Pleasures of Life Dept.

White-Knuckle Fists

And how to pry an idea out of them

By Jenna Biter

More often than not, I’m wrong — not about any one thing or even a short list of several things. No, not me. I cut a wide swath. I sprinkle conjecture willy-nilly as if it was fairy dust, speaking too soon and judging too quickly. I find myself nursing a bout of foot in mouth so often I should be vaccinated for it. Luckily, erosion of excessive pride is a by-product of my blunders, so I’ve learned to take jokes at my expense gracefully (ish) and to hold my opinions loosely.

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania with a mile-long driveway seemed dull to a 13-year-old with the dream of becoming a fashion designer in a big city, and, to my 20-year-old self, my Perry County upbringing was merely fodder for comedic storytelling. Tales of my Amish neighbors or the eccentric neighborhood survivalist, Emerson, who had constructed a bomb shelter beneath his garage, were megahits with my city-dwelling college mates. “I’ll never marry a man from home,” says I, after breaking up with my high school sweetheart. Wrong. I’m newly married to a man I met in seventh grade. We settled here in the Sandhills, bought our first house–a modified Cape Cod with navy shutters and a fenced-in backyard–and I began prying some of my dumbest preconceived notions out of my white-knuckle fists.

I used to avoid Lowe’s. It wasn’t the garish inflatable holiday decorations that offended me but the garage-style concrete floors. The scuff, scuff, scuffing of my shoes against that cold, hard floor pooled in my head like an invasive earworm. Wriggling into five layers of snowsuit in the backseat of a Suburban was more fun. Then, my husband, Drew, and I became homeowners, and now we worship at the altar of Lowe’s. Somehow my newfound interest in orbital sanders, wainscoting and dovetail joints drowned out the sound of shoes on a floor. My re-evaluations didn’t stop at home improvement.

“But, I want to sit beside you,” I whined into Drew’s ear. “I know, I know,” he cooed as he squeezed my hand and pulled me to our two-person table at our favorite breakfast spot. He slid into his seat, and I plopped into the chair across from him with a huff. It was 10 a.m. on a Saturday. The restaurant was slammed. We crossed our fingers for a booth, so we could cozy in beside each other, hold hands and pull up a Monday or Tuesday puzzle in The New York Times crossword app. Finger crossing has a fairly low success rate when the line snakes out the door and halfway to Savannah. Begrudgingly, we accepted the wooden two-top. Drew concentrated on the menu, even though he orders the same thing every time; I’ll cough out my latte the day he orders differently, and I’m not one to waste a coffee. I glared at him from across the table. Then it struck me. You hypocrite, I chuckled to myself. How long ago was it when I rolled my eyes and held back laughter at the Romeo and Juliet feeding each other French fries while snuggled up side-by-side at Applebee’s? “Weirdos,” I muttered back then.

Now, I’m the weirdo. But I’m OK with that. The list of things I once avoided or mocked now sports a new title: Things I Do or Will Do. I married a man from my hometown, shop at Lowe’s, sit beside rather than across at restaurants, and use an electric toothbrush daily, even though its wet grossness still makes me cringe. I live with a big, hairy dog that drops poufs of fur like tumbleweeds on Route 66 and own utility pants from REI Co-op. On the flip side, my husband now likes mushrooms and red onions and wears clothes that aren’t only for utility.

I’m not saying all of my opinions have or will reverse themselves–I’m still too stubborn for that. And, who knows, some may even withstand research and reanalysis. Hell, there’s an off chance I could be right. You know what they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and I think my odds are better than that. Hope springs eternal.  PS

Jenna Biter is a fashion designer, entrepreneur and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jenna.l.knouse@gmail.com.

Pleasures of Life

Great Discoveries

All happen in good time

By Scott Sheffield

It was December of 1956 and I was 9 years old, turning 10 three days after Christmas. My brother, Steve, was 7. My awareness of the world was just beginning to widen, and I asked my parents and my fourth-grade teacher a lot of questions about what I saw and heard. The questions led to revelations about many things, including a recently acquired knowledge about where my Christmas presents really came from. My brother still believed they came down the chimney.

My new knowledge was conferred upon me by my parents out of frustration from my continuous barrage of questions concerning the matter:

How does Santa get down the chimney? I looked up there and there isn’t enough room for someone that fat.

What if there’s a fire in the fireplace? Won’t he get burned?

How can he carry all the toys for everyone on one sleigh? Does he go back to the North Pole for more when he runs out?

How can he deliver all the toys in one night? Et cetera, et cetera.

My parents surrendered this new information reluctantly with the strict prohibition that I not tell my brother anything that might ruin his belief in the story that, only a short time before, I had shared. Of course, after basking in the glow of having my suspicions confirmed, the first thing I wanted to do was tell my brother everything I had just learned. But, it was also cool that I knew something he didn’t, and, that I shared this secret with Mom and Dad. It made me feel grown up.

I weighed the two options and decided not to say anything about it to my brother. The fact that a different decision most certainly would have carried consequences of an unpleasant nature probably also played a part. It was very difficult, though, not telling him something of such seismic impact.

In the latter days of December, after Christmas and my birthday, Dad took us all out to dinner at the local Howard Johnson’s. Next to McDonald’s, HoJo’s was our favorite place to go. The menu listed food that boys our age loved: chicken pot pies, hot dogs — especially hot dogs. We liked the way they called them “frankforts” and because the buns were exotically sliced open from the top, not from the side like the ones we always had at home. It was a treat to order one of those.

