Zeppole

ZEPPOLE

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February 2025

Zeppole

A Love Story

Fiction by Joseph Bathanti   •   Illustration by Mariano Santillan

My mother swears she’s pregnant. She wants to cook. Which she never does. In our house, my father handles the cooking. As recently as yesterday she wasn’t even speaking to us, but this baby — the baby, she says — has her happy and she wants to make zeppole. Little patties of dough fried in hot olive oil, then sprinkled with sugar. She has a craving. The way her mother used to make them. I don’t remember ever eating them, but my mother assures me I have. At my grandmother’s. But we hardly see her anymore, and I’m not certain I’d recognize her if she crashed through the roof.

My mother produces a white prayer book with a tiny lock like an antique diary’s. With a key the size of an infant’s thumbnail she opens it. Should she drop to her knees, mumbling antiphonies like those insane Calabrian widows on Good Fridays at the graveyard, I will fall over dead in astonishment, and my father will join me. But she does not pray. Rather, she takes from the prayer book’s withered secret pages a slip of frayed paper and, reading from it as she puffs on a Chesterfield, assembles the grayish-yellow mound of dough.

My father sits reading the obituaries at the kitchen table. Wearing a long white terrycloth robe with a black hex sign on the back, he looks like a prizefighter. He tells my mother that Philly Decker died and is laid out at Febraro’s.

“Did somebody shoot him or did he just eat himself to death?” she asks.

“Doesn’t mention,” says my dad.

“I thought he was too in love with himself to die. How will the world keep spinning?”

“I think we should go see him, Rita.”

“You go. I never liked him, but please tell him I said hello.”

“Your mother has no respect for the dead, Fritz,” he says to me. “Or for the living.”

He gets up and takes the newspaper into the living room. I follow him, lie on my stomach on the floor with the comics and doze off. As I sleep, the dough, hunkered in a glass bowl covered with a tea towel, miraculously doubles in size.

When I wake, I walk toward the kitchen. My mother, in a pink summer nightgown, stands at the ironing board running the steaming wedge back and forth across the collar of the black dress she’ll wear to work. The iron occasionally hisses. From the radio, volume hiked way up, Elvis Presley, in a whispery voice, sings “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.”

She sings along as she irons, fervently, churchy, then sways, guided by Elvis over the dance floor of dream. She has not noticed me. There are tears in her eyes. Behind her, like excelsior, sun sprays the window, silhouetting her, the gown chiseled in relief, her hair spun at her crown in filigrees, her face a marbled shadow of backlight out of which drifts a disembodied yearning not clearly my mother’s. And for that instant I am blinded and do not see until the sun flares off the Pentecostal flames from the ignited oil in the skillet raging behind her.

“Mom,” I scream. She looks up surprised and smiles, still singing unabashedly: Take my hand, take my whole life too.

Then she turns and sees the fire licking at her. She grabs the wooden skillet handle. The flames leap from the skillet to her gown, pour over it like liquid, and she is instantly engulfed. The music like requiem, Elvis Presley like the cantor at High Mass looping incense over his mesmerized flock as the church burns down. I can’t move. I can’t take my eyes off her, no longer my mother, like sacred art restored, an angel wedding fire.

My father storms by me and scoops up my mother. He kicks open the screen door. There is an audible suspiration as he too catches fire, stumbling down the three concrete steps to the yard where he drops her, still clutching the spouting skillet, in my swimming pool, then simply steps out of his fiery robe and leaps in the water beside her.

The pool has sat in the little yard all winter. Leaves float on its surface. Neighborhood dogs drink out of it. The blue plastic bottom, patterned with yellow cartoon fish with long-lashed eyes and huge puckered lips, is slick with algae. The round aluminum frame is caving.

Unharmed, my mother and father sit next to each other in the pool. Laughing. She in what’s left of the charred pink gown. Bit by bit it falls off her body and floats on the water like scraps of flesh. My father is naked. Together they splash water on his burning robe until the flames die down, and there is the sodden smell of fried terrycloth, the nubs at the end of each thread brown on white like blackened marshmallows.

