A Christmas Tale

By Sam Walker

Before Chaptico, Maryland, became a quaint village amid old manor houses and rich farmland, it was a gathering spot for Native Americans to hunt and fish the waters of a tributary of the great river that flows southeast from what would become the nation’s capital.

On high ground beyond the water a church was built in 1640. Fields were cleared and planted as stalwart people began to work the land and waters. They still do. This tract of Lord Proprietary acreage was overseen by High Sheriff Sir Philip Key, great-grandfather of Francis Scott Key, who emigrated from England in 1726. Ten years later the “old” church was replaced with a handsome brick structure designed by Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul’s in London, or so the story goes. The front porch beneath the steeple and belfry led to high arched 10-inch-thick doors that opened to reveal rows of boxed pews and a raised altar at the east end. The bell tolled each Sunday calling folks to worship. It still does.

The churchyard holds the remains of both gentry and scoundrels, including the pirate Gilbert Ireland, who was buried according to his wishes in the upright position. A wrought iron chair rests beside a family headstone awaiting the ghost of a woman who comes to keep watch. The British savaged the town on their way to burn the capital during the War of 1812, stabling their horses inside the church. During the Civil War a Confederate spy was granted sanctuary there by a church lady from a nearby manor.

Gradually, homes framed the village side roads, a post office opened, and later a country doctor began his practice. The village market, a way station for locals and travelers, justifiably boasted about its fried chicken. One year the doctor organized a way to mark the holiday season by lighting a large evergreen at the main crossroads. Folks gathered for carols and to swap stories, but none better than the time the little church decided to revive the Christmas pageant.

Costumes were sewn. Children cast for parts — though some balked at their assigned role. Rehearsals commenced. The simple design of a narrative accompanying the Nativity tableau, with the organ leading familiar carols, promised all would come off without a hitch.

The steeple bell rang out the Sunday welcome and the church was jam-packed. Lights dimmed and quiet settled in. “O Come, All Ye Faithful” boomed forth. Heads turned and necks craned as angels in white holding tobacco sticks affixed with large glittering stars crowded into the altar area.

Another carol welcomed all sizes of shepherds. The disgruntled one, who had wanted to be Mary, chose that moment to express creative differences and walked out in a huff. While angels and shepherds jostled for position during yet another carol and some reverent narration, the audience beamed as Mary and Joseph arrived. She cradled a swaddled doll to be gently laid in a straw-filled milk crate set between two chairs that ordinarily held the posteriors of clergy, or a visiting bishop.

Even before the three kings finished their march, things began to unravel. It seems Mary had been up all night with a fever and was now falling asleep at her post, nearly dropping the unraveling baby. Ever alert, Joseph snatched the child by one arm then poked Mary with the other to wake her up. She, at that point, simply left. Dismayed, Joseph took this as his cue to follow her, leaving the baby face down in the bishop’s chair.

When the tiniest shepherd loudly appealed — “Daddy, I’ve got to pee!” — all the heavenly host and abiding shepherds came undone and so did the audience.

Everyone stood for a heartfelt “Joy to the World.” The narrator wished all a Merry Christmas, and the little church exploded into thunderous applause with hugs all around as Santa arrived at the top of a ladder on a firetruck. PS

Sam Walker, a retired minister, maintains a curiosity about life and is an old friend of PineStraw.

Wish I Could Find the Words

The joy of a good read

By Sam Walker

On my first ever plane ride from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, I became the star attraction. “So you’re going there to ask this guy you’ve never met if you can marry his daughter? Are you nuts, just in love or both?” asked my aisle seat companion. Cheers followed. Right then I promised myself never to fly without a book again.

It would take a few years before my romance with reading and the power of words would begin. Books for me were to be studied. They were assignments written by experts in various academic fields. Reading was a responsibility, an often tedious chore to be done in library nooks.

Even on family vacations my beach or lakeside reading was “heavy,” as my wife surmised. One day she offered, “How about reading something just for fun?” Sometimes a person suggests you need to do something even before you know you need to. That afternoon I rode my bike to the summer library in a quaint clapboard cottage and entered a new world. The romance began with a small volume by Anne Morrow Lindberg called Gift from the Sea, and I displayed it proudly after dinner. I was hooked.

I would discover that, if stuck at a social gathering or caught in an awkward silence, you can ask, “What are you reading?” The conversation may surprise you. Book clubs are everywhere. The team from The Country Bookshop has guided me to folks I never would have met — Sue Monk Kidd, Laura Hillenbrand, Barbara Shapiro, Louise Penny, Khaled Hosseini and in a deeper way, Richard Rohr. Books can be wonderful companions. You can close a book, mark your place, and pick it up later. Dogs and people, wonderful as they are, don’t have a pause button.

Written or spoken, words are powerful. They can inspire, encourage and heal. They can also do deep and lasting harm. In these days of parties, promises and pundits, words can overwhelm and numb us. Sometimes mute is the better choice. Words on social media can be dangerous. Words can be walls to hide behind or invitations to breakthroughs. Words are part of relationships, part of simply being human.

Consider renowned photographer Ansel Adams, some of whose works were recently displayed at Reynolda House in Winston-Salem. The interplay of black and white, essential to the portrayal, was inspiring. But it was Adams’ words framed at the exhibit’s entrance that drew me in and spoke to me:  “I hope these pictures will rekindle an appreciation of the marvelous.” True of landscapes and, more so, of people.

Consider the images of some of our planet’s humanity unfolding from the opening ceremonies and throughout the summer’s Olympics. Inspiring and full of hope for the best of our world. But it was the poet Maya Angelou’s words as a lyrical accompaniment to a diversity of faces on the only commercial worth watching that drew me in and spoke to my heart: “We are more alike, my friend, than we are unalike.” True of our own community right here.

Consider a bookmark I grabbed on leaving a bookshop in San Francisco for the return flight to North Carolina following a friend’s wedding. It was strictly utilitarian. After takeoff I saw its odd design of sun, moon and stars set in purple shading with a small line of words around the perimeter. It would be these that really drew me in and spoke to me: “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of intelligence at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future cease to be perceived as opposites.” True, and a way to look through artificial stereotypes. The bookmark guides my reading of daily meditations today.

Why have these few simple words of a photographer, a poet and an unknown author spoken to me? Why have I shared them? Because, I suspect, I needed to hear them. Because sometimes words suggest something you need to know before you know you need to. May you take time to seek and listen to those intriguing, peaceful and true words that speak to you.  PS

Sam Walker, a retired minister, maintains a curiosity about life and is an old friend of PineStraw. 

Tobacco Road Home

An ode to Nabs, gnats and gummy leaves that stir memories

By Tom Allen

The hardest work I’ve ever done. That’s how I described “barning tobacco” to a young relative who knew little of the history behind harvesting North Carolina’s infamous bright leaf. The heat and humidity extracted plenty of sweat. Mingle that with dirt and tobacco gum, throw in a hoard of gnats and a day’s labor sounds miserable. It was. And I loved it.

Early 19th century innovation introduced a tobacco variety that thrived in the coastal plain’s sandy soil. When leaves turned a yellow-green, the sugar content had reached its peak. The flavor of this quick-cured leaf became popular with smokers; soon North Carolina led the nation in tobacco production.

For decades, tobacco was picked by hand. Migrant workers harvested leaves for larger operations, but on small farms, for a boy willing to work, tobacco offered summer income and poignant memories.

For me, growing up in rural Carolina during the 1970s, barning tobacco meant rising early, sticky leaves dripping with dew, and long days of humid heat.

The farmer I worked for was kind and easygoing. “Mr. Gerald” would make the rounds in our community, picking up teenage boys eager to work. He knew us and we knew each other. We played together, attended school together, worshipped together. Harvesting tobacco, also known as priming, was an extension of community.

Our dress code was far from summer casual. Clothes protected us from the blistering sun and sticky sap. Everything was old or worn — tennis shoes, faded jeans, dad’s long-sleeved shirt, a dirty ball cap. After the final harvest, we pitched the rags.

Those first primings were the hardest. Harvesting sand lugs, bottom leaves that hugged the soil, nearly broke our backs. As summer burned into fall, we worked our way down the rows and up the stalks, snapping leaves with one hand, cradling them under the other arm. Each harvest brought less bending. As stalks became leafless, ventilation improved. In a tobacco field, you welcome any whiff of a breeze.

Mr. Gerald, out of kindness, gave younger boys rows closest to the tractor-pulled trailer. Kids hardly ever quit. A few steps and they could slap their harvest on the “drag,” a name recalling days when mules pulled harvesting sleds through the fields. Three rows harvested, then a break. Water-filled coolers were always on the drag. Mr. Gerald took us home for lunch and maybe a quick rest before the afternoon stint. He provided twice-daily snacks, mostly Honey Buns, Twinkies and Lance cheese Nabs. We poured down Dixie cups filled with crushed ice and Pepsi. Breaks were also for laughing, horseplay, and listening to our boss expound on politics or religion.

In the afternoon, with harvesting finished for the day, we stopped by the barn where women piled leaves on an electric contraption that strung primings onto wooden sticks. Mr. Gerald’s older sons hoisted those heavy sticks, straddled the barn’s tier poles and hung the leaves to cure. A rite of passage (and a real test of strength) came when an older boy was allowed to straddle the poles and “hang.” One day of straddling was enough for me.

On Friday, Mr. Gerald came to my home and handed me a small manila envelope marked with my name and the amount — $66.37 or $72.81 or $52.95. I have no idea why he didn’t round those numbers. I never calculated or knew my hourly wage. What mattered was hard work, mixed with a little fun, paid off.