We walked into the restaurant and entered the glass-enclosed vestibule where the checkout counter stood. Dad asked the hostess for a table for four. Then, as the hostess left us to check on seating, he moved, suddenly, across the vestibule to stand by the front glass wall. It seemed strange that he would do that, but by the look on his face something must have alarmed him.

Trying hard not to alert anyone else, Dad stood there until the hostess came back to seat us. He motioned for us to go ahead, and once we were all through the door he followed us in.

Curious, I walked back through the door and looked around. I saw nothing unusual. I looked out through the windows on both sides and saw nothing unusual outside either. Then I noticed a magazine stand sitting in the corner where Dad had positioned himself. I walked over to it and saw that it held copies of the latest issue of The Saturday Evening Post. They were standing on end so they were easy to see, which was obviously the supplier’s objective. I leaned in closer.

On the cover of the magazine was a picture of a boy, about my brother’s age, clad in pajamas, standing in front of a chest of drawers. Wide-eyed, mouth agape, his expression was one of total surprise, if not shock. The bottom drawer of the chest was open, and the boy had apparently pulled some things out of it. In his left hand he held a red coat, and in his right, a white beard attached to a red cap trimmed in white fur. Exploring where he shouldn’t have been, this cover boy had made a discovery, and an unsettling one at that.

It all became clear to me. Dad had moved in front of that display to hide it from my brother! He was obviously concerned that Steve would see it and start questioning his belief the way I had but, in his case, much too early in the learning curve.

I hurried to catch up with the family and sat down. Steve and I had our frankforts, as usual, and drank the cream that came in the little glass vials with our parents’ coffee, as usual. When it was time to leave, I walked ahead of everyone and stationed myself in front of the magazine stand. When Dad came through the door, he looked over at me, gave me a smile and turned to pay the bill.

Steve, being only 7, might have noticed The Saturday Evening Post, or maybe he wouldn’t have. He may not have understood what he was seeing even if he had. But I thought at the time that what Dad did was neat. And, just as we shared the secret, I felt that I had shared the experience of sparing Steve from enduring this element of growing up a little too soon. In the fullness of time since that night, as I have become a parent and a grandparent, I appreciate that what Dad did was far beyond neat.

We never spoke about what took place that night, Dad and I, and I never told Steve about it. He probably doesn’t know to this day. He learned the truth about Santa right when he should have.  PS

Scott Sheffield moved to the Sandhills from Northern Virginia in 2004. He feels like a native but understands he can never be one.

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

The Heat is On

The journey from Alaska to the Appalachians

By Katherine Smith

It’s nice to be hot again. That’s what I tell people when they ask how it was living in Alaska, and how it is to be back home. This time last year, and the previous year, and the one before that, I was living and working deep in the boreal woods of the Chugach, the second largest national forest in the country.

Each summer, our five-person trail crew lived in tents for eight consecutive days every two weeks as we built the forest’s newest trail in an area accessible once a day by train — that is, if the tracks weren’t flooded. The Chugach is where, during my first hitch, a bear clawed through my tent and stole my only clean clothes. It’s where I learned to fell big trees with a big chain saw and little ones with an ax; where I learned to shoot a rifle; and where I competed with the guys to carry the most tools, hiking miles with a sledgehammer on one shoulder and a steel rockbar on the other.

It’s where I grappled with scoliosis, hypothermia and trench foot, and learned the hard way that my worth is not defined by what I can do. It’s where I learned that my four fellow trail workers eat even more than my four siblings, and became known as Mama Kate for Southern-size group dinners of jambalaya, biscuits and gravy, cornbread and collards. I’ve spent solid eight, 12-hour days inside long sleeves, high socks and a bug net as protection against every kind of winged, blood-sucking bug imaginable, and hitches inside fishing-grade rubber raingear and Xtra-Tuff rubber boots, falling asleep and waking each day to the sound of hammering, unending rain.

My favorite hitches were the ones that should have been hardest, redeemed always by my jolly crew family. We’d belt out Irish drinking songs in hailstorms, make doughnuts from canned biscuit dough, carry 600-pound trees together for a primitive turnpike, laugh until we cried, and play games of bocce ball, cribbage and dice long into the night.  

July in the Chugach brought a cacophony of flowering salmonberry bushes, an Independence Day tradition of exploring Bartlett Glacier, and buying a second freezer for all the salmon we caught. July is sunlight by midnight, bears by day, wolverines by night, and lynx prints in the mud. July brought my first wildland firefighting assignment when I was flown out to Colorado and Wyoming for 18 days of adrenaline and exhaustion digging line, laying hose, sawing, protecting cabins when the fire grew closer and, hardest of all, eating MREs. July is Alaska’s warmest, driest month, shooing my crew and me skinnydipping into sun-baked kettle pools and, after long days, into the numbing glacial creeks where we gathered drinking water. One July, the heat climbed to nearly 80 degrees.

Now, back in the 100s, I am exactly where Alaska shepherded me. For the last three summers, I spent my days off gathering the plants that healed my chronic urinary tract, bladder and kidney infections. Now I am in the Appalachian Mountains, deep in a clinical study of the herbal medicine that redeemed my health. I am learning how to read bloodwork and walk barefoot; the chemistry of polyphenols and my body with 500 acres of quiet, virgin land.

