Southwords

Bucket o’ Wings

What happens in the bathtub stays in the bathtub

By Beth MacDonald

Having been a military family for so long, we’ve often been away from our families at Thanksgiving. Apart from the obvious inconveniences, we were thus spared the torture of what should be a day of familial gratitude devolving into one of competition, tears and regrettable comments. That is, until my husband, Mason, now retired, suggested we schlep our blended, extended family to my parents’ home for a holiday feast. I initially said no. Mason was convinced this was a good idea as much as Arthur Carlson was convinced that turkeys could fly in WKRP in Cincinnati.

The great thing about Mason is that he is forgetful. I can throw away things that clutter up the house that he doesn’t even know he misses. Sometimes he’ll ask for them three years later. I’ll pretend they are around somewhere. This time he had conveniently forgotten my family is mostly made up of “well-meaning” people. You know the sort.

My sister lives as far north as she could stand to go without needing an Eskimo passport, while I chose to live in the loveliest part of the South. The epicenter of chaos is Pennsylvania, home of my mother, a generally clinical and, not to put too kind a face on it, harsh woman. When I was a senior in high school and told her I had been accepted into an Ivy League school, her response was, “You should probably just stick with community college.” I haven’t heard my father speak since 1972. He is capable, he just doesn’t. My brother is a bit of a genius, but he speaks like Napoleon Dynamite. I never hear what he’s actually saying. All I hear is what I think he would say, which is never what he does say.

My mother isn’t known for her culinary abilities. My sister, an excellent cook, thought it would be a great idea for us to brine an organic, ethically bred, farm fresh turkey and bring it with us. I was not about to drive 10 hours with a sloshing bird in my trunk, nor was I inclined to spend however long it would take to find a turkey with just the right CV. Thinking we were smarter than we are, we decided to make the trip up, stop at a hotel, and brine the bird there. We equipped ourselves with a 5-gallon bucket from the hardware store, a frozen grocery store turkey and the gourmet brine my sister sent that came with very specific directions, which we immediately threw out.

We filled the hotel bathtub with water and brine, dumped the turkey in, and let it sit overnight. The next day we looked at the scene we created like it was from a TV crime show drama and we’re standing over the deceased with the murder weapon in our hands. Oh, my God, what have we done? We left the housekeeper a note of apology and the kind of tip that would pay for her kid’s college textbooks. We put the bird in the bucket and left the hotel, going down in the elevator and through the lobby looking like we had three-day old bait fish in a covered pail. Our mission: convince the assembled dinner guests that a bathroom-brined Butterball was, in reality, a gourmet high-class fowl.

Two gin and tonics into dinner my eyes glazed over and a courageous indifference took hold. My mother was comparing my sister and brother. My sister was pointing out my mother’s faults, my in-laws looked extremely uncomfortable, and I finally noticed there were strangers at the table. Mason’s regret set in.

Everyone did agree on one thing. The turkey was amazing. Mason’s terror was palpable. Knowing that gin is the equivalent of truth serum, he squeezed my hand a bit too firmly as if to say, “Don’t!” I started laughing into my napkin. Mason grew more alarmed. My sister looked at me suspiciously.

“What have you done?”

You could see Mason’s mind doing complex calculations.

“We changed the brine,” he blurted.

“Well it worked! I love it.” It was my mute father, piling more turkey on his plate, his decades of silence broken by a bird. I looked at him, stunned.

That, however, didn’t faze my sister. Like Nancy Drew, she wanted answers. What was the secret ingredient?

Mason leaned over his plate, “I could tell you, but I’d have to take you to this hotel where I know a maid who can keep a secret.”  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.

Southwords

The Crazy Family

It could just be you . . .

By Beth MacDonald

It’s a safe assumption that most neighborhoods have at least one crazy family. If you look around and don’t know which family that is, it might be yours. That’s absolutely the case with us.

When I look around my peaceful section of town, I see smiling children playing in their yards and well-behaved dogs on leashes, all properly pooper-scooped. People are well dressed, having civil conversations. Every Thursday night their trash is out and the recycling bins are neatly stacked for Friday pickup. I envy these people. They seem to pull off the illusion of having it sooo together.

We, too, have a lovely, well-appointed home. We are well traveled. We have diplomas, in a box someplace. I do try my best to maintain the appearance of social acceptability in public; it just never happens to come off that way. You can’t really start a conversation with your neighbor about your exciting trip to Cuba while your googly-eyed mixed-breed dog is trying to mate with a holly bush.