Tea Leaf Astrologer

TEA LEAF ASTROLOGER

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February 2025

Aquarius

(January 20 – February 18)

Those who know and love you can attest: Humdrum just isn’t in your wheelhouse. This month, when life sprinkles a few so-called obstacles in your path, consider it a boon. Not only will you rise to the occasion, you’ll also land in the good graces of someone whose unconventional thinking both complements and challenges your own. Trust that any perceived failures are but compost for the goodness to come. Your life will be anything but boring.

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

Take two whopping steps back.

Aries (March 21 – April 19) 

Read the subtle cues.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

It’s going to be worth all the mess.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Deeper breaths, darling.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Two words: lemon and cayenne.

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

Best to take smaller bites.

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

It’s time for a new playlist.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Resist the urge to fold.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

The laundry is behind you.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

Tend to your nervous system.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Don’t forget to stretch.

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

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February 2025

The Heart of Appalachia

Discovering a long-forgotten love

By Anne Blythe

Appalachia and its resilient people have been in the news digging out from the path of destruction carved through the mountainous region by the powerful remnants of Hurricane Helene. Vice President JD Vance rose to political prominence, in part, based on his 2016 depiction of the region in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Isabel Reddy, a science writer based in Chapel Hill who has turned her hand to fiction, tells another story of Appalachian life in her debut novel, That You Remember.

Reddy takes readers to the fictional Otter Creek Hollow, a Kentucky coal country “holler” full of men with “miner’s mascara” — that perpetual dark smudge of coal around the eyes — and the cast of women who rile, nurture and support them. Reddy, herself the daughter of a former coal company president, brings the miners, company executives and townspeople to life in a poignant page-turner about love, self- discovery and impending catastrophe.

The story starts when Aleena Rowan Fitzgerald receives a box from her brother with her deceased father’s desk diaries enclosed. It’s 2019, and Aleena, the mother of two college-age daughters, is in the midst of a divorce that has forced her to examine who she was, who she is, and who she wants to be.

Aleena’s dad, Frank Rowan, spent much of his working life away from their Connecticut home, either at his New York City office or on the road. “Here was a man who, from looking at his desk diaries, could schmooze with politicians and owners of large conglomerates, who flew all over the place and dined at the most fashionable hotels and restaurants,” says Aleena. After the family company bought Otter Creek Mining Company, an acquisition Rowan initially described as “another truck mine teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in a backwoods ravine,” Frank visited Otter Creek Hollow often, trying to learn the lay of the land. 

As Aleena flips through pages about her father’s work life, including his trips to Otter Creek, she finds a slip of paper with the name “Sara” scrawled on it three times. If it had been only once, it might not have piqued her interest, but three times sets Aleena on a journey from her Connecticut home to Kentucky coal country. “I wondered what Sara was like. If there even was a Sara,” Aleena adds.

Frank Rowan and Sara Stone come to life as Reddy blends the past with the present, taking readers down into the coal mines with the clanks, rumbles, smells and signs of peril while fleshing out the characters who live their lives above ground in the restaurants, homes and businesses. They are not the caricatures of Appalachia so often portrayed in modern literature and art. The people of Otter Creek Hollow are warm, giving and protective of one another while often exhibiting a hard-won, home-grown worldliness. The protagonists are multilayered and complex, much like the geography of the region itself. They offer pearls of down-home wisdom, and encircle one another during their trials and tribulations. Reddy crafts them with sensitivity and an understanding gained through her own trips to Appalachia, and the conversations she had with the people who live in the hills and valleys there.

Sara has an enigmatic air when the mere mention of her name in the beginning pages of Reddy’s novel opens the door to Aleena, inviting her into the narrative. But when she and Aleena come face to face and Sara invites her into her home, Reddy flashes back almost 50 years to 1970, before Otter Creek Hollow is obliterated by a Thanksgiving Day dam breach that sends a 30-foot tidal wave of black, fiery slurry and debris through the hollow, scooping up homes, people, cars and infrastructure in its path.

It is long ago, before the disaster, when Sara and Frank meet at a fishing hole, two people caught in a world they don’t necessarily want to be in. Dead-set against getting romantically involved with a miner, Sara has dreams of leaving the valley, going to college and finding a more fulfilling job than being a waitress. Frank is a fledgling executive entrenched in a family business that seems more focused on profits than the safety of the coal country communities.