There is vastly more plant diversity here, the woods reverenced for their endangered medicinal gems like bloodroot, black and blue cohosh, goldenseal, ladies slipper and American ginseng. The ancient plant healing tradition has been kept vividly alive by the sharing of medicines from native peoples to Irish and Scottish immigrants and African-Americans, whose poverty passed down the knowledge by necessity. And while I am learning textbook assignments of isolated botanical constituents to illness, it’s framed by the Western tradition of herbalism that hails back to Hippocrates — the assessment of imbalance of the individual’s hot, cold, damp, dry, tense and lax energetics.

Here, I’m learning the science of my granny’s medicine.

July in the Appalachians is the sweet scratch of blackberry and briar-draped bushes, peaches for sale in old truck beds, and sunshine as the crow flies. It’s just now here, on the proverbially flying time, and yet we find it just the same as we remember it in our young hearts. It’s good to be home in the first mountains I loved, in dusks wet with locust song, fingers purple with mulberry juice, bluegrass on the front porch, an accent growing familiar again on my prodigal tongue, and, slow and honeyed as the South, the sweet, heavy heat.  PS

Katherine Smith is a wild-prone witness who grew up swinging from ivy vines and hunting water lilies in Pinebluff, North Carolina. She’s returned to North Carolina to study clinical herbalism at the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine in Lowgap, calling Ireland and Alaska home in the interim.

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

Be Prepared

Malevolent Mercury will strike again

By Beth MacDonald

I never gave any credence to things like virtual chain letters, ghost stories, urban legends, or certain celestial events that are credited with affecting our wellbeing. The dire consequences if we should fail to pass them along, conjure them through a mirror, or change our travel plans never fazed me. All of that changed when Mercury went into retrograde last March.

When Mercury goes into retrograde it’s like a fortune cookie telling you to hide under your bed in the fetal position until that pesky planet goes back into prograde, whatever that is. But, make no mistake, Mercury was out to get us. The Old Farmer’s Almanac practically said so directly. Prograde may sound like a cherry flavored sports drink crammed full of electrolytes, but according to Google it’s a real live astrological term. And we were in desperate need of it.

After having a series of impossibly negative days during this mystical Mercury interlude — the kind that makes you want to eat a pint of ice cream and cry into a bag of Doritos — I called my friend Sara. Everything was wrong. Whah, whah, whah. Her reply, “Mercury’s in retrograde.” Oh, fine. Would I be protected from it if I passed that message through Facebook to 10 friends?

I had to go to a legitimate, reputable, scholarly source to research this phenomenon. I went back to Google. Of course, my studies at the University of Google taught me to go to the first link that popped up. The Old Farmer’s Almanac: the preeminent source on all things astronomy. Indeed, Mercury was in retrograde.

That meant I could blame everything on that fact and that fact alone. Potential disasters included, but were not limited to, electronics going on the fritz; travel plans being disrupted; a state of confusion (how this differs from my every day life I’m not sure); and a preoccupation with the past. I’d also be blaming any future weight gain on Mercury. It still sounded like nonsense. I wasn’t a true believer until the Ides of March confirmed the credibility of my Doctorate in Googling.

On a brisk morning, after my usual Friday Trash Dash/Cardio HIIT, I was energized and up for the day, ready to do some work. I needed a pen from my car. How all the pens in my home ended up in my locked car is not relevant to this story but if you were to imagine the magic brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that’s not far wrong. I unlocked the car from the kitchen, proceeded outside, only to find the car door was still locked. I must have hit the wrong button. It was early. I’m blind. I went back in, looked at the correct button, watched the car unlock, went back out to the car, and it was still locked. Dang. Back outside with the keys. This time, I got a pen. Mission accomplished. Call me Ethan Hunt.

I continued on with business as usual. An old friend from 20 years ago messaged me about some people we used to hang around with and how she ran into one of them. We reminisced for a little while over that. Ah, the good ‘ol days. Was I preoccupied with the past? I decided to switch gears and do some writing on the back porch. I left my phone inside.

The second I closed the door I heard the wireless lock click. My eyeballs bulged. I checked my pockets for my phone. The only way to lock the door from the outside was with my phone paired near the lock. I pressed my face to the glass door; my phone was nowhere to be seen. How could this be? Now the dogs were barking at me from inside, like a chorus of lunatics. Fantastic. Surely, Mercury was to blame for this howling opera, too.

Why does Mercury have to be so singularly unpleasant? Why can’t it make my hair soft, my hands surgically precise with eyeliner, or my bank account swell? It should have enough power to, at the very least, make my TV work for me and not against me — the volume is either too loud or too soft; I hit the wrong application button every time, and never know where to find which program on whatever media it’s streaming on. Mercury must have dug in for the long haul. Maybe Skynet could take over Alexa and play elevator music 24/7 or Siri could reply to a simple question with a stream of four-letter words or Google Maps could give me directions to places I don’t want to go, like Detroit. 

According to “The Never Wrong Old Farmer’s Almanac,” Mercury was in retrograde for almost the entire month of March. I believe it. Worse yet, it would be back in this bothersome position in July. So, in preparation, I’m cleaning out the dust balls, abandoned dog toys and unpaired socks from under my bed. I plan to be there with a bag of Doritos, writing chain letters on the 4th.  PS

Beth MacDonald is a Southern Pines suburban misadventurer who likes to make words up. She loves to travel with her family and read everything she can.

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

Foraging for Fabergé

An Easter egg hunt worth a czar’s ransom

By Michael Smith

Here comes Peter Cottontail,

Hoppin’ down the bunny trail,

Hippity, hoppity, Easter’s on its way.

Five will get you 10 that you remember that little composition by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins, the same guys who gave us “Frosty the Snowman.” It was popularized by cowboy crooner Gene Autry, who hippity hopped all the way into the ownership of Major League Baseball’s California Angels.

Many symbols attach to Easter — the holy holiday observed by Christians the world over on a spring Sunday between March 21 and April 25 — and “Peter Cottontail” mentions plenty of them, including but not limited to, jelly beans, rabbits and eggs. Sixteen billion (not a typo) jelly beans are made in this country for Easter. President Reagan ate ’em all year long. He got hooked on the things when he gave up smoking. He had jelly bean canisters on his desk and on Air Force One. He even sent jelly beans on the first successful Challenger space shuttle flight, to treat the crew. Raise your hand if you’d rather wash a cat than eat those things.

How did rabbits and eggs get into what is otherwise a deeply religious picture? Many historians think the Easter bunny might have more to do with paganism than Christianity. It may have been adopted from the pagan celebration of the festival of Eostre, goddess of fertility, who was symbolized by a bunny. Rabbits, notoriously fecund, are all about bringing new life. Legend, mainly from ancient Germany, is that the Easter bunny lays and hides colored eggs, which are, as much as rabbits, redolent of new life.

From there, it’s a short hop (please forgive that) to chocolate bunnies (of which the National Confectioners Association says 90 million pounds were sold in 2017); to Easter egg rolls (like those at the White House, started in 1878 by POTUS Rutherford B. Hayes and conducted almost continuously since); and to Easter egg hunts (like the largest ever in 2007 in Florida, where 501,000 eggs were searched for by 9,753 kids).

But forget jelly beans, chocolate bunnies and your everyday Easter eggs. Instead, let’s delve into an egg hunt that’s anything but everyday — a multi-million-dollar hunt for six (perhaps seven) Russian imperial Fabergé Easter eggs. The Las Vegas of Easter egg hunts.

This hunt can be said to have started the very moment the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, ended. It was July 17, 1918, when the Russian Bolshevik revolutionaries executed the entire family — all those rumors of Anastasia’s survival now discredited. Comrade Lenin had the family’s Fabergé eggs transported to Moscow. When Comrade Stalin appeared on the scene, he saw dollar signs, not eggs, and began selling the things to the West, particularly in America, probably through Lenin’s old acquaintance, Armand Hammer.

Fifty eggs had been presented to the royals. The whereabouts of 43 (and possibly 44) of the eggs are known. So the hunt is all about the ones that have gone missing.

The world’s largest collection of Peter Carl Fabergé’s jewelry artworks — including nine of the 50 imperial Fabergé Easter eggs — is in the Fabergé Museum, in the Shuvalov Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The museum, privately owned by Russian Viktor Vekselberg, was established to restore to Russia as many of its lost cultural artifacts as possible.

Vekselberg, a Ukrainian-born, Russian-reared billionaire, bought the palace in 2004, restored it, furnished it with thousands of items, and opened it to the public in 2013. He purchased the museum’s nine imperial Fabergé eggs from heirs of American financial magazine magnate and news publisher Malcolm Forbes for something just north of $100 million. Vekselberg’s Fabergé museum, the Shuvalov Palace, presents a brief but interesting side trip.

The palace was built in the late 1700s, then in 1799 was purchased from its original owners by Maria Naryshkin. Maria lived there with her husband, Dmitry Naryshkin. She was a princess of Polish nobility, described in her day as impossibly beautiful. Maria and Dmitry unabashedly flaunted her status as mistress of Alexander I, who was, simultaneously, czar of Russia and king of Poland. Some say her affair with the czar lasted 13 years, some say 15, but none say why it abruptly ended. Nobody seems to know.

At any rate, Maria’s husband countenanced the affair, beginning-to-end. Whether the czar’s wife, Elizabeth, also agreed to the liaison is academic, as she, herself, is reported to have engaged in affairs with both women and men. All of these goings-on may appear a bit unseemly, but the truth is, Czar Alexander’s court was a hotbed of adulterous affairs, so no one ever raised an eyebrow.

But, back to the hunt — the whereabouts of both extant and lost multi-million-dollar Fabergé imperial Easter eggs.

Of the missing eggs, with no dispute, one was found in a scrap metal-type flea market in America, narrowly escaping a meltdown to retrieve its gold. That egg was sold and is now in a private collection, though there is no public record of its owner or where the egg is located. With considerable dispute, another of the missing eggs was found in 2015 and is located in a private collection in New York.

Russians have long been big on Easter, and exchanging gifts at that time of year is a long-standing tradition. So, a couple of Alexanders down the road we find Peter Carl Fabergé, the most renowned jewelry artist of his time (and perhaps of all time) crafting the first of the imperial Easter eggs for Czar Alexander III. The czar desired a unique gift for his wife, Empress Feodorovna, for Easter, 1885.

Fabergé’s creation was called “The Hen.” It was presented as a 2.5-inch high solid-white enamel egg shell, with a gold yolk inside the shell and a gold hen with ruby eyes inside the yolk, with a miniature gold and diamond royal crown plus a ruby pendant inside the hen. The czar’s own creation was the beginning of the tradition of turning Fabergé loose on a new egg for the empress each Easter.

It was a tradition that lasted through 10 eggs during Alexander III’s reign and through 40 more during the reign of his son, Nicholas II. Nicholas ordered two eggs annually, one for his wife and one for his mother. The eggs were increasingly ornate, opulent, intricate, and increasingly shrouded in secrecy. Most contained a surprise like The Hen’s treasures, which was known only to Fabergé. Not even the czar himself knew of an imperial egg’s surprise till Easter.

Following the Russian revolution, The Hen, together with the other eggs, was sent to Moscow. There, The Hen was sold and sold again, and though its surprise was lost (or is privately hoarded), the egg is now in the Fabergé Museum in the Shuvalov Palace in Saint Petersburg.

Not surprisingly, many of the surprises were lost or sold separately, as were many of the eggs. The times were a-changing, tumultuous and chaotic during the Russian Revolution and later during the Stalin years. As to the hungry revolutionaries, sadly, their tastes were pedestrian. So really, the surprise is that any of the imperial eggs and/or their surprises survived at all. But they did.

Here is where the 44 or 43 (depending on who’s counting) extant eggs are: Fabergé Museum, Shuvalov Palace — nine with one surprise; Kremlin Armoury, Moscow — 10; private collections in the U.S. with known owners — 15; private collection in the U.S. with anonymous owner(s) — 1; Royal Collection, London — 3; Monte Carlo, Monaco — 1; Switzerland — 2; Qatar — 1; anonymous collection where the country is also unknown — 2 (where one of these two, presented in 1902, has since 2015 been in a private collection in New York). Some experts dispute this egg’s provenance and regard it as still lost.

Now we come to the hunt for the seven (or six) still missing Russian imperial Easter eggs. Until 2014 Fabergé aficionados feared that eight of the eggs were lost. While it’s never too late to hunt for a Fabergé Easter egg, it actually is too late to hunt for egg No. 3. Some dude in America found it, his discovery underlining the utility of hunting for them.

When Fabergé presented the third imperial egg to the czar in 1887, he had aptly named it “Third Imperial.” Five years after Russian revolutionaries killed the Romanovs, the egg was sold to a dealer in London to help finance Russia’s “Treasures into Tractors” program. (How mundane does it get?)

No one knows how the egg arrived in America, but in 2011, Fabergé researchers dug up a 1964 catalog that showed the third egg and noted that it had been sold to a lady from the southern United States for $2,450. When the lady died her estate sold the egg for peanuts and it languished in roadside market venues till an anonymous American Midwest scrap metal dealer purchased it for $14,000.

The buyer’s thinking was that he could melt the thing down for its gold, then sell the gold for a small profit. Thankfully, nobody wanted to give him more for the gold than he had paid for the egg. Resigned to his “bad deal,” he sat the egg on a shelf in his kitchen. And there it sat till 2013 when, out of frustration, he Googled “egg” and the name inscribed on a timepiece inside the egg.

This bit of bird-dogging led him to an article in a British publication titled: “Is this £20 million nest-egg on your mantelpiece?” There it was! Our guy hotfooted to London, pictures of his egg in hand, to show the expert, Kieran McCarthy, mentioned in the article he found on Google.

McCarthy, a Wartski jewelry dealer, says, “He brought pictures of the egg and I knew instantaneously that was it. I was flabbergasted.”  McCarthy and the still anonymous buyer made the trip across the Atlantic to the buyer’s home, modest digs across the street from a Dunkin’ Donuts. Says McCarthy, “There was the egg, next to some cupcakes on the kitchen counter.”

McCarthy described the guy like this: “He’s from another world entirely. It’s a world of diners and pickup trucks, real blue-collar America.” Blue-collar no more.

There is no public record of the amount Wartski paid the Midwesterner on behalf of an anonymous buyer, but it easily could have been the $33 million mentioned in the 2011 article.

If you’re a bird dog, you need not be dissuaded by discovery of the “Third Imperial” egg; rather, take heart, as the following six and/or seven are still missing: second egg (1886 — “Egg with Hen in Basket”); fourth egg (1888 — “Cherub with Chariot”); fifth egg (1889 — “Necessaire Egg”); 16th egg (1897 — “Mauve Egg”); 26th egg (1902 — “Empire Nephrite Egg,” potentially already in a private collection in New York); 28th egg (1903 — “Royal Danish Egg”); and 36th egg (1909 — “Alexander Commemorative”).

Of those missing, the two that experts think are most likely to be found are the fourth and fifth, in that they have been seen more recently than the others. So get hopping. Who knows, old “Peter Cottontail” may just have something for your Easter basket.  PS

Michael Smith lives in Talamore, Southern Pines, with his wife, Judee. They moved here in 2017 and wish they had moved here years earlier.

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

The Black Hat

Happy returns and small kindnesses

By Janet Wheaton

I have always liked to wear hats, not only to keep the sun out of my eyes and off my face, but because I don’t have good hair — it’s too fine to provide much warmth for my head and too flat to hold a nice style. A good hat, however, must be more than serviceable, it should define you. Such a hat is not easy to find.

I don’t remember exactly when I got the black hat, a soft, felted wool fedora with a 2.5-inch brim and a ribbon around the crown (no feather). I ordered it online and knew as soon as I pulled it out of the box and set it on my head, tilted the brim and dimpled the crown that it was my hat. Worn with a tan trench coat from early fall through late spring, it was met frequently with approving glances and elicited comments such as “nice hat.”

I have always kept it close when I took it off in restaurants, kept my hand over it in gusty weather, and double-checked hotel rooms and overhead bins when traveling. But last spring my husband and I flew to Ireland, where a friend would join us. The trip over was fraught with delayed flights and missed connections; and upon arrival, we were met with excruciating lines, first at customs and then the rental car agency. I could hardly keep my eyes open on our drive to our first destination in the Wicklow Mountains, south of Dublin. Exhausted from lack of sleep and addled by jet lag, I went into town and had dinner with my companions. Back in the cozy B&B, I fell into bed and had one of the best night’s sleep ever. The next morning I awoke refreshed and excited to be in this land I loved so well.