My husband says he doesn’t yell. He is a “motivational speaker to those who won’t listen.” You can hear him any given day giving several motivational speeches to our dogs while listening to bluegrass music. It is no coincidence that he is shouting orders to barking maniacs with banjo music playing.

Our dogs get way too excited with every leaf that blows by our glass front door. Any neighbor who walks by is met with barking and jumping. When one of our three dogs recently journeyed to the Great Beyond, a neighbor commented in exasperation, “Finally.” I wasn’t even offended. I just shrugged, knowing how hard it is for people to pass our home.

Our son, a successful young man who lives on his own, likes to put Band-Aids on his car to cover any scratches it incurs. It has now incurred approximately 150 scratches. When he comes to visit on weekends, his car looks like it’s a mobile first aid kit.

My fellow moms seem to live such color-coordinated lives. Oh, I’m sure they have their own struggles; we all do. They just seem to do it all while maintaining the look of supermodels. They each have three or more children in tow, clean and happy, while I drag yard waste to the curb in mismatched clothes, bleeding from weeding. I wonder how I ended up in dishwashing gloves, my husband’s camouflage Crocs (questioning why my husband even has camouflage Crocs), looking like I’m trying to bury a body, and somehow surrounded by way more plastic than I can explain.

My friend Janine says I’m the “garden variety crazy.” She told me when she comes over I’m at least dressed, and she’s never eaten out of the dog bowls — so there’s that to be proud of.

Any given Friday at eight in the morning the rumble of the trash trucks disrupts my peaceful ritual. Scrambling to put my coffee down, I furiously begin to look for clothes. Anyone’s clothes will do; they never match. I begin the mad dash from the house to the curb in what looks like a ridiculous live version of the old ’90s Nickelodeon network game show Double Dare where the prize is getting slimed with my own week-old garbage.

One particular Friday I was finished doing my morning cardio/trash dash and came back to find a very large and intimidating spider on the kitchen door window. This spider had a neatly woven, well-organized and fashionable zigzag web. It was clearly mocking me. I grabbed a can of Raid (to save my life, certainly not my dignity). Spraying poison on one spider really upset a wasp’s nest that was apparently hidden behind a flowerpot.

Wasps began to swarm me. I began to scream and do an ancient, interpretive dance of terror. None of my neighbors were the least bit disturbed, concerned, or even surprised by this. Not one.  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.

And the Winner Is

Sports gambling, coming to a state near you

By Jim Moriarty

It’s that time of year when, at long last, the heat breaks. Geese check out of their quaint Vermont inns and follow their GPS to Currituck Sound. Hordes of unruly monarch butterflies make a thunderous racket flapping off to Mexico. And, inevitably, the mind turns to the gimlet-eyed assessment of point spreads.

Thanks to a 6-to-3 United States Supreme Court ruling last May, the legality of sports wagering has devolved to the states, as the Founders no doubt intended. It was George Washington, after all, who covered the spread against Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Though hard evidence is scant, rumors of gambling in our part of the world predate the Supremes. There is some suggestion that games of chance took place at the infamous Dunes Club and that, in that bygone era, the local constabulary was in the habit of placing phone calls to various establishments around the county to give advance warning of police raids. A few decades ago there was a private club on Broad Street in Southern Pines where it was possible to get those old-timey, pre-internet football betting cards. I know this only because my wife got them every week, inexplicably circling the exact opposite of my own picks while looking over my shoulder. Her winning streak remains unparalleled in the annals of wagering.

Charles Price, the great golf writer, spent his final years in Pinehurst and brought with him the memory of his father, who had been something of a professional at it. “He was acquainted with every notorious hood, cheat and racketeer on the East Coast, and he was afraid of none of them,” wrote Charley. “He was accustomed to being entrusted with large amounts of other people’s money. He always kept his mouth shut about other people’s affairs. And he was scrupulously honest. These were the qualities which set him apart from ordinary gamblers and which enabled him to walk the underworld, if need be, with no more armor than his pin-striped suit and the incongruously flamboyant neckties he always wore.”

When it came to gambling Price’s father played off scratch. We are not all so genetically favored. I, myself, inherited what can only be described as the chump gene, a marker of utter futility in anything involving wagering. I once bet on a horse at the Stoneybrook Steeplechase that decided, rather than gallop along with the crowd, to take off in the exact opposite direction, settling peacefully in the infield as if he was a late-arriving guest delivering Swedish meatballs to a tailgate party.