Their bond is quick, but both want to keep it secret. He’s married, with an alcoholic wife and three children (including Aleena) at home. She has brothers who would not be so warm and inviting if they found out she was being romanced by an “operator,” the generic name for the owners and operators of the mines.

The novel is loosely based on Reddy’s discovery of her own father’s work diaries and the 1972 Buffalo Creek mining disaster in West Virginia that killed 125 people and left nearly 5,000 without a home after three coal waste lagoons failed and sent a 30-foot wave careening through a 10-mile hollow at 35 miles per hour. The fictional Otter Creek Hollow disaster also left 125 dead and nearly 4,000 homeless — a cataclysmic event still very much on the minds of survivors 50 years later, when Aleena finally meets Sara in the flesh.

“This long journey, which seemed so foolish, had such a surprising result,” Aleena concludes at the end of her hunt. “I felt like I’d been given the father, the one I’d always wanted, my dad. He was a complicated man, but a loving one.”

Reddy’s writing is as fast-paced and vivid as the dam break she describes, tugging and pulling at the hearts and sensitivities of readers as they go along. The disaster looms as large as the love story, half a century old. “Your father was a unique man, I’d say,” Sara tells Aleena of the brief affair. “I suppose there was that tough businessman side of him, but that’s not the side he showed me. Our time together was kind of separate from the world.”

Then after a pause, Sara adds: “He had a good heart.”

That You Remember does, too.

The Naturalist

THE NATURALIST

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February 2025

Sunny with a Chance of Murmurations

The amazing spectacle of blackbird flocks in eastern North Carolina

Story and Photographs by Todd Pusser

A cold, frosty morning gives way to bright blue skies over rural Tyrell County. Vast agricultural fields, interspersed here and there with patches of dense forest, border the dusty backroad. This region, just west of Lake Phelps, North Carolina’s second largest natural lake, is the winter home to an incredible wildlife spectacle.

The road continues straight as an arrow for miles and miles, providing clear, unobstructed views across freshly plowed fields. Far up ahead, above the edge of an immense soybean field, I spy what looks like a plume of black smoke rising up from the ground high into the Carolina blue sky. As I drive closer, the plume morphs into a pulsating cloud that suddenly splits in half, as if cut by an invisible ax, only to rejoin a few seconds later. The cloud rapidly changes shape again, this time looking like a massive black beachball dancing above the horizon. A few seconds later, it transforms into a thin-waisted hourglass. Then, a tornado-like funnel.

I pull off the shoulder of the road and hop out of the car with a pair of binoculars in hand. The amorphous cloud soon reveals its true identity: an immense flock of blackbirds twisting and turning together in perfectly coordinated movements. Scientists describe such behavior as a murmuration. I describe it as jaw-dropping.

Soon, the flock passes directly overhead. The birds’ high-pitched chirps, combined with the sound of thousands of wings flapping together in unison, is almost deafening. For nearly a full minute, the flock flies by uninterrupted and settles into a row of leafless trees on the opposite side of the road. There, they perch and begin to preen their feathers. The bare branches of the trees look as if they are draped in thousands of black Christmas ornaments.

The pause in the aerial acrobatics allows me the opportunity to examine the flock in more detail. Staring through my binos, I note that the vast majority are red-winged blackbirds, a beautiful species in which the males sport jet-black bodies and bright red shoulder patches that glow like campfire embers under the afternoon sun. Scattered here and there among the blackbirds are hundreds of common grackles and brown-headed cowbirds.

Before long, the birds take off from the trees, cross back over the road and land in the middle of the field, where they begin to forage for an afternoon snack. This is the moment I have been waiting for. I pull out my tripod from the back of the car, and grab my camera and telephoto lens.

More and more birds settle down into the field. Soon the ground looks like it is covered by a living black carpet. Experience has taught me that this many birds together in one place will not go unnoticed for long. Hungry eyes will be watching this all-you-can eat buffet.

As if on cue, the arching flight of a northern harrier appears over an irrigation ditch running along the far side of the field. With rapid wingbeats, the hawk suddenly dives toward the ground, near the edge of the flock. Instantly, thousands and thousands of birds launch simultaneously into the air, arching high above the horizon. A new murmuration has formed.

