Backyard Breaks

BACKYARD BREAKS

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Backyard Breaks

A miniature Himalayas at home

By Jenna Biter   •   Photographs by John Gessner

In the neighborhood of Pinehurst No. 9, Bob and Maria Milligans’ white stucco house lounges near the back of a lot shaded by mature pines, oaks and flowering dogwoods. Rhododendrons, hydrangeas, azaleas, camellias — the front yard is a gardener’s dream. The backyard is a golfer’s paradise.

“I love to play golf, so you’ll notice we’re walking from the patio to my . . .” Bob motions with his hands like he’s unveiling the grand prize on a game show “. . . putting green.”

This mini-Thistle Dhu, or micro-Himalayas, was fashioned from a seamless 20-by-20 piece of artificial turf, molded for a natural roll and sped up with hundreds of pounds of sand worked into the surface. There are three cups to aim at and enough contour to keep a tour pro scratching his head. “Sometimes it breaks left, sometimes it breaks right,” says Bob. The longest putt is roughly 15 feet.

McNeill’s Landscaping Services of Aberdeen installed the green when they overhauled the Milligans’ backyard in 2025. Upgrades included a rock garden, patio and walking paths, the continuation of a retaining wall, and in addition to the green, the replacement of the yard’s grass with turf. “I can’t stress enough how good of a job McNeill’s Landscaping did,” says Bob, surveying his domain. The backyard’s facelift was the final step in a home makeover that began just after the Milligans purchased the home in 2021.

“This is our Florida . . . I guess you call it a Carolina Room here,” Milligan says. The outdoor living space is situated on a deck they converted from a split-level to a single tier in 2022. Later they installed a pergola with remote control-operated louvres that can divert the sun any time of day and even keep out the rain. Four or five seating arrangements spill off the deck and into the backyard, ready to accommodate the Milligans’ frequent entertaining. A teakwood dining table seats 14. There are two gas-powered fire pits, plus a grill. “It’s the only thing he’s good at besides golf,” says Maria, grinning.

“We love to have more than just two or three friends over,” she says. They regularly commune with a group of six couples, the self-proclaimed “dirty dozen.” “Our new friends all love to come here because they can just chill, unwind and open a few bottles of good wine,” says Maria. “It’s relaxing.”

Dark blue cushions, pillows and pots finish the backyard. It’s a fitting color for a Navy family. Bob served 27 years in uniform before retiring as a captain in 1999. After their first life moving around the country, overseas and on the seas, followed by a second life in northern Virginia, the Milligans finally settled in Pinehurst. Their home sits across the street from the fairway of the fifth hole of No. 9, the Jack Nicklaus-designed course originally known as Pinehurst National.

“It was fate,” says Maria. Friends were moving to the area and the Milligans traveled south for a visit. “I walked into a shop, and the owner gave a hello-how-are-you,” says Maria, still dumbfounded. “I don’t get that in northern Virginia.”

Pretty soon the Milligans were searching for their own place in Pinehurst. “It took us three months,” says Maria. They liked the floor plan of their now-home and could see the property’s potential. “We could make it our own,” she says.

The Milligans moved into the nearly 4,000-square-foot house in 2021 and immediately got to work updating bathrooms and the kitchen, painting from top to bottom, essentially redoing everything indoors except for the layout. Then they shifted their focus outdoors.

“It was overgrown. It looked more like a jungle than anything else,” says Bob. “The backyard was nothing but pine needles, so it wasn’t really usable.” They hacked, trimmed, shaped and reshaped the potential they saw into reality. Thirteen trees were removed, so the surviving stand could flourish. They left the sprawling azaleas untouched.

“I love flowers. I want flowers,” Maria says. “I have these gorgeous azaleas throughout, I have rhododendrons, I have camelias, I have jasmine, roses, gardenias.” Whites, reds and pinks color the scene. “During the spring, this place is unbelievable as far as the color goes,” Bob says. Plus the Milligans’ home is just under a mile from the clubhouse. “Why do you think we moved down here?” Maria teases as Bob cracks a smile.

“The people I play with say that I have an advantage over them,” he says, eyeing the backyard’s crown jewel. A golfer-gnome watches the emerald turf from his home in a garden bed, lanterns illuminate the playing surface for after-hours practice and a pair of loungers offer respite to tired putters. “They’re older, I keep reminding them, so they putt and they sit,” says Maria.

Pathways puzzled together from geometric pavers circulate guests to and from the main attraction, and a golf-themed bird bath completes the scene. The yard’s full of robins, blue jays, woodpeckers and hummingbirds, especially when the flowers are out. It’s nearly a private aviary. “You can barely see our neighbors through the trees. You can’t see our neighbors at the back. We love it here because we’re in the community, but we can also get up early in the morning, have a cup of coffee on the deck and not worry about golfers.”

Unless they’re playing at Milligans National.

Celebrating Poetry

CELEBRATING POETRY

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Celebrating Poetry

Spurred on by the success of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, the American Academy of Poets organized the first National Poetry Month in April 1996. Over its 30 years of existence, it has grown into the largest literary celebration in the world, involving readers, students, teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishers, events and, oh yes, the occasional poet. It’s possible to sign up to receive a “Poem-a-Day” in your inbox (curated by Dorianne Lux), request a National Poetry Month poster, encourage participation in the “Dear Poet” project for students in grades five through 12, and consult a “Poetry Near You” calendar. To quote Emily Dickenson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” You may feel free to lose your head every month of the year, but April
is a good place to start.