The worst of it is that there is an element of contagion associated with my particular affliction, a fact that became glaringly obvious to Dick Altman. When I met Alty he was one of the instructors in the Golf Digest Schools. He’d also been one of the magazine’s editors in its early days. It was more than hearsay that Dick enjoyed placing the occasional bet. Sometimes using bills of impressive denominations.

In 1989, in addition to taking photographs and writing stories for Golf Digest, I shot home football games for Clemson University. One of the games that year was Clemson vs. N.C. State. I remember that Saturday as a sunny day. Certainly it was sunnier for me than for Dick Altman.

N.C. State was coached in those years by Dick Sheridan. The Wolfpack was unbeaten, 6-0, and Sheridan’s teams had defeated Clemson three straight times. Clemson was 5-2 at that point. They’d been shellacked at home by Georgia Tech the previous week. Their other loss was to Duke. Yes, that Duke. Can you see where this is going?

Terry Allen was Clemson’s star running back. He may be the toughest running back I ever watched up close. I once saw him get hit high, low and in-between, simultaneously, by three guys near the Clemson sideline, crawl off the field on his hands and knees, puking his guts out, and come back in the game two plays later. For other unrelated reasons, it looked very much like Allen was going to be sitting out the N.C. State game.

Here’s the kicker: State was the underdog. I forget the actual point spread but it wasn’t insignificant. Five or six. “Alty,” says I, “it’s the lock of the century.”

Well, Clemson came bounding down the hill that sunny day in all orange, top of the helmet to tip of the toe, and ran N.C. State right out of the other end of Death Valley. It felt like the Tigers were ahead 56-0 by the end of the first quarter. In reality, they won 30-10 but the game wasn’t remotely as close as even that lopsided score would indicate.

It’s fair to say that if Facebook had existed in 1989, I’d have been on the fast track to a fuming unfriending. Had Alty been able to take our case all the way to the Supreme Court, I’m pretty sure I would have ended up on death row.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the Senior Editor at PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com for anything except gambling advice.

Roughing It

Objects may be closer than they appear

By Beth MacDonald

I love camping. I love the smell of fresh, early morning air. I love the quiet, the darkness easing into light, the birds beginning a morning conversation. I love the deep woods, a lake, an ocean, any place to explore. My preferred method was to pitch a tent until we bought an RV last year.

Fortunately, we have friends, Drew and Rollie, who are RV veterans. Drew’s go-to line is, “Something will always go wrong.” I hear it in the voice of Jud Crandall, the character in the movie, Pet Sematary when he says, “The ground is sour.” Drew’s right. I could write an entire book based on last summer alone. Each chapter title would be a mishap. “That Smell Is Your RV,” “You Can’t Make a U-Turn in Trenton, New Jersey,” “You Can Eat Six Muddy Kraft Singles.”

My husband, Mason, is a quick study. Learning the ins and outs of the RV, however, has challenged him. Flushing our plumbing, without fail, puts us in the category of those people — a classification, according to Rollie, that’s viewed suspiciously by the veteran RV community. No matter how diligently he tries to thoroughly complete all the steps, there is an inevitable calamity that requires a HAZMAT suit. Embarrassment ensues, and one can’t face-palm with the “plumbing gloves” on.

The camping community is full of kind and helpful people. Children speed through the parks on bikes, laughing. People stop by your campfire to say hello, pet your dogs, and talk about trucks. Soft sounds of music drift over from other campsites. The transition from tent camping to RV camping has been entirely too easy with all the comforts of home rolling along with you.

Our son is working down by the coast, so we decided to take a trip to visit him last month. I didn’t do much research on the camping resort, forgoing my due diligence and booking the site closest to him. It proved to be a desolate parking lot with the ambience of a place where you’d be murdered in your sleep. There was no shade, a swimming pool that Mason referred to as “marinade for victims,” no laughing children, no drifting music and, worst of all, no trash service.

The day we left, Mason decided to clean the toilets from the inside. He handed me this large wand, attached to a hose that, like a robotic colonoscopy, I had to insert deeply into the interior plumbing. The hose filled up with water faster than fear could fill my heart. Water did not go down, it went up. Potentially blinded by backwash, I doused myself with our daughter’s hand sanitizer. Luckily it also had glitter in it, a lovely accessory to pathogens.

Twenty minutes into our drive home from Camp Creepy, Mason started yelling.

“Oh no! NOOO!”

“What?” I began to think the RV was breaking up like the Enterprise on Star Trek.

He looked at me, eyes wide with fear.

“The trash just got sucked out! ZOOP! It’s gone!” He looked behind him in the side mirror. “OH NO! It just exploded like a hot garbage bomb on that Toyota!” Mason’s voice was cracking with frenzy.