North Carolina remains number one in tobacco production, although that production has declined substantially. The tobacco barns of my youth, if still standing at all, are dilapidated icons from another era. Automation and galvanized bulk barns replaced hand-harvesting and flue-curing. Tobacco warehouses have become condos and boutique malls; stained boards, reclaimed and refinished, are prized as flooring in pricey homes.

The ethics of growing tobacco have changed. Tobacco has always been a strange bedfellow in the Bible Belt. While the bright leaf fueled the state’s economy for decades, providing income to small family farms and resources that built colleges, hospitals, even churches, pulpit-pounding preachers (many of them paid from the tithes of tobacco farmers) railed against the evils of cigarettes. The evidence that smoking was deadly continued to mount. Some farmers still wrestle with growing a crop that, when processed, lit and inhaled, can cause debilitation or death. Those tensions endure.

Sometimes, on a humid late summer night, if the wind is blowing just right, I catch a whiff of curing leaves, from a farm near our house in Whispering Pines. Every day I drive past tobacco fields. Occasionally, I see workers snapping off flowering tips or mechanical harvesters stripping ripened leaves. Though I have no desire to experience the heat and gnats and gummy leaves, I’m grateful for the work ethic, the rhythm of labor and leisure, of rest and recreation, those fields instilled. And sometimes, when I see a field of ripened leaves, I want to stop, spread out under a shady oak tree, and wash down a pack of Nabs with Pepsi from a Dixie cup, all the while pondering how tobacco roads still lead me home.  PS

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

Senses of Summer

A lifetime of family vacations shaped the author’s sense of time and travel, emphasizing the importance of simply being present

By Sam Walker

It’s been said that humans are marvelous sensing instruments. Smells, sounds and sights can be powerful triggers of memory and story. This has been especially true for me in experiences of summer. Long before there were Currituck sunsets or Oak Island strolls, there was the back seat of an old Buick on its annual trek from a Philadelphia suburb to the Jersey Shore. Stuffed in between bedding, a Samsonite suitcase and the dreaded summer reading books, I’d try to fall asleep.

What air conditioning? In the early ’50s, blasts of summer air through open windows and parents’ cigarette smoke made the trip a torture to be endured. Mercifully, a two-lane road called the Black Horse Pike signaled hope. The last turn, air changing, the night quieter and rest came. That is, until the fragrance of marsh and tidal mud flats began to stir my consciousness. Low tide brought high hopes of adventure; and something else I came to realize — a peace awakened, a settling of spirit I still treasure.

Time turned into an overstuffed station wagon and a bright orange, slightly rusted VW “Thing” winding down the final stretch of a Maine coast road. Passing Harmon’s store and the sign for Prouts Neck, the energy of anticipation grew feverish. Songs learned the previous summer swelled, as the caravan crossed the finish line and acknowledged the welcome wave from Nick, the rotund summer cop.

Down the lanes shouts of friends reunited mixed with the laughter of the children who simply had to have the bikes unloaded first. Off they went with shrieks of “come on” in the hope that pals not seen in a year would be back at the same old cottage. The coolers moved to the fridge but all else could wait. Neighbors hugged and hollered “hey” across porches and driveways. Magic beckoned with sounds of stories from circles of beach chairs, cookouts on the rocks by the bay, evening sing-a-longs, and “hoots” from a sea glass cave at low tide — maybe a piece of blue this year. On the first new morning, birdsong joined the quiet harmonies of the sea, rendering a settling of the spirit once again.

As years and family grew, a new oasis was discovered. Vistas framed by ancient live oaks draped in moss welcomed us for several summers to the wonder and mystery of the Lowcountry. Causeways connected islands, finally leading to the one most seaward. Fripp Island, named for a clever swashbuckler and steeped in lore of pirates and Gullah heritage, boasts wide beaches sloping gently to an ocean that can be both tranquil and treacherous.

Early morning bike rides featured a tapestry of colors — great blue heron, snowy white egrets, slumbering gators the shade of mud and forest, brilliant oleander, and always the oaks. Presence mattered. Time did not.

The island store had a special nook with shelves of Pat Conroy books. He lived on Fripp, and the proceeds from book sales helped support the island conservancy. I hoped I would run into Pat, be invited for supper and chat about how his stories always touched something in me. He once told an interviewer, “I write to try and explain my life to myself.” I savored everything he gave us. I missed seeing him then, and hear him now in the words he left behind.

During one such island visit, a beachside afternoon of umbrellas, dolphins and parades of brown pelicans was jolted by a low-flying rescue chopper. The tranquil sandbar of yesterday had, without warning, turned into a treacherous riptide that would tragically claim a young life. I stood with the family at water’s edge. Presence mattered. Time did not.

Even now the scene is vivid. The seemingly blissful world of live oaks and blue heron can also hold scars of sadness. At eventide that day, the pelicans returned gliding low along a now-deserted beach. It seems that life has times when spirits are shattered, but always, I believe, with the promise of place and memories that settle us once again.  PS

Sam Walker, a retired minister, maintains a curiosity about life and is an old friend of PineStraw.