I first read Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry in the mid-1990s. I quickly became a fan of her work, and “Valentine for Ernest Mann” has long been one of my favorites. The quirkiness of the first stanza — the idea of ordering a poem like ordering a taco — made me smile and want to read on. Then in the second stanza comes the kindness and generosity that shine through all her work. Instead of dismissing this rather audacious request (which was an actual demand from a middle school student), Naomi leads him, and us, into an exploration of how we too can find our own poems. “What we have to do/is live in a way that lets us find them.” She reminds us that we all have poetry in us, if we are attentive to the small meaningful moments in our lives. She doesn’t lecture us about it; instead, she gives us that wonderful example of the man who saw skunks as beautiful, and her images make them beautiful too. Her gentle and genuine words make us realize there is beauty everywhere if we are open to seeing it.

This poem has stuck with me over the years. When I was teaching both children and adults, I would share it to encourage students to make lists of where they could find their own poems. When I was writing my first book of poetry I came back to the line “Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us/we find poems” and realized that was exactly what I was doing. Naomi’s work shows us that poetry is a way of accessing our true feelings, be they of beauty or wonder or moving through difficult times. Born to an American mother and Palestinian father, Naomi Shihab Nye captures in her poetry the humanity that connects us all. She has spent over 40 years traveling the world leading poetry workshops with both children and adults that spread that humanitarian spirit. I am grateful for her presence through poetry.   

    — Joanne Durham

Valentine for Ernest Mann

By Naomi Shihab Nye

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment 
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries 
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

From Red Suitcase, by Naomi Shihab Nye. Copyright 1994 Naomi Shihab Nye. Used by permission of the author.

I’m sure I had read persona poems before I encountered Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s debut collection, but certainly none had struck me the way this one did. The excerpt I’ve selected is the last of 10 sections in the poem, which is also the title of the book. Each section is written from the poet’s imagined first-person perspective of an individual who was touched by Amelia Earhart’s final flight and disappearance, beginning with an ordinary bystander in section I all the way to her husband in section X. The facts of Earhart’s story (which I vividly remember learning in elementary school) are compelling enough. But when Calvocoressi filters them through the eyes of carefully curated characters — some who knew her personally and some who didn’t — those facts simultaneously gain dimension and become more intimately human. I had been under the impression that contemporary poetry was generally supposed to derive from personal experience, influenced on occasion by outside research. Reading The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and the other suites of persona poems in this book allowed me to see just how a poet could use their imagination in service of their work, bringing fictional narrative into lyrical verse and giving the reader an even deeper insight into something we thought we already knew. Though it’s taken me years to come around to it, it’s given me permission to do the same.

— Morrow Dowdle

The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart

(An Excerpt)

By Gabrielle Calvocoressi

X. George Putnam, husband

Afterwards she was everywhere:

a map in the glove compartment,

shoes on the stairs, her wedding ring

on the bathroom sink. I found

her house keys by the phone

and wondered how she’d get back

inside. Of course I wasn’t the only

one: everybody thought they’d seen

her, especially children

who wondered if she was hiding

from me. One girl wrote,

When my father yells

I hide in the barn. Do you have a barn?

The last time I saw Amelia Earhart

she was three steps ahead of me,

crossing to the other side

of the street. I almost died trying

to reach her, called her name

over the traffic and when she turned back

it was a young man, startled

by my grasping hand, saying sorry

but I was mistaken. Then she was gone;

clothes sent, car sold, nothing left

to look for. Except airplanes

where are everywhere now

and take me back to her, turning

away from our expectant faces.

Excerpt from The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle
Calvocoressi, Persea Books, 2005.

I am a graduate of SUNY Brockport, where I chose to continue my study of reading and writing poetry after finding my way to it in community college. As it happened, two poets who’d become, for me, extremely important influences, preceded me at Brockport, Michael Waters and Li-Young Lee. Style-wise, these are different poets entirely, except for the attention to poetic craft and texture both bring to their work.

The recipient of many awards and honors, Li-Young’s backstory is as extraordinary as his poetry. He was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents, and his father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China.  

Eating Together is a poem in which his father figures prominently, and the poem’s title presents us with an irony. That is, the family is not together as the recently deceased father is absent.

Rooted in Confucian principles of respect, it is a common and traditional practice in Chinese culture for the head of the household (often the father or the eldest member) to be honored with the head of the fish. Therefore, this is a poem of transition. The mother now assumes the father’s role as head of the family and is afforded that respect.

Like so much of Lee’s poetry, this selection is notable for its quiet tone and sensory texture. Grief is in the poem, of course, but the fact need not be uttered. Instead, the reader is provided a closure of beauty and, at its core, an extraordinary simile. The dead father is compared to a snow-covered road in a pine forest, and we understand that here, death is blessed relief, as he is “lonely for no one.”

— John Hoppenthaler

Eating Together

By Li-Young Lee

In the steamer is the trout   

seasoned with slivers of ginger,

two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.   