I have an inappropriate response to stress. I laugh hysterically.

Mason pulled over. I tried to speak through the staccato breaths of laughter, tears streaming down my face.

“Is the driver OK? Is the car OK?”

“He didn’t even have time to brake! That man is going to need therapy and a car wash.”

“I’ve never even littered. I pick up trash,” our daughter said from the backseat, as if our steaming trash controversy was going to appear on her permanent record.

“Who doesn’t have trash service? This poor guy is going to be picking my trash out of his grill wondering who drinks Hamm’s beer! We are never coming back here again!” Mason was yelling from across the road as we picked up our trash shrapnel.

I texted Rollie. You’ll never guess what we did this time.

The reply came back instantly. You’re those people!  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.

Southwords

Hit the Highway

An ode to the road

By Susan S. Kelly

It’s a universal truth of summer in North Carolina, when the beach and the mountains become our magnetic poles, that sooner or later you’re going to be traveling on Interstate 40. Or “Forty,” as its fans and its haters call it.

I’m a fan.

You can have your backroads. How can a pastoral scene compare with the racetrack of 423.6 miles that (somewhat) horizontally slices the state? Every mile is pure entertainment. Sure, the “Bridge Ices Before Road” signs get boring, but the stuff people are hauling more than compensates. Where else but on I-40 in North Carolina can you find Christmas trees and golf carts and watermelons and boats? Plus, skis, surfboards, bicycles, kayaks, coolers, tobacco, cotton, horses, coonhound cages, Airstreams, and the requisite pickup or two hauling a chest, a mattress, a La-Z-Boy, and a fake tree, tarp a’ flappin’. It must be admitted that when I pass one of those silver-slatted semis, I strain to see if there are hogs inside, just before I avert my eyes and try not to think about their ultimate destination. Same for the vanilla-colored school bus whose sides read “Department of Prisons.” Don’t tell me you haven’t tried to peer into those windows crisscrossed with wire. I grew up with a father who always pointed out the guy with the rifle on his shoulder while inmates worked on the roadsides. Don’t see that much anymore, or those silvery mud flaps sporting silhouettes of naked ladies. Now the rigs are hot pink, for breast cancer. Progress.

I’m not the slightest bit offended if a rig driver honks at me as I pass. If someone still finds my 63-year-old knees attractive, I ain’t complaining.

How does a town get a name like Icard?

I particularly like those lead drivers with flashing head and taillights that warn of “Wide Load.” What a cool job. Like Dorothy Parker, who famously said that she’d never been rich, but thought she’d “be darling at it,” so would I in one of those cars. Think of the books-on-tape you could finish.

The amazing variety of stuff dangling from rearview mirrors — sunglasses, leis, air fresheners, Mardi Gras beads — all give a glimpse into a driver’s personality, like bumper stickers. (Question: How did so many Steelers fans wind up in North Carolina?) And while Virginia holds an unofficial record for vanity tags, I-40 is no slouch in that department, either. PRAZGOD. KNEEDEEP. IAMAJEDI. JETANGEL. Hair seems to be an ongoing tag topic: HAIRLOOM. NOHAIR. And this: SPDGTKT. Seriously, why not just call the cops instead of advertising?

I do not understand convertibles on interstates.

Do not fret yourself over aliens and vampires: If I-40 traffic is any indication, white pickup trucks are far more likely to take over the world.

You can’t fail to notice, while the Athena cantaloupes you bought at the state farmers market are growing more and more fragrant in the backseat, that, let’s face it, the flowers and trees planted in medians around Raleigh are way more attractive than anywhere else in the state. Harrumph. Near Fayetteville, D.C. license tags get more numerous, just as around Asheville, the Tennessee tags multiply, and around Benson, the New Yorks and Floridas proliferate.

Granted, I’d swap a few Bojangles and Cracker Barrel signs for South of the Border and Pedro puns on I-95, but that Mobile Chapel — a permanent trailer in the parking lot of a truck stop near Burlington — never fails to intrigue. As does Tucker Lake, a Johnston County curiosity with a fake beach and so kitted out with rope swings, slides, ski jumps, cables and random docks that you can scarcely see the water. Moreover, a stretch of I-40 around Greensboro has its own ghoulish nickname — “Death Valley” — for its unfortunate statistic of wrecks. And how about those cell towers disguised as pine trees? Come on. The “trees” are so spindly that they look like they belong, well, somewhere near the actual Death Valley.