It rolls across the field like a giant black tidal wave. I marvel how each individual bird can instantly change direction to match its closest neighbor. Essentially, a murmuration acts as a single giant superorganism. Scientists have applied all sorts of fancy logarithms and computer modeling to help explain the mechanics of murmurations. Despite their best efforts, the intricacies of such vast coordinated movements of birds remain something of a mystery.

However, one fact is clear. A whirling mass of blackbirds can easily confuse a predator like the northern harrier. And if by chance a predator is successful in procuring a meal, the odds against one particular bird being the victim, out of tens of thousands, is small. There is safety in numbers.

Murmurations in coastal Carolina are often due to the presence of an aerial predator. Over the years, I have witnessed peregrine falcons, merlins, Cooper’s hawks, sharp-shinned hawks and northern harriers all pursuing the vast flocks of blackbirds. Once, I watched a northern harrier successfully knock a red-winged blackbird to the ground. As it stood over the bird, picking feathers off its breast, a bald eagle suddenly swooped in and chased the harrier away, claiming the blackbird as its own prize.

On this occasion, the northern harrier is less successful. As the murmuration suddenly pivots, the harrier falls behind.

Continuing to careen and pirouette across the sky, the avian ballet moves farther away and disappears across the far side of the field, leaving me standing alone. All that remains are a few feathers scattered here and there on the ground, the only clues left behind by one of nature’s most amazing shows.

Focus on Food

FOCUS ON FOOD

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February 2025

Hearty Breakfast in Bed

For the love of eggs and toast

Photograph and Story by Rose Shewey

Here is a piece of advice I would give to my younger self: Celebrate. Everything.

So what if Valentine’s Day is a commercial holiday? Get out the heart-shaped waffle iron; make a card if you don’t want to buy one; pick some wild blooms and simply enjoy the privilege of celebrating with the people you love. Which, of course, you can do any day of the week. There’s no need to wait around for a specific day in February, but there’s also no need to not do these things come Valentine’s Day. There is no better excuse to start the morning with mimosas and hugs, because — why not?

No gifts, though. I won’t budge on this. My husband knows and, I am fairly certain, appreciates it. He’s having a hard enough time picking gifts for the usual occasions (I’m impossible to shop for), so he’s off the hook for this quasi-holiday. He never fails to make cards for me together with our son, though, which is the most precious gift of all.

But back to heart-shaped things. Here is a subtle but eye-catching way of adding romantic flair to your morning meal: Try this heart shaped egg toast with herb butter. It’s quick and easy. You won’t need Barbie-pink frosting or rainbow glitter sprinkles and, with a minor adjustment using plain butter instead of garlicky butter, the youngest family members will dig in, too.

Garlic and Rosemary Butter Bread with Eggs

(Serves 4)

6 ounces butter, room temperature

1-2 cloves garlic, minced

1 sprig rosemary, finely chopped

4 thick slices of bread (such as fresh sourdough)

4 eggs

Salt and pepper, to taste

In a small bowl, combine the butter, garlic and rosemary. Mix with a fork until all ingredients are well incorporated; set aside. Using a heart shaped cookie cutter (or working freehand with a knife), remove the center of the bread, but be sure to leave enough of an edge so the bread won’t fall apart. Spread a generous amount of butter on one side of the bread and the cut-out center piece. Melt 1-2 tablespoon of prepared butter in a skillet and fry the bread and cut-out center piece over medium heat on the plain side first for 2-3 minutes, then flip the bread and cook the buttered side for an additional 2-3 minutes. Turn down heat to low and crack an egg into the center of the bread; cover with a lid. Cook on low heat until the egg has the desired level of doneness, about 3-7 minutes. Add salt and pepper, to taste, and serve immediately.

PinePitch

PINEPITCH

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February 2025

PinePitch

Spinning Wheel

Have a spot of tea with the people who make the pots on Saturday, March 8, shop-hopping along the N.C. Pottery Highway in Seagrove, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Enjoy tea tasting, homemade treats and samples from The Table, Seagrove Cafe and Carriage House Tea. For additional information visit www.teawithseagrovepotters.com.