We shall eat it with rice for lunch,   

brothers, sister, my mother who will   

taste the sweetest meat of the head,   

holding it between her fingers   

deftly, the way my father did   

weeks ago. Then he lay down   

to sleep like a snow-covered road   

winding through pines older than him,   

without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

This poem, from the volume In the Lateness of the World, eloquently speaks to the work of witness both externally and internally. “Early Confession” resonates with my own work as a documentary poet whose work also questions and engages in the interior domains of political, social and personal struggle. Carolyn Forché has always evoked and amplified beauty in the difficult and often traumatic everydayness and ordinariness of life, mirroring ourselves in the webs of each other’s experiences and humanity. I’ve never known how to walk away from suffering, and I too have asked, what might my path have been if I had not chosen this path? What if I had lain down in the drifts to finish a dream? The pastoral imagery and metaphors create a wisp of a trailing scent; an invocation, or a lamentation for life, death, consciousness, and our intimate lives. “Early Confession” is an invitation to seek clarity, declare purpose, and assume agency both given and liberated. This poem is an affirmation for my ethic of wonder and need to focus my creative intentions and resolutions on the wonders and realities of the world. Forché has always written poetry that returns us over and over again to how to purposefully witness wonder and humility as wholesome emotions that will never exist with destruction. “Early Confession” reawakens a primal portal for becoming receptive to what lies around us in our communities that are inherently worth preserving and protecting. The poem draws me personally to bear witness to my own self-cultivation for learning how to fully inhabit the path that I’ve chosen and that chooses me back. I am grateful for the vast landscape this singular poem constructs, reminding the reader to forge new connections with the self that guide us to inhabit and forge new connections on the path, guiding our sense of wonderment outward toward full radical amazement.

          — Jaki Shelton Green

Early Confession

By Carolyn Forché

If I had never walked the snow fields, heard the iced birch,

leant against wind hard toward distant houses, ever distant,

wind in the coat, snow over the boot tops, supper fires

in windows far across the stubby farms, none of them

my house until the end, the last, and late, always late, despite how early

I’d set off wearing gloves of glass, a coat standing up by itself.

If I had never reached the house, but instead lain down in the drifts

to finish a dream, if I had finished, would I have

reached the rest of my life, here, now, with you whispering:

must not sleep, not rest, must not take flight, must wake.

When I was at NC State in the late 1960s, Guy Owen was already a legend. The journal he founded and edited, the Southern Poetry Review, was well-established. His second novel, The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man, had been made into a movie. His collection of poetry, The White Stallion and Other Poems, won the Roanoke-Chowan award. There wasn’t much he hadn’t done or wasn’t doing. At the time there was an active revolt against traditional forms, against poetry for the ear. I felt that revolutionary spirit too. But having had a grandmother who would, at the drop of a hat, recite verse, I wanted the sounds, the music, as well. When I read Owen’s poem, I was taken by how different it was than the early 20th century verse my grandmother loved and how different from the writings of the Beats that so attracted young poets like me in the late 1960s. The poem is so full of sound and surprise. In just 16 lines, it manages to be psychologically complex and simple, dream-like and real, innocent and wise, showing tension between father and son. Although I was a computer science major who had failed introductory English (I am a terrible speller), Guy talked with me a little and was kind. Not long after, I published the longest poem ever in the student literary journal, the Windhover. (Someone else checked and corrected my spelling). Guy remembered that. A few years later at the first North Carolina Writers Conference I attended, he remembered me in the best way; he invited me to share his whiskey. We talked about poetry. I mostly listened. The horse, he admitted, had been black, but at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference the editor of Poetry told him that if the horse was white as a ghost or as dawn it would be a better poem and would be published in his respected journal. It was published in Poetry as “The White Horse.” Somewhere along the way, the horse now white became a stallion. I learned a lot about how small revisions and particular details can greatly improve a poem. Today, 20 years older than Guy was when he died in 1981, I return to “The White Stallion.” It seems to me a masterpiece. So accessible and so mysterious. I can hear Guy talk about it again. I can taste his whiskey. Jack Daniel’s, since you asked. — Paul Jones

The White Stallion

By Guy Owen

A white horse came to our farm once

Leaping, like dawn, the backyard fence.

In dreams I heard his shadow fall

Across my bed. A miracle,

I woke up beneath his mane’s surprise;

I saw my face within his eyes.

The dew ran down his nose and fell

Upon the bleeding window quince. . . .

But long before I broke the spell

My father’s curses sped him on,

Four flashing hoofs that bruised the lawn.

And as I stumbled into dawn

I saw him scorn a final hedge,

I heard his pride upon the bridge,

Then through the wakened yard I went

To read the rage the stallion spent.

I once had a poetry teacher who said try and write lines so good someone will want to have them tattooed on their body. Quite a goal, indeed, but Joe Mills’ poems are full of such lines.

I could have picked a dozen of his poems but I chose Savings from his collection, This Miraculous Turning, which won the 2015 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry. I’m a huge fan of what I think of as the classic Mills’ poem: accessible, personal, often funny and about family, with an ending that kicks you in the gut but also somehow lifts you up. Mills is the author of seven poetry collections and a professor at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. While his poems are smart, they are not the sort of poems that feel like a puzzle to be solved. Not that that means they are “easy.” You do have to do some work, but his poems pull you in and share something about his life that also feels universal.