So much to see from mountains to coast. What you won’t see, though, is the sign where I-40 begins, in Wilmington, that reads “Barstow, California 2,554 miles.” It was stolen so often that the DOT got tired of replacing it. Meanwhile, if you happen to have a list of locations for the elusive Dairy Queens along I-40, please text me. Calories don’t count when you’re a friend of Forty.  PS

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud grandmother.

The Mighty Widget

And the learning curve of sweat

By Jim Moriarty

My two older brothers and myself all matriculated at the same institution, the Widget Factory. It’s the place we worked during the summers of our youth. I’m not sure which one of my brothers gave it the name but it’s the only thing we ever called it in our house, and it helped put all of us through places where the learning was advertised as being higher. In the final analysis — which is creeping up on all three of us — I’m not sure if I learned any more from Chaucer than I did from Jocko.

We called it the Widget Factory because functional, mostly unidentifiable, metal objects were manufactured there. You know those doors that open with a push bar? And, the doohickeys that hold the bar on the left and the right? Widgets. Gears don’t shift and forklifts don’t fork without widgets. They are the invisible hand that turns the indispensible cog. In the absence of the mighty widget, life is just a bucket of bolts. It’s true we had no idea what we were making but we were, nonetheless, secure in the knowledge that it served a purpose somewhere, somehow, to someone. And we got paid 10 cents more an hour for doing it on the graveyard shift, 25 cents more if we worked in the foundry.

Jocko ran the acid bath. He had the face of a battered palooka and the body of Haystacks Calhoun, dressed in T-shirts that appeared to be pre-sweat stained and unlaced work boots. You could strop a razor on the toe of either foot. As one might intuit from the name, the acid bath was not without its perils, the evidence of which appeared on most of the exposed portions of Jocko’s flesh. Serious about his craft, he was as territorial as a honey badger. Even the owner of the factory approached Jocko as if he was inviting Luca Brasi over for tea. 

Gil worked in the foundry, where they poured the steel at 3,100 degrees. One of the jobs I mastered during my summers was being Gil’s set-up guy, using a two-pronged pitchfork to move ceramic molds from the 1,200-degree oven to the spot where Gil would fill them with molten steel. He once told me he’d grown up in the same neighborhood as Jack Nicklaus and, after Jack hit the big time and Gil hit the foundry, he walked up to the door of Jack’s old house in Columbus, Ohio, and knocked on it just to see how he would be received. He said Jack was still the same old Jack and treated him like the same old Gil. He thought it was the kind of information people with a future beyond the Widget Factory ought to have.

Bob worked in the wax room, but I only addressed him by his last name, preceded by Mr. He owned one of the finest houses on top of a sand dune in one of the swankiest neighborhoods on the lake. On a clear night he could see the Chicago skyline through his picture window. He had successful kids. One was a professional athlete. Sometimes on break, I’d see him out back drinking wine out of a pint bottle. Inside, he sat in front of a cafeteria tray full of tiny wax widgets using a sharp knife and shaky hands to whittle away the residue where the two halves of a mold left an unwanted line. He wasn’t scraping away his dignity; he was holding on to as much of it as he could.

Dennis was the head inspector. Tall and lanky with James Dean hair, he drove a pickup truck as orange as a hunting vest and called me Hippie, combining derision and kindness in the same smoky breath. He had no education to speak of, but he worked meticulously and honestly and showed up on time every day, trusted more by the man who owned the joint to do the right thing than the owner trusted his accountant. That turned out to be prescient, since long after I’d stopped spending my summers there, two people (one was the accountant) who inherited the executive offices from the original owner got led away in handcuffs after they embezzled every nickel that wasn’t welded down. That was the graveyard shift for the Widget Factory, where the evening classes began with a punch clock instead of a bell, and the degree you received was a doctorate in the nobility of work.  PS

Mom’s Way

A son remembers that nobody did collards and cornbread better

By Tom Allen

My mother did not fancy herself a cook. Cooks were known for their, well, cooking. When I grew up, cooks were women. I don’t recall hearing a man referred to as “a good cook” even though some were good at cooking — fried fish or barbecued chicken. I guess Hubert Byrd was a cook, probably a good cook. He owned Sleepy’s Grill, in our community, and Lord, he could cook — hamburgers and hot dogs and the best chili.

In the rural culture of my childhood, cooks were women you paid to bake a 12-layer chocolate cake at Christmas or fix a pot of chicken pastry (pastry, not dumplin’s) because pastry was hard to make. There was always something on a cook’s stove — cold biscuits, fried applejacks, crispy fatback. Mom never paid anyone to cook anything. If she couldn’t cook it, we didn’t eat it.