After a delightful breakfast and chat with our host and hostess, Mike and Margaret, we piled into our rental car and headed across Ireland. You are certainly guessing what I have to tell you. Yes, when we arrived at our next destination and got out of the car, I realized my hat was missing. The day before was something of a blur, and I couldn’t even begin to think where I might have left it. On the plane? In the restaurant? At the B&B? My husband and our friend could not remember when they last saw the hat on my head.

I bought an Aran wool knit hat to keep my head warm and soldiered on, silently mourning the black hat. Uncertain of where I had lost it and who might have found it, I held out slim hope of ever seeing my hat again.

Upon returning home, I emailed the hosts of the B&B where we stayed in Wicklow and asked: Could they have found my hat in our room, the breakfast room or the lobby? If not, would they be so kind as to check with the restaurant where we ate dinner that night? The next day I heard back from Mike that our waitress at the restaurant had picked up a hat matching the description I gave him and brought it to the office in case someone came back to claim it. Mike was going to fetch it that day and put it in the mail to me. I shed tears of joy, but remained fearful over the next week. Would it get lost in the mail? Would it be crushed and ruined from the shipping?

But a week later, the black hat came back to me, carefully packed and protected. I danced to the mirror and gave the brim an affectionate little tug. Several times that day and even the following, I had to go to the closet and take a peek, like a pinch to remind myself I hadn’t dreamed its return. I wrote to both the waitress and Mike, effusing my gratitude and appreciation, especially to the waitress, who had found — hers for the taking — a valuable item, a fine hat that might have looked quite smart on her own head, but instead had done what she could to get it back to its owner.

I felt that gratitude afresh when I packed my old friend away for the season. It reminded me of a time years ago when I admired a gold necklace worn around the neck of a co-worker. When I complimented it, she had responded: “I found it in the ladies room at a restaurant over the weekend.” And no, she said, she had not turned it in. Its owner would probably not have a clue where her necklace had fallen, would never go back to the restaurant to check, and some waitress or other patron would have wound up pocketing it. This was my colleague’s rationale for keeping the necklace. I thought about that girl who lost the necklace, what special meaning it might have held for her, what a bitter loss it must have been, how she might be missing it still. I thought about the smugness of my erstwhile co-worker over her “find” — an exquisite piece that had cost her nothing. Or so she thought. PS

Janet Wheaton is a Pinehurst resident, frequent contributor to PineStraw, and a recent writer-in-residence at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities.

Pleasures of Life

The Look

With a little help from my friends

By Beth MacDonald

You know those characters on the TV show Alien Nation? You know how, at first, you can’t quite put your finger on what’s missing, but then you realize they have no eyebrows? I, too, have several rather invisible features that throw off the aesthetics of a face. Since I have a fair complexion and very blonde hair, my eyebrows and eyelashes are imperceptible without a little AA, artificial assistance. When I apply even a light layer of makeup I often find myself narrating the process like a National Geographic documentary. “Here we see the one-eyed morning sloth searching for light hairs to shade in for others to see. The furrowed brow means the female of the species is frustrated, unable to locate any indigenous hairs.” If I don’t go through the process of trying to make these features evident to other humans, I am frequently mistaken for a 19th century influenza patient that won’t make it through the winter.

That’s just the beginning. My hair is unruly in its natural state, with so many irregular curls that it serves as a near-perfect hair hygrometer. Scientific tools aren’t required anywhere within my ZIP code since my head produces uncannily accurate relative humidity readings. I often try to soften the look by essentially destroying it with a straightening iron set on “nuclear power” mode. 

A friend invited me to one of those parties most of us have reluctantly supported where you are gathered for a demonstration of the best cookware, makeup, leggings, and home/car organization kits that will all simplify and improve your life and looks. This particular party was an amalgam of all of those salespeople selling their cutting-edge wares, turning my friend’s home into a virtual department store. I didn’t want to go because I already have four of most these items. I just wanted to sit at home in my buttery leggings, eating 5-minute fondue from my state of the art, personalized pot, while wearing the only vegan-organic-coconut-volcano-cherry-seaweed face mask on the market that would get rid of my wrinkles-lift my eyelids-plump my lips-strengthen my marriage, while I binge watch Netflix.

I tried to stick to the snack table, where I’m most comfortable, for long periods of time, but the makeup lady found me.  She must have taken one look at my sickly face and thought she should rescue me from “the ugly.” I relented and followed her to the other side of the living room/department store. I observed a moment of insanity, when I considered the necessity of a 137th finely woven pair of leggings.

I sat down in her chair as she read off an extensive list of makeover options ending with “natural bronze goddess.” I chose that one. Who doesn’t want that look? I’m pretty sure no one walks up for a makeover and says, “I’ll have the ‘pale haunted house clown face’ please.”

After an eternity (measured by increasing back pain in the uncomfortable chair, not actual real time) she was finished. She handed me a mirror to see my new, improved look. I tried to keep a straight face. I politely thanked her, hoping she couldn’t hear the horrified squeak in my voice. Blue eye shadow, bright pink cheeks, and red lipstick were not what I imagined a “natural bronzed goddess” looked like unless she was named Chuckie.

I made a mistake by going with a friend who drove, leaving me no easy escape option. I was waiting outside, hiding behind her car when she came out eons later, measured in beauty chair-time. On the way home she decided it would be a good idea to chain smoke with her windows shut. I opened my window to catch some fresh air approximately 15 seconds before a torrential downpour hit. I couldn’t close the window fast enough. I was in a lose-lose situation. Failure was not an option; it was a certainty.

At home, I realized I had forgotten my keys, and had to ring the doorbell. As I waited for my husband, Mason, to answer the door, I felt around my now sticky, wet face and knotted hair. Eau d’Ashtray was overpowering the Chanel No. 5 I had put on earlier. I looked like Dee Snider from Twisted Sister getting off his party bus. My husband opened the door and stared at me, wide-eyed.

“Sir, do you have a moment to hear my testimony of the greatest poet of our time, Alice Cooper?” I asked.  PS

Beth MacDonald is a Southern Pines suburban misadventurer that likes to make words up. She loves to travel with her family and read everything she can.

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

Midlife Mulligan

One duffer considers pulling his sticks out of storage

By Tom Allen

“So you’re movin’ to the Sandhills? What’s your handicap?”

“Uh, eyesight’s not great.”

A golfer friend raised the question, when a job move brought the family to Moore County in 1998. He joked. I was serious. But perhaps a new job in a new town called for embracing the favorite pastime.  

I played that first 18 holes, 20 years ago, at the Southern Pines Golf Club. A gracious hacker from my new congregation invited me to join a church charity foursome.

“I’ve never played,” I warned.

“We’re awful. You’ll fit right in.”

“Let’s do it.”

One guy secured a set of clubs and provided tees and balls. Another loaned a pair of shoes. Wife, Beverly, recalled her college P.E. elective. “You’ll need a glove.”

“A glove? Why? For what hand?” Novice is an understatement.

My heart rate doubled on the first tee. Had I missed the club selection chapter of Golf for Dummies? At least I grabbed a driver. A par-4 loomed. The ghost of a weekend hacker whispered, “Hit it straight down the middle. Head down, knees bent, eyes on the ball. Grip, squeeze, swing.” I topped my first shot, then sliced a mulligan. On the green in four, or maybe six. Two-putt. Or was it three? I shot 118. Or was it 128? No matter. I had a blast. After 18 holes of whiffs, lost balls and unplayable lies, I was hooked. Maybe captivated is a better word.

My first set of sticks cost $120, at Sam’s Club. On to Walmart for gloves, tees and sleeves of Titleists. I owned plenty of khakis and short-sleeved polos. A church member left a couple of caps in my office cubbie. FootJoys completed the ensemble. At least this duffer looked the part.

My first par was memorable — the sixth hole of then Pinehurst No. 5, a par-3. I topped my tee shot. On in two. Inches from the hole. Tap, plop, sweet. I hollered. Friends shushed me, with something between a smile and a frown. Is exuberance bad etiquette or just not cool?

Over the years, I hit the driving range after work, even took a few lessons. I gradually lowered my score, nearly breaking 100 on a perfect spring day at Mid Pines. If you’ll allow a couple of mulligans and a gimme putt or two, my scorecard would read 95.

I shot a 46 on nine holes at Knollwood, once. Double that (which I’m sure would have happened had we played another round) for 92. A fudge, for sure, but I can dream.

With time, club selection and reading lies came easier. With help, I grasped the lingo. “It’s a bunker, not a sand trap,” a low-handicap friend once chided. I even had a “most incredible shot” story. The 18th hole, old Pinehurst No. 1, a par-3 that concluded the round. My tee shot was short of the green, second shot in the bunker and a really bad lie. I pulled out my sand wedge, a Christmas gift from Beverly (that cost more than my set of clubs). A perfect out, and into the hole. I yelled. My buddies yelled. Fist pumps and high fives. Yes, sweet.

My worst day? The summer of 2002, Pinehurst No. 6. I was playing the best ever. My friend trustingly pulled forward, anticipating another hit down the middle of the fairway. I shanked a shot off the sixth tee, popped my cart buddy above his left eye. Eight stitches and he was fine. Me? Sick the rest of the day. Just pull the pin and let me crawl into the hole.

The most fun round? When I turned 50. Three buddies and I played what was then National Golf Club. We were probably the only ones on the rain-drenched course. Talk about mulligans. By the 18th hole, we were putting with our drivers. Soaked and humbled, we laughed and made memories.

I haven’t played in five years, but three Pinehurst U.S. Opens, a trip to the Masters, up close with Tiger, Phil, Fred Couples and Davis Love III remain highlights. My clubs rest in a storage unit, next to my grandmother’s mahogany four-poster bed. Life intervenes — caring for parents at the end of their lives, raising two daughters, seeing them off to college, walking one down the aisle. Between work and marriage, family and friendships, golf’s allure faded. But who knows? Maybe I’ll take another swing this year, when I turn 60.

Because sometimes, on that perfect fall day, when the temps are cool and the fairways green, a voice whispers through the towering pines, “Head down, knees bent, eyes on the ball.” I grip my 3-wood, squeeze and swing. Straight down the middle. On in two. Tap, plop. Sweet. Very sweet.  PS

Tom Allen is minister of education at First Baptist Church, Southern Pines.