Oh, How Times Have Changed

In 1946, with a campaign budget of $100, Jane Pratt was elected by a landslide to represent the state of North Carolina in the United States Congress. The Moore County Historical Association, in association with the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities and The Country Bookshop, will host Marion Elliott Deerhake in discussion with Kimberly Daniels Taws about Deerhake’s book Jane Pratt: North Carolina’s First Congresswoman, on Thursday, Feb. 6, at 11:30 a.m. For further information go to www.ticketmesandhills.com.

And Not a Drop to Drink

The Artists League of the Sandhills will hold an opening reception featuring the work of its members in the exhibit “Water, Water, Everywhere” on Friday, Feb. 7, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., at the Artists League of the Sandhills, 129 Exchange St., Aberdeen. For additional information visit www.artistleague.org.

A Not So Hasty Judgment

The Ruth Pauley Lecture Series presents “Everyone’s a Critic,” with Adam Feldman, on Tuesday, Feb. 18, at 7 p.m. in BPAC’s Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Feldman is the chief theater critic at Time Out New York. He covers Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway, as well as cabaret, dance shows and other events of interest in New York City. He’s the president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, a position he has held since 2005. The lecture is free of charge, but registration is required at www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Be the Best Lawn You Can Be

Sure, it’s February, but can spring be far away? Flowers bloom. Birds sing. And the front yard is a disaster. When do I fertilize? How much water is too much? Where’d all those weeds come from? On Friday, Feb. 21, at 1 p.m. Dr. Grady White, a turf extension specialist at N.C. State, will answer those questions and more in a lecture at the Ball Visitors Center in the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens, 3245 Airport Road, Pinehurst. To register for his talk go to the Sandhills Horticultural website at www.sandhills.edu/horticultural-gardens and click on “upcoming events.”

Encore!

Joe DeVito reprises, well, Joe DeVito when the comedian from Fox News channel’s “Gutfeld!” returns to BPAC at 7 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 28, in the Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. For information and tickets go to www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Big Voices in Little Bodies

The Sandhills Repertory Theatre presents Tiny Giants, a salute to the petite powerhouses from Judy Garland to Lady Gaga, with Kelli Rabke and John Fischer, beginning Saturday, Feb. 8, at 7 p.m., at the Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., Southern Pines. There will also be a matinee performance on Sunday, Feb. 9, at 2 p.m. To learn more go to www.sandhillsrep.org or call (910) 692-3611.

Swing and a Hit

The Sandhills Community College Jazz Band gets you in the mood for Valentine’s Day with its concert “Swingin’ Sounds of Love and Romance,” featuring classic and modern songs in Big Band arrangements, on Monday, Feb. 10, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., at BPAC’s Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. For further information go to www.ticketmesandhills.com.

Birdwatch

BIRDWATCH

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February 2025

Early Nesters

Winter suits great horned owls

By Susan Campbell

It is mid-winter across the Old North State: a time of cold temperatures, wet weather and hints of the longer days to come. Despite the seemingly inhospitable conditions, there is a group of birds already preparing to raise new families: owls. Of the three species that are regulars in our area — great horned, barred and eastern screech-owl — great horned owls are the first of the year to breed.

Being nocturnal creatures, owls are not as appreciated or as well understood as other raptors. Though owls are known for their impressive ability to locate and catch prey under the cover of darkness using their phenomenal hearing and night vision, few people are acquainted with their natural history. Great horneds are adapted to breed very early, well ahead of their cousins, the hawks, when rodents are plentiful and nesting locations are unoccupied by other species.

Great horned owls, whose name originates from ear-like feather tufts on the top of their heads, are one of the most common owls in North America. They can be found in a variety of habitats across the continent. This species is considered the top avian predator in most ecosystems with individuals preying on assorted small mammals and birds, including other owls. Great horneds are even capable of displacing eagles if they are so inclined. These birds are non-migratory, and individuals associate with the same mate year-round on an established territory. In our area, they are found in open agricultural fields, mixed grassy and wooded areas like golf courses, and in both pine stands and hardwood forests. Until late fall, when they begin their distinctive hooting, they tend to go unnoticed.