Some cooks worked outside the home — schoolteachers, nurses, mill hands. Regardless of employment, for some, cooking was a side hustle, a second or, perhaps, only stream of income. Most cooks, like good beauticians, were extroverts, people-persons, so that chocolate cake or pot of pastry came with 30 minutes of conversation, the catching-up kind of conversation, not gossip. Cooks don’t gossip. Might lose a customer.

Cooks liked to cook. Mom cooked, not for enjoyment or for money, but out of necessity. We had to eat. Nevertheless, Mom was a good cook, or maybe I should say, she cooked good, at least I thought she did.

Mom baked, which comes under the umbrella of “cooking,” but only two things — coconut chess pie and peach cobbler. That pie was her go-to, year-round dessert. If someone had a baby, a hysterectomy, divorced or died, Mom delivered a coconut pie. Peach cobbler, made with canned peaches (the slippery, cling kind), was a summer dish, although canned peaches are on the shelves year-round. Two years ago, when she died, I included a copy of her handwritten cobbler recipe in the service bulletin. Folks smiled as they shared stories of pies and cobblers that accompanied her support and sympathy.

But my favorite meal Mom cooked was a Southern staple, as indigenous as “Dixie” or a “Bless your heart.” I didn’t miss the combo until I left home for college. Absence, I learned, affects the stomach as much as the heart. Her collards and cornbread filled the void; that combo was my only request when I came home, regardless of the season, since Mom cooked and froze the greens for future consumption.

Collards, those dark green, loose-leaf cultivars, are a fall crop, made sweeter by nip of a first frost. My dad sowed seed in late summer, then thinned and nurtured each plant. By November, he harvested the massive leaves for Mom to cook down in a pot of water, seasoned with fatback or bacon grease. No onion, garlic or red pepper flakes. Perhaps a sprinkle of sugar. Mom’s collards, unlike others I’ve eaten, were chopped fine, to the point you could eat them with a spoon. Collards were a traditional side at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but were just as good thawed and reheated during spring break or with corn and butterbeans from Dad’s July garden.

Collards cooking have an unforgettable smell — pungent, foul. A saucer of cider vinegar or a scented candle toned down but never dispelled the aroma. But that smell was a small price to pay for a plate of pure goodness.

Cornbread was the essential accompaniment. Mom fried her simple version in lard, later canola oil. The batter — Old Mill of Guilford cornmeal, scant water, pinch of sugar, pinch of salt — was dropped by spoonfuls into an iron skillet, where it cooked up, thin and crispy. “Lacy cornbread” she called it. Leftover pones sat on the stove, a paper towel underneath to soak up any grease. Sweet tea completed the meal. Hard to come by in Kentucky, where I attended seminary.

Two years ago, we ate the last package of Mom’s frozen collards. Mother’s Day without her still falls bittersweet. What I wouldn’t give for a plate of collards, lacy cornbread, and her strong, brewed tea, yet I will forever cherish memories of a bitter green made savory and sweet by one who cooked but most of all, was simply . . . good.  PS

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

Greenus Envious

Tips from the tried and failed

By Susan S. Kelly

So it’s finally a warm weekend in spring, and you long to have something to pick, prune, pluck or even deadhead in your yard, garden, or the scorched-earth, weed-whacked plot that passes for it.  But you’re too busy or lazy to learn Latin names, and it’s embarrassing to go to the garden center and say, “I want those, you know, pink flowers that are tall,” or “ . . . that tree that looks pretty in the spring.”

Herewith, therefore, your tried-and-true primer, from someone whose personal dirt’s worth is incalculable due to all the tried-and-failed specimens I purchased, trucked in, planted, tended, and either rejoiced or mourned over. Or, alternatively, ripped out, chopped down, and consigned to the mulch pile. Because, in my yard, like professors seeking tenure, you either produce or perish.

Magnolia — Best climbing tree ever. But as a flower, forget it. The blooms are never low enough to cut, and besides, they only last a day. Leave it alone and just sniff the blooms big as plates. Come fall, your children can play army with the seedpods.

Gardenia — Only reliable if you live east of Raleigh. As for picked longevity, ditto the one-day warning above. Touch the vanilla petals and your invisible skin oils will brown them not invisibly. Heavenly aroma, though I rejected them in my wedding bouquet because the overpowering sweetness tends to provoke a gag reflex.  Still, nice in a teacup or that silver scallop shell your grandmother used as an ashtray.