One of the things that strikes me first about Savings is the conversational tone. It starts off with a narrator telling you a simple story of setting the clocks back for daylight saving, but it can’t just be about that, can it?  By the second stanza, it’s becoming more personal as the poet brings in the scale and his wife’s blood pressure pills. The third and final stanza really gets to what the poem is about — family and how we want to hold on for as long as we can, whether it’s for an aging parent, a spouse, or in this case, your children. I have a friend who, upon reading a book he really enjoyed, throws the book across the room. Perhaps as a sign of respect, or awe, or I wish I’d written that. Whenever I read a Joe Mills book, I throw it good and hard across the room. But not too far, because I know I’ll soon want to pick it up and read more of his lovely poems.

          — Steve Cushman

Savings

By Joe Mills

Last night we set the clocks back

gaining an extra hour to sleep

or drink or read, and I walked

through the house changing the time

in the coffee maker, the stove,

the VCR, the thermostat

then I went into the bathroom

to twist the dial on the scale

a few pounds lighter

and I moved the numbers down

on the blood pressure machine

so my wife wouldn’t need as many pills,

then to the children’s rooms

to erase the doorframe marks

and repencil them slightly lower,

not to the point we again would need

strollers or slings, just an inch or two,

to make these days last longer.

One of many things I love about reading poetry is seeing a poet’s thought process unfold as I read. How they move from wonder to thought to wonder. At the core of Taylor Johnson’s poetics seems to be making visible his thoughts, his concerns, and his loves. “Menace to” is such a great example of the Venn diagram of Taylor’s mind. The poem draws a diagram around the speaker’s enemies: money and plastic. On the other side of that diagram, comrades. As he does, Taylor complicates the speaker’s position. Wi-Fi is an enemy as well, allowing the speaker to reach out to those comrades. Thus, as the speaker states, “wifi is a money for me,” while Wi-Fi kills the houseplants. The speaker is aware of his complicity, as he states: “My enemy is distance growing dark, distance growing politely in my pocket as connection.” The Venn diagram becomes even more complicated as the enemy grows larger, into a drone that is literate, “well-read and precise and quiet,” yet is still connected to the “money” that opens the poem and the wifi in the second stanza. Taylor ends by turning the poem back on himself, the new computer, enemy as well, becomes a tool to destroy the enemy, to reach again, comrades. 

— Tyree Daye

Menace To

By Taylor Johnson

after June Jordan

Nightly my enemies feast on my comrades 
like maggots on money. Money being my enemy 
as plastic is my enemy. My enemy everywhere 
and in my home as wifi is 
a money for me to reach my comrades 
and kills my house plants. My enemy
is distance growing dark, distance growing 
politely in my pocket as connection. 
I must become something my enemies can’t eat, don’t have 
a word for yet, my enemies being literate as a drone is 
well-read and precise and quiet, as when I buy something 
such as a new computer with which to sing against my enemies, 
there is my enemy, silent and personal.

A Southern Pines Fairytale

A SOUTHERN PINES FAIRYTALE

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A Southern Pines Fairytale

Whimsical blooms with an intoxicating scent

By Jason Harpster
Photographs by Paige Ramsey Moody

Fairies and fairytales hold a special allure in the hearts and minds of children and adults alike. We grow up enchanted by the possibilities of magic and often wonder if such possibilities are real. In Southern Pines, this question seems a bit less far-fetched. We are home to the world’s oldest longleaf pine tree and are known for our old-growth forest. What other towns have an annual festival celebrating a tree’s birthday? It seems only fitting that it should have a fairy named after it, too.

If fairies do exist, then their form surely would be fleeting and ethereal. Whether you call them woodland nymphs, pixies or sprites, one thing is certain: They are rare and special. Only the most fortunate may catch a glimpse. To capture one in a photograph, timing must be perfect. One such sprite has been seen, documented and officially confirmed by the Species Identification Task Force. No kidding.

When Dendrobium tipuliferum ‘Southern Pines Sprite’ was presented to American Orchid Society judging on Aug. 13, 2023, conditions were just right. Native to Fiji, this diminutive orchid is capable of blooming multiple times a year, producing flowers that are so delicate and ephemeral that they often go unnoticed. The whimsical blooms have an intoxicating watermelon fragrance. Like many other orchids, the more fragrant the bloom, the shorter its life. The flowers of Dendrobium tipuliferum last less than 24 hours, so it’s not entirely surprising that this was the first time this species had been exhibited for judging.

The plant received a Certificate of Horticultural Merit with a score of 86 points for its form, color, floriferousness and overall aesthetic appeal. The judges commented that the filamentous petals, serrated lip and brilliant yellow color were especially striking. The photos speak for themselves.

The clonal name ‘Southern Pines Sprite’ was chosen as the stellate flowers seem to wave and beckon you closer, just before hitting you with the magical watermelon fragrance. Since this was the first award ever granted to the species, one of the blooms had to be carefully dissected, measured and described for official verification by the Species Identification Task Force.

Some plants and flowers have anthropomorphic features that give them seemingly human qualities. Dracula flowers, or monkey-faced orchids, are one such example. Dendrobium tipuliferum is truly a special species as its flowers look like fairies gracefully dancing in the breeze. The flower chosen for the award photograph is especially cheerful as it looks like it is waving hello.

It seems the fairies in Southern Pines are rather friendly and have a propensity for making people smile.

Open to Art

OPEN TO ART

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Open to Art

The Sandhills Photo Club conducts six competitions a year. The last competition of 2025 was “open,” allowing the 115 club members to submit their best images on any subject. The photo club posts its themed topics — voted on by the membership and suggested, in some cases, with the aid of artificial intelligence — two years in advance, and any submitted image must have been taken within the last three years. What appears here are the results of the member-judged open competition when the camera is free to roam anywhere the photographer’s eye takes it.

Tier 3

Tier 3 – 1st Place, Horses of the Camargue, Pat Anderson
Tier 3 – Second Place, On the Rocks, Donna Ford
Tier 3 – 3rd Place, First Light, Dee Wiliams

Tier 2

Tier 2 – 1st Place, Curious Chimp, Joshua Simpson
Tier 2 – Second Place, Glen Coe Canyon, Michael Sassano
Tier 2 – Third Place, Standing Out, Cathy Locklear

Tier 1

Tier 1 – First Place, White Whiskered Puffbird, Dawn Willis
Tier 1 – Tied Second Place, Morning Glory, Catherine Maready
Tier 1 – Tied Second Place, I See Moo, Cindy Murphy
Tier 1 – Tied Honorable Mention, Embracing the Blue Horizon, Sharon Kitchen Miller
T1 Tied – Honorable Mention, America the Beautiful, JoAnn Sluder

The Inn Place

THE INN PLACE

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The Inn Place

Return of the Magnolia

By Deborah Salomon   •   Photographs by John Gessner

In a mere 130 years the Magnolia Inn has gone from overflow to intimate, a destination within a destination. Completed in 1896, just one year after the Holly Inn, the Magnolia began as a boarding house — its rooms referred to as chambers — needed to comfortably house the servants, doctors, even some family members of people attracted to James Walker Tufts’ new health resort for consumptives built on 6,000 acres in the Sandhills of North Carolina.

Closer than Florida and located on a north/south rail line, with an adorable village layout designed by the firm of Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot — fresh from the completion of its work at Biltmore House in 1895 — and implemented by his right-hand man, Warren Manning, Pinehurst was positioned to attract those in need of a little R&R in the pine-scented outdoors. There was just one problem: The disease, as it turned out, was communicable. Hanging around in groups was contraindicated. Just two years after its founding, the resort’s raison d’etre had been undermined. Pinehurst needed to find another path.

As luck would have it, the timing more or less coincided with the arrival in 1901 (the year the Carolina Hotel, the “Queen of the South,” opened) of a Scottish golf professional named Donald Ross. There were already 18 holes to be tended, built by Dr. Leroy Culver and John Dunn Tucker, Pinehurst’s first golf pro. The game, growing exponentially in the United States at the dawn of the 20th century, would become the backbone of Tufts’ resort. The Magnolia, designed by architect Lyman Sise (the brother of Gertrude Sise Tufts and the man who also designed the Holly Inn), morphed into an annex, handling the overflow from the Harvard, Berkshire and Holly inns, ultimately adding the Carolina to the mix.

With deep Boston roots, Tufts knew how to attract talent from New England. He snared J.L. Pottle from the Highland House in Jefferson, New Hampshire, to be the first manager of Magnolia Inn. Pottle arrived with a complete staff of maids, janitors, cooks, handymen and other staff. An 1898 advertisement for the Magnolia in the Pinehurst Outlook touted “the finest Northern cooks.” Another boasted of amenities like steam heat, electric lights, bathrooms with hot water and “perfect sanitary arrangements’’ all for $8 to $12 per week.

In the 1920s the Magnolia was sold to Mr. E.J. Fitzgerald, manager at the Carolina, who used it as an annex to the main hotel. Fitzgerald’s wife continued to run the Magnolia after his death. Pottle’s son also remained in the area. During that period Dr. Francis Owens, who would become one of the founders of Moore Memorial Hospital, maintained his office in the Magnolia, even performing some minor surgeries and child deliveries on the premises.

If its occupants changed over time, so did its footprint. The lovely Queen Anne-style building with 14 bedrooms was originally five stories rising between the village and the Carolina. Porches, verandas and rocking chairs hugged the structure. Not long after the completion of the Carolina, the Magnolia underwent its most drastic alteration. The building was making it difficult to see the village from the grand, new Carolina — and vice versa — so the top two floors were lopped off. The Magnolia still contains an interior stairway that now leads, well, absolutely nowhere.

After a half dozen or so changes of ownership through the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the Magnolia was reacquired by the resort in 2023. It no longer answers to the name boarding house and instead is a stately presence overlooking village streets where well-dressed vacationers browse the shops and relax from days on the golf course. Inside, eight posh bed/sitting rooms, called spaces, each identified with a brass plate bearing the name of a village street, showcase period and early-modern furnishings. Colors are soft grays and pastels. Padded headboards, pull-across drapes, bay windows and angular upholstered chairs suggest the ’50s.

The enticing aroma comes from fine Italian dining at the in-house Villagio Ristorante & Bar, and the only surgery performed in the Magnolia Inn these days is stress removal.

Poem March 2026

POEM

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Poem

Julian

In christening gown and bonnet,

he is white and stoic as the moon,

unflinching as the sun burns

through yellow puffs of pine

pollen gathered at his crown

while I pour onto his forehead

from a tiny blue Chinese rice cup

holy water blessed

by John Paul II himself

and say, “I baptize you, Julian Joseph,

in the name of the Father, and of the Son,

and of the Holy Spirit.”