Cafeteria Girls

Soaking in the songs of heartbreak

By Janet Wheaton

“Allen, Cole, Cunningham, Englehart,” the teacher read off the first four names from her alphabetized class list. We four girls filed out the door of our classroom and headed for the school cafeteria, where we would be the cafeteria ladies’ helpers for September. The next month it was supposed to be the next four, and so on down the list, but we proved too darned good to give up. We got to keep our plum assignments — not only getting out of class half an hour before lunch and half an hour after, but also getting to keep our lunch money: 25 cents a day, $1.25 a week, $10 a month. Not to be sneezed at by a sixth-grader in 1962.

We were 11 years old, not quite children, but not quite anything else. Donning hairnets and calling each other by our last names, we found a new kind of camaraderie in our work, setting out the big stainless steel bins with the day’s hot lunch, lining up the milk cartons and filling the silverware trays. After lunch, before washing up and wiping everything down, we’d take a break behind the kitchen with the cafeteria ladies and sit in the shade of a white oak tree, eat our Fudgsicles and listen to country music on their transistor radio.

The tales of heartbreak and longing and missing other places struck a chord in me. A child of the military, I had already learned the sorrow of parting with friends and family. I was still missing my fifth grade class in Alabama, and the boy who was, I guess, my first boyfriend. Donnie Smith and I sat next to each other in class each day. We were square dance partners on the rainy days when we couldn’t go out for recess or lunch break. He was my leading man in a play I wrote for our class on another of those rainy/no recess days. We talked about everything together, and though we had never even held hands, we pledged to write to each other forever when my father’s transfer to Virginia separated us. So I thought I knew what Hank Williams meant when he sang, “I’m so lonesome I could cry.”

I was fascinated by the adult stories that I found in the lyrics of songs like “El Paso,” by Marty Robbins, and Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty and George Jones told tales that caught my imagination and lifted me up. I listened carefully to their lyrics of love and loss, of woe and glory; and I understood that adulthood was fraught with danger, regret and missteps, but also with romance and adventure.

I watched the faces of the cafeteria ladies, etched with lines that told me they had made a few of those missteps, had a few of those regrets. But the hard lines softened when they would hear a certain song and laugh or sigh knowingly at one another. I guessed they’d had some adventures, too. At the end of our break, we went back in the kitchen to clean up. I remember Johnny Cash singing “I Walk the Line,” as we girls sang along, not having a clue as to what that line was.

The next year I would start junior high and succumb to Beatlemania, but I never lost my love of country music. Fifty years later when I hear one of those songs, the lyrics still roll off my tongue — and in the back of my head I hear Allen, Cole, Cunningham and Englehart chiming in.

And Donnie Smith and I still write to each other.  PS

Janet Wheaton is a Pinehurst resident, native North Carolinian, unpublished novelist and a frequent contributor to PineStraw.

Summer Flurries

Some old memories never melt

By Joyce Reehling

I knew the very minute when it was over. We were at a smoky bar in the West Village, piled into a booth with friends, talking about the state of the world as one does in one’s late 20s. It was Saturday night and the jukebox howled with Bee Gees.

Snow. I remember the loveliness of the falling snow and how it tamped down the sound of the traffic. It was late but the streets are timeless, flowing like the Mississippi past the islands of bars and parks and people who float by, arm-in-arm. I remember the snow so clearly because it was big, fluffy flakes falling in what seemed like slow, elastic time. Instead of being pure white they took on the almost amber color of the streetlights. It was beautiful.

It wasn’t that we had argued or had a bad day, no. It was his slight lingering look at the waitress, not a beautiful girl but known to all of us. And there was that glance as she put down his beer. The warmth of his arm around my shoulder was still there but the chill began in his eyes. My time was up.

My eyes kept going to the huge window watching this flutter, this drifting down, and I began the dance of questioning my own instincts.

We ordered our usual burgers and fries. We continued our conversations and laughter but beneath my feet, unfelt by anyone else, a chasm was opening, a huge sinkhole that was about to swallow me whole. He was my first real love and he was making a decision. In front of me.

The chasm was only big enough for one. It would not swallow him. He would probably say he was merely making a choice, moving on, traveling light through life. He would say, and days later did, “I never lied about who I am.” It was the cloak of a rascal who wraps the hurt they inflict around themselves like a scarf.

The night went on, my tea-reading mind trying to dispel the widening hole just beneath me. He, as he always seemed to do, ran roughshod on the topics. Though others pushed back on his hyperbole, he felt just the way he always liked to feel, smart and just that little bit ahead of everyone else’s curve. It was not really so but the illusion was enough.

The lateness of the dinner and the night was not unusual, but when the time came for the nightbirds to fly home, we gathered our things and walked to the street. He whistled up a cab and opened the door, saying, “I think I will come up to your place a little later.” It was as obvious as a neon glance. As loud as a lingering look.

“Not like this.” It was all I could muster. “Can we not end like this?”

I am polite now and was polite then and did not scream or cry or wail or go punch that girl’s lights out. It wasn’t her fault. She told me over drinks years and years later that though she shared part of her life with him, it was often a misery. That was the night she reached out to apologize. He never did.

This was long ago and far away, and yet the feeling of the impending coldness, of being left, hovers just over my shoulder. There is no burn as painful as the first time the world goes up in flames right in front of you while everyone else keeps laughing. I don’t think about all of that very much, but sometimes when the night is late and the snow is falling and I walk under a street lamp or see that slightly yellow tinge as the snow slices through the spot of light, the pain of dying love bubbles up.

And the snow, the lovely and peaceful snow, did not help me at all that night as I waited for footsteps up the stairs that never came.  PS

Joyce Reehling is a frequent contributor and good friend of PineStraw.