Camellia —  Cannot be picked or arranged satisfactorily. For viewing only. Bonus: unlike azaleas, stay glossy green all year.

Orange daylilies — My neighbor calls them “privy lilies,” presumably because folks once planted them to beautify the outhouse. But they beat the heck out of the stubby gold hybrids planted in interstate medians. Go for it.

Queen Anne’s lace — Field and roadside freebies, but bring them inside and they proceed to shed fine white dust all over everything.

Marigolds — Often dumped upon as plebeian blooms, but for this commoner, nothing smells as good as one of their stems, broken.

Cleome — Pink, pretty, proliferous, and self-seeding. What else could you ask for in an airy weed that loves neglect, red clay, and 1,000-degree days? In late summer, take the seeds to the office, to a friend, or, for that matter, to another place in the yard. Strew with abandon.

Black-eyed Susans — As the Chatham Blanket tagline once boasted, they cover a multitude of sins. Require little effort and even less skill to stuff in a glass, metal or pottery container. Do not disparage that which can withstand full sun when you can’t. You call them invasive, I call them indispensable.

Knockout roses —  The Johnny-come-lately “it” flowering shrub. Utterly unpickable, but compensates for this shortcoming in sheer size and volume.

Peonies — The ultimate bloomer. Often disqualified for, as the farmers like to say, seasonality, but worth the wait, the space and the ants. Go ahead, gird your loins, and bring yourself to cut and enjoy them before a 20-minute thunderstorm causes irreparable loss and gnashing of teeth.

Hydrangeas — Bingo! Once upon a time, my mother referred to hydrangeas as “trash shrubs.” I love this. Or rather, I love reminding her of this now that no one can live without them.

Ivy — Just, no. You’ll be sorry. Plus, snakes like it. Use pachysandra instead.

There you have it. No more feeling humiliated by Biltmore with its perfect planters and borders and gardens featuring every floral texture and contrast and interest which nevertheless are superior to previously-envied Disney World’s planters and borders and gardens. Because Biltmore’s flowers actually grow, rather than simply get replaced by Snow White’s 426 dwarves every night.

Or, how not to waste your time or money on What Won’t Work Because We’re Not England.  PS

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother.

Spring Forward

But only when the cows do

By Ray Linville

If it wasn’t for the railroads, we might not be losing an hour of sleep on the second Sunday in March when we spring forward and advance to daylight saving time.

The railroads, after all, are responsible for pushing us to adopt time zones in this country to improve communications and travel coordination. Until then, time zones were determined locally. Can you image the chaos if Raleigh and central North Carolina were on a different time than Asheville?

Actually, something similar did happen. From 1883 (when our country’s four time zones were established) to 1946, Asheville and points west in this state were in the central time zone while we kept time with others in the eastern zone. After time zones became standard, it was an easy step to create daylight saving time — and necessary during wartime as a fuel-saving measure.

Benjamin Franklin, famous for the maxim “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” knew better. He didn’t rise at daybreak, and he certainly didn’t want to see the sun an hour early. When he encouraged people to get up early — for the benefit of saving on candle use in the evening — he meant it as a joke.

Tar Heels might have more in common with Pennsylvanian Franklin than we realize. In 1945 when World War II ended, the federal requirement for “war time,” as DST was known, also ended. For decades, observance of DST throughout the country was inconsistent. However, North Carolina never observed DST again until 1966, when the state began following the national schedule.

The argument that DST benefits farmers was long ago debunked. Cows follow a schedule based on the sun, not the hour on our clocks. Even energy conservation today is questionable because any savings in reduced lighting are more than offset by additional demands for air conditioning in the summer evenings.

It was hard enough before the age of the internet to spring forward. Now it’s almost impossible. High schoolers are up late and get so little sleep that their parents are asking for later and later start times.

My granddaughter, Katie, now in seventh grade, has it bad. Because high school students can’t get up early, the middle schoolers win the first bus routes. She sets her alarm clock for 6:15 each school morning to get up for the earliest bus in her county. Imagine her joy for springing forward this month.

In contrast, when I was a teenager in the era of no social media or video games, I got up before sunrise to complete a morning newspaper route well before school began. That alone required that I went to bed early, regardless of Franklin’s advice.

Then in college I struggled to attend 8 o’clock classes. Yes, colleges used to have classes that early.

South Carolina may be leading the region in determining what choice is better — daylight or standard. One legislator has proposed a bill that lets voters decide in a referendum this November if that state should continue to observe daylight time. How would you vote?