Nor does he stir when the monarchs

and swallowtails,

in ecclesiastical vestments,

lift from the purple brushes

of the butterfly bush

and light upon him.

  — Joseph Bathanti

The Artist Known as Cowman

THE ARTIST KNOWN AS COWMAN

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The Artist Known as Cowman

b. 1949? — d. not long ago now

Fiction by Daniel Wallace

Illustrations by Keith Borshak

He wasn’t always Cowman. Before he was Cowman he was just a boy, and like a boy he played in the fields, in the river and the woods, near the lake, and down the road. He worked with his family planting things. In the summertime he didn’t wear shoes or a shirt, just a pair of cut-off jeans passed down from brother to brother, the blue worn nearly white, and sometimes he wore a hat, when the sun bore down so hot he could feel it boiling his brains. This is the way it was from May to the middle of September, and by then he looked less a boy than he looked like something that was once a boy, or that could become a boy, under the proper supervision and a bath.

Near the end of a long afternoon sometimes beneath the spindly towering pine trees that were everywhere, he cleared the pine needles away until he made an open patch of dirt. With the palms of both of his hands he would smooth it out, harder and faster, until the dirt pressed so hard into his skin that no bath would ever get it out completely. His hands would always be a little bit darker than the rest of him and that makes for an interesting biographical detail.

Then he would take a stick and carve a picture into the ground, and maybe some words. In the beginning, he always said, he drew nothing but cows.

This is how it started, becoming what he later became: Cowman.

Now of course he’s known the world over.

But before. Before all this, where was he?

A valley where there was a river — small at times, then bigger, frothy and white, then . . . not. Mountains this way, that. A hill, a dale. No place anyone has ever been, however, nor a place they would want to go, and for precisely this reason it remained undiscovered by the likes of you or us for centuries probably. It had no name, this place. For generations the people there weren’t aware there were other places, so isolated was this little town, quiet and dark in the hills and in the dales, the mountainous extremes of their lives. Why name it? Why name something there is no more of than one?

Home is what he called it. He hasn’t been home in such a long time and knows now he will never see that forgotten patch of soil ever again. But the day he left he knew he never would. All of his work is influenced by what he no longer has.

Dug into the side of a hill was his house. Two-sided wooden walls, the front stone, the back wall a dense red clay, which, true, he grew up eating. Not for the main meals. Just a little something in-between. When a new baby came they just dug deeper into the mountain for room.

Worms were a problem. When it rained the wall dripped. But it mostly did the job it had to do.

The wall in his room had a streak of lime running through it. The pale white against the dull orange was like a late summer sunset, he said. The artist transforms the world with his eyes, even when his world is no more than an ambitious hole.

The fifth of seven, Cowman was. The first three were girls, the second three were boys, and the last was some odd combination of the two but less than either. They called it Tarp. While the others were passing fine in almost every respect — the boys big and strong, the girls industrious, pleasant — all of Tarp’s parts were either bigger or smaller than they were supposed to be, and inside his head was probably not something anyone could actually think with, no better than a peach pit, really, or gravel. Truth be told he never did amount to much and had he amounted to anything no one would have been more surprised than he. Everything surprised him, though. Even chairs and rocks.

The others were named, in order of their birth, Estem, Maudry, Ebee, Root and Mold. The Cowman’s real name is not included in the list, as it has been carefully lost to time. It has variously been suggested to be Remly, Tirk, Lebby, Crop, Moses or Pisky. No one can say. Cowman has thus become Cowman, now and forever, and can avoid the embarrassing parenthetical approximations which attach themselves to the nomenclature of famous geniuses.

Estem, Maudry and Ebee, his sisters, were beyond beautiful. They all had thick auburn hair and perfect freckles. It was said no man could look at any one of them without falling in love, and thus the daughters were never in the same place at the same time. Except once, one time, and a man fell in love with all three of them and courted each on a revolving basis. Finally, they all said no, and his heart was broken once a day for three days running by each of them in turn, repeated on a loop for months, and he did not live long thereafter.

Mold and Root were large — Mold largely fat, and Root like one big muscle. Root’s strength was legendary. He once threw a wild bobcat high into the air using naught but his little finger — and caught it with his face. Before this legendary event he was a handsome man, too. Or handsome enough.

Mold’s girth impressed as well. He was one of those constant growers — ever expanding, like a balloon blown up by God. One morning he overslept and could not leave the room through the same door he entered it and stayed there for several months. He eventually became so big that he filled the room from side to side, floor to ceiling. Root dug him out. He remained an outdoor child after that, and for as long as he lived was never allowed within the dwelling of another human being again. Sad.

Cowman, being the seventh child and the third boy, spent most of his childhood either lost or forgotten. The seeds of art are born within the desolate souls of the suffering. Wagon trips across the wide valley to visit relatives who lived in a holler never failed to exclude him — not out of cruelty, or dislike, but out of pure absentmindedness. His family had a sense of him, but they could never be sure — like something glimpsed quickly out of the corner of your eye — was there a – ? did we have a – ? He was more of an idea, a vague one at that. Maybe he was a dream — a communal dream? Communal dreams were common in that time and place. Hard to conceive of nowadays, that people were too poor to have dreams of their own, but had to share them with their family, sometimes the entire village. But it was true. Dreams were crowded places. Cowman did not help his cause by being quiet in an exceptional way. He was neither small, nor large. He rarely complained, by nature content. When he would wake up and find his entire family had gone he tried to pitch in by cleaning up around the house and doing worm duty on the back wall. Then he might go fishing.