Pairs of great horneds begin courtship calling or “dueting” around Thanksgiving. The four-hoot reply of the female is somewhat higher pitched than the hooting of the male. Mates typically strengthen their bond by the end of December. In January they will choose a nest site, usually a nest built by another species such as a red-tailed hawk, crow or even gray squirrels. They make few improvements other than perhaps lining their nest with some of their soft body feathers. The female lays one to five eggs, and then both adults share incubation duties for the next month. When the young hatch, they are covered in thick downy feathers but must be continuously brooded by the parents for the first two weeks, until they are large enough to thermoregulate independently.

Even though the temperatures are chilly, nights are long and mean more hours for the parents to hunt food for their ravenous offspring. At eight weeks, the youngsters begin to make short flights away from the nest, though they are closely watched and fed by their parents for several more weeks. Like the adults, the immature owls have gray, brown and black striped plumage, which is effective camouflage against the nest or vegetation during daylight hours.

Although hearing a great horned owl calling at night in winter is not terribly unusual, seeing one during daylight is a special treat — no matter what.

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

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February 2025

The Babe

And the overlooked Slam Bang

By Lee Pace

Golf history is full of memorable win streaks — Bobby Jones and the original “Grand Slam” in 1930, Byron Nelson and his 11 straight PGA Tour wins in 1945, and of course the “Tiger Slam” accomplished over the 2000-01 major championship seasons by Tiger Woods.

Not as well known, however, is the “Slam Bang” that Babe Didrikson Zaharias compiled in 1946-47 by winning 17 consecutive golf competitions, from Texas to Pinehurst, from Miami to the nation’s capital. In fact, perhaps no source other than The Pinehurst Outlook referred to Zaharias’ unprecedented run of domination in such cutesy fashion. Run an internet search on the phrase in that context and you’ll come up dry.

But there it is in one of the Outlook’s weekly editions in early April 1947 as it chronicles the Babe “winning everything in sight on the winter and spring tour” and being “under unusual strain as she wanted to complete the most remarkable sequence of victories ever accomplished in women’s golf.”

After winning two gold medals and one silver in track and field in the 1932 Olympics, taking up golf in 1935 and playing in 1938 in a men’s pro golf tournament, the Los Angeles Open, Zaharias had regained her amateur status in golf in 1942 and was at the top of the game’s talent pyramid as World War II came to an end. She channeled her immense athletic skills into golf by hitting a thousand balls a day. Her strength and power off the tee gave her a huge edge on the field — she amazed sportswriter Grantland Rice by hitting two shots to the edge of the 523-yard seventh green at Brentwood Country Club in Los Angeles. And her confident (some would say cocky) personality augmented her aggressive, go-for-broke style on the course.

Peggy Kirk Bell, the matriarch of Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines from 1953 through her death in 2016, first met Zaharias in the mid-1940s on the women’s amateur circuit and one day got an invitation to be Zaharias’ partner in the Women’s International Four-Ball in Hollywood, Florida.

“Babe said, ‘I need a partner, and you might as well win a tournament,’” Peggy said. “That’s how confident she was. I was really nervous the day of the first round. She could sense that I was on edge, and she told me to relax. ‘I can beat any two of them without you,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know if I need you.’ Of course, we won the tournament.”

The Babe’s winning streak started in the summer of 1946 in the Trans-Mississippi in Denver and continued with the Broadmoor Invitation and All-American Championship, and then Zaharias’ one and only victory in the U.S. Women’s Amateur, that coming at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa. She won the Texas Women’s Open in the fall of 1946 and took the rest of the year off, relaxing at home in Denver with her husband, George.

“I was ready to take a long layoff from golf competition and just enjoy my home for a while,” Zaharias said. “But George had other ideas. He said, ‘Honey, you’ve got something going here. You’ve won five straight tournaments. You want to build that streak up into a record they’ll never forget. There are some women’s tournaments in Florida at the start of the winter. I think you should go down there.’”

So Babe opened 1947 with wins in Tampa, Miami, Orlando and Palm Beach, then teamed with Peggy Kirk (who would marry hometown sweetheart Warren Bell in 1953) in the International Four-Ball. The tour moved northward to Ormond Beach, St. Augustine and then The Titleholders in Augusta, Georgia, victories all. She had won 13 straight when the Women’s North and South opened on Pinehurst No. 2 the second week of April.

The Outlook noted that Babe was “getting even odds” versus the entire field, and the implication was that a bet could be placed at the Pinehurst clubhouse. It reported that in an early match Zaharias “hit a screaming brassie that left the gallery gasping” and counted the spectators for the championship match featuring Zaharias against Louise Suggs at approximately 2,500 — “the largest gallery ever.”

Suggs was a 23-year-old golfer from Atlanta who had won two North and South Amateurs in 1942 and ’46 and would later become a heated rival with Zaharias on the LPGA Tour that was founded in 1950. The Outlook noted that Suggs seemed to garner the sympathy of the gallery and that it was only human nature as the fans “wanted to see the little one beat the strong one.” Suggs conceded an early putt to Zaharias and soon after Zaharias refused the same courtesy toward Suggs, who then missed the short putt.

“After this incident, the match became a real fight,” the newspaper noted.

Babe was 1-up going to the 18th hole, but her approach shot flew to the right and landed against a tree. She tried a bank shot against the tree that didn’t work out and lost the hole, extending the match.

“That almost killed me,” Babe said. “George was just going crazy. He later said, ‘I thought for sure you were going to lose one and break the string.’”

Suggs flew the green with her approach on the second extra hole, made bogey, and Zaharias left Pinehurst with victory No. 14 secure. From there she won the women’s division of an event called the National Celebrities Tournament in Washington, D.C., traveled to Scotland to win the Women’s British Amateur, and returned home to win the Broadmoor Invitation again. Her streak of 17 ended when she lost in October in the Texas Women’s Open. Soon after, Babe accepted $300,000 from a Hollywood film maker for a series of golf instructional films and turned pro.

The name Babe Didrikson Zaharias occupies a mere one line on the champions board in the Pinehurst clubhouse, but when you probe beneath the surface, it was an important win and a neat part of golf history.

Almanac

ALMANAC

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February 2025

Almanac February

By Ashley Walshe

February is a vision quest, a serenade, a love note in the wide open wood.

On this day, though winter’s grip seems only to have tightened, the cloudless sky is otherworldly-blue. The vibrancy of color hones your senses. At once, a dreary world is clear and bright.

Follow your breath toward the luminous yonder. Above, a red-tailed hawk settles in a web of silver branches. Below, dead leaves perform their unbecoming, spilling into humus at the speed of dirt. What more is there to know?

Wander noiseless as a doe. Can you fathom the vastness of sky, the medicine of silence, the wisdom of barren earth? Can you grasp the full potential of this frozen pause?

As the cold air stings your face and lungs, a shock of yellow rises from the forest floor. Daffodil buds, swollen with promise. Look closely. Do you see your own reflection? Do you feel the inner workings of your own becoming?

Walk gently. Feel the sun caress your back and shoulders. Listen to the whisperings of trees.

The deeper you drift, the more you can sense your own emptiness and fullness. The days begin to stretch. Ensembles of daffodils open. A cardinal sings a song of spring.

Winter has changed you. Prepared you for your own luminous unfurling. There was no other way but through.

Give thanks to this frozen pause, the sting of cold, the promise that was always here. Even when you couldn’t yet see it.

Year of the Snake

The Chinese Lunar New Year, which began on Wednesday, January 29, culminates with the Lantern Festival on the Full Snow Moon (February 12). Cue the paper puppets for the Year of the Wood Snake. Ancient myth tells that 12 animals raced to the Jade Emperor’s party to determine which order they would appear in the zodiac. Sneaking a ride round the hoof of swift-and-mighty horse, snake was sixth to complete the great race, crossing the finish line before horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Those born in the Year of the Wood Snake are known to be highly perceptive, intuitive and adaptable. How will the wood snake shape your destiny? The Times of India predicts a year of profound transformation and growth. If you’re searching for direction, you’ll find it within.

Love Songs

Perhaps nothing says spring is nigh so clearly as the sudden swell of chorus frogs screaming from the wetlands and darkening woods. Spring peepers, whose hypnotic high-pitched calls stretch throughout the night, have but one objective. The louder and faster they peep, the better their chances of attracting a mate. Do you hear that? Love is in the air indeed.

Art of the State

ART OF THE STATE

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February 2025

Wishes into Art

Paper and fiber artist Elizabeth Palmisano’s particular alchemy

By Liza Roberts

For Charlotte artist Elizabeth Palmisano, inspiration comes from many sources: the material she works with, often handmade paper and fiber; her community, which includes students, fellow artists and complete strangers; and lately and most importantly, from a deeply felt calling to collect and transform the hopes and wishes of those people into art.

That art is often three-dimensional and always colorful. It typically makes a bold statement through scale, composition or unexpected materials, but does so disarmingly, with a beguiling beauty. Her work has been exhibited at Charlotte’s Mint Museum and McColl Center, and Palmisano has twice been voted Best Visual Artist by the Charlotte’s Queen City Nerve newspaper.

It’s not surprising that her community — which she incorporates into nearly everything she does — loves her back. As a self-described wishkeeper, Palmisano has been actively collecting their anonymously submitted wishes to use in her art for the last few years, most recently gathering more than 1,000 handwritten ones to incorporate into a massive, multidimensional mural on Charlotte’s 36th Street. Completed in September, NoDa Cloud Wall transforms a 23,000-square-foot parking garage wall into a colorful skyscape featuring three-dimensional clouds inscribed with those wishes.

“It’s really beautiful to see all the similarities that people have, from all walks of life,” she says. “We all kind of want the same things: Always love, then wishes for family, or for children. Love and family are always first. It’s wild to me how vulnerable people will be if you give them an anonymous spot to ask for what they want.”

The pandemic started it all. “It was really hard for me,” she says. “I’m an artist with a capital A first and foremost, but I teach classes and workshops because I love being with people. And I couldn’t do anything like that. So this was my way to collaborate with people without being in the same room. I asked them to digitally submit a wish, and it could be anonymous, and I was going to make a piece of art for each wish submitted. Those were my first wishes, 58 wishes, and I created a piece of art for each one.” One recent morning, at uptown’s McColl Center, Palmisano was busy printing a limited series of card decks that feature her illustrations alongside wishes and affirmations: “I love fiercely, beginning and ending with myself” was one.

She jokes that her focus on affirmations and wishes allows her to be “a professional fairy princess at 40 years old,” but “because I’m an artist, I can get away with it.”

Still, so much outward, public focus can take an artist away from her own center, her own source of creativity. A recent fellowship at the McColl Center, during which she made paper vessels and curated an exhibit, “iminal Divine,” that included her work and that of six other McColl fellows, inspired her to look back within.

“I want to make art for me for at least the next six months or so,” she says. “So I’m diving really deeply back into my handmade paper and fibers.” The paper vessels at McColl and a recent commission to create a 60-foot-long piece of handmade paper and fiber to hang indoors allowed her to return to the delicate medium that she started with.

As a child in South Carolina and as a young adult living on her own without a high school diploma, Palmisano not only had no access to art materials, she didn’t know “artist” was something someone could be. “I grew up in poverty, in a culture of poverty,” she says. Those roots underpin everything she does today. The first time she took discarded scraps of paper and fiber and reworked them entirely into a piece of handmade paper and sold it at an art show, she says, it was a revelation; she felt she’d performed a work of alchemy.

“It made me think of the way I grew up and where that came from,” Palmisano says. “Using someone else’s trash. You figure it out when you have no other choice. You can’t say, ‘I’m not going to eat today.’ Or, ‘I’m just not going to get to work today.’ Or, ‘I’m just not going to have clean clothes today.’ You figure it out. And I think that has served me well.”

In late 2019, when she filled a giant wall at the Mint Museum with Incantation, an ethereal, abstracted skyscape made of handmade paper, paint and collage, it was the first time many viewers had encountered fiber art in a blue-chip museum.

“Boundary-pushing” is how the museum described the piece, both for its use of recycled materials and for “breathing new life into objects not typically considered for use in the creation of art.”

It’s clear that the process of taking something discarded, breaking it down to its elements, and reworking it into something valuable and beautiful is not just empowering for Palmisano, it’s metaphoric.

And it’s always new. “Right now, I’m leaning deep into: ‘what do I want to make?’ I’ve got a lot of experimentation underway,” she says. “In the spring, I’m sure there’ll be something. I’ll be excited, like a kid walking up and handing you a dandelion they just picked: ‘Here’s my offering.’ Good work takes time, and I really want to give myself that time, because I want to continue to be able to do this work.”