For me, the decision would be easy. My days of springing forward are over. I’m with the cows. Sunlight determines my schedule, unless the railroads again have a better idea.

Ray Linville writes about Southern food, history and culture.

For the Love of Nothing

An entire month devoted to . . . whatever

By Susan S.Kelly

I speak now for that silent minority who fear to voice, confess, or admit their glad anticipation for, their deep abiding love for, their eternal gratitude for . . .  January. Believe ye: there are those of us who crave every endless 31 days of a month so roundly dreaded by so many.

Bring it, baby.

For quad-A overachievers, list-makers, and borderline OCD peeps like myself, January is the season of somnolence, of letting go. For over-organized souls, nothing beats a full-on month of . . . nothing.

No holidays, and therefore no searching, purchasing, wrapping, hiding. No candy. No centerpieces. No costumes or cocktails. No (unspoken but acknowledged) competing for best dessert or coleslaw or fireworks or slalom or Easter basket or parade float. Personal bonus: no family birthdays.

No yard work. Everything is leafless, hideous, and charmless, and with any luck, will stay that way for six more weeks. The only outdoor chore is filling the feeder. No to-dos of raking, mowing — it’s too early to even prune. Nothing needs fertilizing, watering. Even kudzu is temporarily tamed to a crinkled, wrinkled weed. I’m so thankful it’s too early to force quince or forsythia; no sense of obligation there, and if you still force narcissus, I have a collection of lovely forcing vases and trays and even the rocks that you’re welcome to. Sorry, but I need to hold on to the gin that stiffens the stems. And I love my roses, but, boy, do I love when they’re whacked off and not producing, and therefore not accusing me of leaving them to grow blowsy and frowsy rather than cutting and delivering them to someone whose life, living room, and outlook would be improved by — oh, never mind. I may be the only person you know who gets depressed when the first bulbs begin blooming.

No fundraisers on PBS. This is huge.

Nothing at the farmer’s market equals absolution from waking early to haul yourself there, and trying to fairly spread your vegetable benevolence to several farmers with pleading eyes. Nothing edible locally means seasonal broccoli and citrus with unknown origins are just fine. As for other aspects of eating, in January it’s practically unpatriotic not to exist on semi-solid foodstuffs straight from your Crock-Pot. Go ahead, add another packet of taco mix to that pork butt, onion soup mix to that chuck roast, chili mix to that ground beef. Dow, Inc. knows: Better living through chemicals.

No campaigns, primaries, elections. No yard signs. No door-to-door, ’cause it’s too cold for solicitors, and if you haven’t gotten your subscriptions and wrapping paper by now, sorry. And altar guilds everywhere — Rejoice! and God rest ye merry gentlemen and women — no need for changing altar hangings and linens. Even at church, once you get past Epiphany, there’s a nice long stretch of nothing until the deprivations of Lent. As for resolutions, by mid-month they’re mostly moot, admit it.

Within the narrow demographic of January adorers, there’s an even smaller contingent: the snow lovers. For those of us dreamers, hopers, prayers and devotees of white stuff, January is the month during which those fervent desires are most likely to be fulfilled. For those who disloyally decamp for sunny Southern climes, desert isles, and ski slopes, all the better. Less car and foot traffic to mar the peaceful white perfection of a snowfall. Sorry, dear, I couldn’t get to the grocery store for supper supplies. Feel free to scrape whatever’s left in the . . . Crock-Pot.

It occurs to me that, were I ever to get a face-lift, January would be an opportune time.

Isn’t it divine to go to the movies and catch up on all those blockbusters you missed and get just the seat you want? Because no one else is there. Plus, you’re exonerated from even going to the movies: Everybody knows nothing Oscar-worthy is released between January and March.

Not that I encourage sloth, far from it. January is the month made for domestic industries, with the iPod blasting in your ears and no fear of anyone catching you atonally belting tunes with Justin Timberlake or Taylor Swift. Consolidate coupons, cull the catalogs, schedule your spanking, sparkling pristine new calendar with all the birthdays you forgot last year. Polish silver. Then, transfer your earbuds to your laptop, scoot your socked feet to the fire, and proceed to unabashedly binge Netflix, knowing you’ve earned and are entitled to The Right to Relax.

Oh, poor despised, derided month, that span of gloom and chill, so scorned and shunned by humanity, I’ll be there for you, bundled and content, cheering you on. Hermits, unite. We knew what Oscar Wilde really was referring to when he uttered, “the love that dare not speak its name” — we few, we happy few, who wallow, with glee, in January.  PS

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother.