterflies, birds and native insects.

This month, the fall monarch migration begins winging its perilous journey to Mexico, laying eggs on milkweed, exclusively, along the way. An extensive stretch of Sheldon Road will be waiting with open arms with milkweed for eggs and nectar plants for sustenance — all pollinators welcome.

“Pollinators continue to make global headlines as native bees and migrating species such as monarch butterflies decline,” writes the North Carolina Wildlife Federation. “Habitat loss from development is the primary cause of population decline, followed by pesticide and fungicide use, as well as parasites and diseases.”

In response, the federation developed the concept of a North Carolina “Butterfly Highway,” a statewide conservation initiative aimed at restoring pollinator habitat, from citizen-driven, backyard “Pollinator Pitstops” to large-scale habitat rejuvenation of roadsides, agricultural margins and development.

Individuals answered the call. Homeowners and garden clubs began taking up the torch to raise awareness and create inviting habitat for these vulnerable and iconic lovelies. Some farms planted long strips of pollinator plants.

Threatened monarchs are at the forefront of the public awareness, as these butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed species. As milkweed declined due to abundant agricultural use of glysophate weed killers versus mowing (which allows the plant to regenerate from the roots) and general habitat loss, so did the monarchs. Fifteen years ago, I read about the precipitous drop in the monarch populations. Conservation organizations were sounding the alarm and pleading with anyone who would listen to plant milkweed.

A visit to a remote Virginia meadow that fall yielded several ripe pods of the common milkweed variety. I tucked the seeds in my cottage garden here and forgot them. Next spring, I had milkweed, and have ever since. Thus began my butterfly journey, near the southern end of Sheldon Road.

About the same time, interest in native plants and pollinator-friendly gardens ripened into the public awareness too. Nearly a mile away from me, on a horse farm at the far northern, sand-road end of Sheldon, retired landscape architect and beekeeper Dez MacSorley designed her farm and decided to have a pesticide-free, non-manicured, tufted grass lawn. “Aside from the horse pastures, I turned all the other bits of land into a continuous meadow devoted to pollinator-friendly perennials and native grasses,” she says. This is the third year for the meadow and its beneficiaries.

“Come they have, “ MacSorley says. “Butterflies, bees, wasps, birds, moths — all come to feed on, find shelter in and enjoy my little meadow.”

She says her nearby Sheldon neighbors inspired her from the beginning, including avid gardeners Lynn McGugan, Cameron Sadler, Tayloe Moye and Carol Phillips, who has since passed away, all with different, complementary styles, and a passion for supporting and extending the natural environment.

     

In April 2021, Molly Thompson-Hopton, Cameron and Lincoln Sadler’s niece, started a Facebook garden group for her plant-loving friends, and the photo-sharing, education and awareness caught fire. “I guess you could say a love of wildlife and plants runs in our family,” she says.

“We started trading plants and knowledge,” MacSorley says. One of her neighbors, Sara Hoover, started a milkweed patch on her property adjacent to the Walthour Moss Foundation.

Thompson-Hopton, though living 8 miles away, caught the conservation bug. “After I moved to the family farm in Aberdeen, I got busy planting,” she said. “I knew I wanted to attract pollinators. I stumbled across some clasping milkweed and brought it home. I have four varieties of milkweed now and hope to add more.”

Through the plant trading on Thompson-Hopton’s social media page, I shared some milkweed plants with Lynn McGugan several years ago. She tucked them in near her other pollinator plants. McGugan, a force of nature, does nothing by half-measures. Before long, armed with information, she was out preaching the benefits of milkweed, pollinators and native plantings.

“Pollinator plantings add beauty to any landscape,” says McGugan, “and serve a purpose.”

A skilled photographer, McGugan posted gorgeous, envy-creating photos of various butterflies, caterpillars, moths and native bees feasting on her nectar banquet. Then McGugan and MacSorely hatched a plan to share the plant love even further.

“We intend to extend our pollinator-friendly native plantings down the natural edges of Sheldon Road,” says MacSorley, “creating a natural environmental corridor between all our properties, the Walthour Moss Foundation land and, who knows, maybe including some of the new houses further up Sheldon and along Youngs Road. This is truly the ‘butterfly effect’ at work.”

As tall pines came down and new houses went up this summer on Sheldon and just off it,  McGugan walked up to a job site and grabbed a number off the sign, then started a conversation with Chris Styne of Homes by Dickerson. She found a willing ear in Styne. In a recent email he wrote: “Homes by Dickerson is excited to . . . be a part of such a unique and necessary organization such as this. We are committed to planting flowers at each of our eight new homes being built on Braden and Sheldon Road.”

Encouraged, McGugan has reached out to other builders. She engaged Seth Mabus of Mabus Farm & General Contracting and came away with a commitment for all new builds to include pollinator gardens. “They have the potential for such impact by just including a few beneficial shrubs and trees,” she said. “It all adds up.”

Across the road, farm owner Tricia Greenleaf and John Robertson started their own patch of milkweed this year, right next to a massive, nectar-rich Miss Huff lantana. McGugan offered them rooted cuttings in pots from some of her own flowering shrubs.

McGugan’s near neighbors in horse country, Sadler and Moye, have cultivated stunning gardens too, sisters inheriting their mother Carol’s love of plants.

“Initially,” says Moye, “I bought a milkweed plant because I was interested in having butterflies. It got covered with caterpillars and they were eating the leaves so I used a pesticide and killed all of them. When I told Lincoln what happened, he said, ‘You just killed all the butterflies.’ That was 14 or 15 years ago.” Moye was heartsick, but soon made up for her pesticide error.

“I have been gardening since a child, continuously throughout my life,” she says, “and I believe it saved me in the worst of times. I have become more interested in native plants over the last 10 years. I’m pretty sure Lynn McGugan was my initial inspiration. I saw what she was doing and over the last three years ordered every type of milkweed I could find on the internet along with other native plants.”

On a long stretch of Sheldon Road, from Foundation-adjacent horse farms to suburban new construction and out the other end to Weymouth Woods, a butterfly-friendly corridor is shaping up, thanks to enthusiastic neighbors.

“Nature fills me with joy and I feel like I’m contributing to the greater good by being an active participant,” says Moye.

Sometimes, it takes a village.  PS

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

 

GREAT PLANTS FOR CATERPILLARS

Butterflies get all the love, and they sip energy-rich nectar from many pollinator-friendly plants. But no caterpillars, no butterflies. Often, when their host plants decline, so does the species. Witness monarchs, who only lay their eggs on milkweed.

As habitat is destroyed, we can help by including a few friendlies for North Carolina butterflies to lay their eggs on, such as:

For monarchs: the milkweed family — common, tuberosa, swamp, clasping and more — offers exclusive food for the monarch caterpillars. These plants tolerate poor soil and never need fertilizing. All milkweeds contain cardiac glycosides in their sap that monarchs consume and store in their bodies. Potential predators learn to steer clear of this bitter, stored substance.

For swallowtail: Dill, fennel, parsley, common rue, carrot greens, tulip tree, wild black cherry.

For fritillaries: passion vine, maypops, violets.

For American painted lady: thistles, mallows, yellow fiddleneck.

For common buckeye: aster, peppermint, tickseed sunflower, chicory.