And then, of course, it goes without saying, sometimes he would make his art. He would use a stick, or a piece of charcoal, or pieces of bark crumbled almost into dust, making the line he wanted across the plank wooden floors of the front room. The famous Cowman line, a line that came from his bones and from the rest of him, from all his parts, and flowed into his hand and through whatever he was holding. He knew who he was before anyone else did, but he kept himself to himself. When he came of age he packed a small tote and left the red clay enclosure to parts unknown even to him and was never missed because no one was really sure he had ever been there at all. He did miss the old life, though, from time to time. He was a cave dweller at heart.

Why did he leave that place? No one left, ever, there being no known place to leave to. But he saw a light no one else could see, heard a song sung for him alone, and he smelled something sweet over yonder, something that could not be found in the red-clay, lime-striped box he called home.

He sought it out.

He seeks it still.

II

Cowman crossed many hills, many dales, and over the last of both came to the first town. So many people, dozens upon dozens, all of them arrayed in colorful garb and shoes made of shiny leather. Some wore hats that looked like clouds and hair that curled and bounced like a small animal living on their heads. Not the sort of people he was used to, and he not theirs. They gave him the side eye and hustled past, as if they were afraid he might bite them, for he looked like someone who lived at the bottom of a swamp, wearing clothes made of mud and dead leaves. A nice woman took him home with her, a young widow named Mary. She gave him a bath and a haircut. He was so handsome then. No one could ever believe he was the same boy who had scared the dogs with his face. She showed him the ways of the world, too — Mary, to whom all thanks are given by him for everything always.

Oh, Mary.

He left at the end of the year, fluent in the ways of human beings, breaking Mary’s heart into so many pieces that no one was able to put it back together again. The first of many broken hearts left in his wake — but what could be done? Not a single thing. He had his work and that was all that mattered. No heart could pine for him more than he pined for the making of great things.

He is most in love with that which has yet to exist.

That’s what mattered to him, and that’s what matters to him still.

(His poor children, though. The less said about them the better.)

III

An old man now, crumbling, silent, possibly happy as a clam, but who can say, waiting for death with his trademark wrinkly grin and nursed by his 7th wife, the lovely Sophia, who is 63 years his junior. All Cowman makes now are dreams, dreams made of bits and pieces of clay and leaves, caves and pine trees, rivers, hills and dales and of Mary, of course, to whom all thanks are given by him for everything always. He has regrets, to be sure, but none that really matter. He can’t remember much of what he’s done, the good things or the bad. He can’t remember his friends or his enemies or his children or any of his many wives, including the one at his bedside now. She is quite beautiful, though, this woman. Her skin is smooth and brown and her golden hair shines like sun on water. She reminds him of nothing because there is nothing in his mind. But he could look at her face forever, and so this is what he does. 

From Fossil to Fame

FROM FOSSIL TO FAME

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From Fossil to Fame

A dino-sized discovery

By Hampton Williams Hofer

Step into the SECU DinoLab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, and you may find yourself shoulder-to-shoulder with a paleontologist dusting off a specimen or examining a slide with a microscope. This high-tech research laboratory is open to the public, a chance for regular folks to see real science in action. And it’s home to a pair of very famous residents: the “Dueling Dinosaurs.”

The Dueling Dinosaurs — thought to be the remains of an intact tyrannosaur and Triceratops that died 67 million years ago — are considered perhaps the most significant fossils ever recovered from Montana’s storied Hell Creek Formation. For one, the specimens were nearly complete and exceptionally well-preserved. For another, these two dinosaurs had interacted, likely even died fighting, as evidenced by teeth fragments embedded in the Triceratops. They were first unearthed in 2006 by Clayton Phillips, a Montana rancher and self-styled dinosaur cowboy, who excavated and stored the specimens while spreading word of his discovery.

By 2016, Dr. Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, had heard of the fossils. She and her team traveled to New York, where the Dueling Dinosaurs were being stored, to verify the legitimacy of the fossils, then on to Montana to examine the conditions of the landscape where they were excavated.

Convinced of their importance, Zanno, along with the Friends of the NCMNS, worked to raise the funds to not only bring the Dueling Dinosaurs to North Carolina, but to build them a new home worthy of what she knew would be one of the most significant paleontological finds of the century. The NCMNS acquired the dinosaurs in 2020 — and got to work.

The museum built a new annex to support the Dueling Dinosaurs’ 31,000 pounds of bone, sediment and plaster. Unlike the way fossils have been treated in the past, the Dueling Dinosaurs would not be fully excavated and reassembled but remain within their plaster preparations — all the better to learn clues about how they behaved and appeared. (In the stone surrounding the Triceratops, for example, are impressions left by octagonal formations on its frill, offering insights into how the dinosaur’s skin may have looked and felt.)

While paleontologists had historically spent their research work dusting bones in dark museum basements, their work at the NCMNS would literally be brought to light. Visitors can see them, even talk to them, ask questions and observe their work in real time. The SECU DinoLab at the NCMNS, which opened in spring 2024, revolutionized the visitor experience with this groundbreaking exhibition.

The remarkably preserved fossils and whatever Cretaceous secrets they held were, as Zanno said at the time, like “a big, unopened Christmas present.” Now, less than two years since the museum welcomed the Dueling Dinosaurs, the first gift has been unwrapped. And it’s a whole new species, flipping decades of Tyrannosaurus rex research on its head.

The small tyrannosaur was believed to have been a teenage T. rex for the 20 years since Phillips spotted its pelvis weathering out of the ground. Using CT scans and imaging to look inside the blocks of earth housing the fossils, paleontologists at the NCMNS uncovered characteristics in their tyrannosaur specimen that set it apart from a T. rex, including larger forelimbs, more teeth, fewer tail vertebrae, and distinct nerve patterns. In addition, growth rings and spinal fusion data proved that the specimen was an adult. But at 18 feet long and 1,500 pounds, it is only around a tenth of the body mass and half the length of a full-grown T. rex.

That meant that the small tyrannosaur is, in fact, a mature Nanotyrannus lancensis.

“The implications are difficult to overstate,” says Zanno. “The fact is, much of our current understanding of T. rex was built on three decades of research that unknowingly mixed data from Nanotyrannus with that of Tyrannosaurus — two different tyrannosaurs that aren’t even closely related. Most of that research now needs a second look.”

Along with co-author Dr. James Napoli, a vertebrate paleontologist at Stony Brook University, Zanno published the findings of their study in Nature this past October.

The scientific gift of the Dueling Dinosaurs exhibit will continue to give, as Nanotyrannus changes much of what paleontologists have believed about history’s most famous dinosaur and the world in which it reigned supreme. A longstanding debate in the realm of paleontology questioned whether Nanotyrannus was a distinct species or simply an adolescent T. rex. Zanno and Napoli showed that the Nanotyrannus at the NCMNS is biologically incompatible with a T. rex — meaning that the T. rex’s dominance in the final million years leading up to the asteroid was not unchallenged.

“To me, what’s exciting about this discovery is that it opens the door to a whole new series of questions about how these drastically different predators — one built for brute strength and one built for speed — interacted in the twilight of the dinosaurs. What we can say right now is that life at the end of the Cretaceous was a lot more colorful than we had imagined,” says Zanno.

Though smaller than T. rex, Nanotyrannus was still a valiant competitor, and a quicker, more agile hunter. Its existence proves that predator diversity at the end of the age of the dinosaurs was richer than previous research suggests. Now a new question arises: How many other mistakenly identified dinosaur species could be hiding in plain sight?

“Scientists have long debated whether dinosaurs were thriving or diminishing when the asteroid struck,” Zanno says. “Without understanding the number of dinosaurs alive at the time and the ecological roles they filled, we cannot document how mass extinction events have shaped life on our planet in the past, nor how they are likely to affect us in the future.”

Zanno and Napoli conducted exhaustive research before releasing their findings in Nature, work supported by the State of North Carolina, N.C. State University, the Friends of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and the Dueling Dinosaurs Capital Campaign. Their process included examining more than 200 other tyrannosaur fossils. One of those, like the specimen at the museum, was originally believed to be a teenage T. rex, but also ended up being a fully-grown Nanotyrannus.

Interestingly, this specimen differed enough from Nanotyrannus lancensis at the museum for them to conclude it was, in fact, a new species entirely. (Zanno and Napoli named it Nanotyrannus lethaeus after the underworld River Nethe in Greek mythology, where souls who drank the water forgot their past lives and were ready to be reborn.)

“Nanotyrannus was clearly an animal capable of speed, darting about on long limbs, unlike its bulkier cousin, T. rex. It also had powerful, dextrous arms, large hands, a shorter tail, and unserrated peg-like teeth at the front of the mouth — oddly, not that dissimilar from yours and mine,” says Zanno. “But how fast could it run? How did it hunt? What was its favorite prey? I am excited to dive into Nanotyrannus itself. We know next to nothing about its biology; in a very real way, this is a dinosaur being reborn to the scientific community.”

The specimens at the NCMNS have affectionately been named after two North Carolina locations. Murphy, the Triceratops, is named for the westernmost town in the state, signifying the strength and longevity of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Manteo, the Nanotyrannus, is named for the coastal town on Roanoke Island, home to The Lost Colony and the original American mystery. It suits the Nanotyrannus, a name that now represents question, discovery and the spirit of exploration.

Zanno says this is just the beginning. “We have decades of incredible research in the pipeline on the Dueling Dinosaurs. This is all made possible not just by the outstanding preservation of the fossil carcasses and the talent and dedication of the team we have put together, but also by the community backing we have received,” he says, adding, “The people of North Carolina and beyond banded together to protect these fossils for science and the public alike — a powerful force for good that will continue to pay dividends.

“We simply can’t wait to keep sharing the excitement with all.”

 

The Ruth Pauley Speaker Series welcomes Dr. Lindsay Zanno, PhD, for National Geographic Live: “Rise of T. Rex” on Tuesday, April 28, 2026 at 7:00 PM in Owens Auditorium at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center (BPAC). Join RPS as Dr. Zanno explores the story behind one of history’s most fascinating creatures. Admission is free, but tickets are required and available at TicketMeSandhills.com.