Poem July 20

Buster Gets a Bath

When I pick him up
and tilt to the bathtub
he falls limp with shock
This cannot be. . . .

Then it’s dark thoughts
from dark eyes, the dog
I love so much hates me
A torture worse than death.

All sudsy now, scent of clover
and dead leaves washed away
with lavender and lemon.
How could you?

The sprayer — that cobra of doom
strikes again and again.
Even if it feels good
I’ll never say so.

After a brisk towel rub
he springs all over the house
a hero home from the war
The bath? It was my idea.

— Ashley Memory

Simple Life

By Jim Dodson

The last time I went to church was back in middle March.

Seems like half a lifetime ago. 

On Sunday mornings these days — most days, actually — I’m out well before sunrise watering my gardens and watching birds.

The garden has become my church, the place where I work up a holy sweat and find — no small feat in these days of safe distancing and social turmoil  — deeper connection to a loving universe. The arching oaks of our urban forest rival any medieval cathedral, and the birdsong of dawn is finer than any chapel choir. It’s the one time of the day when I feel, with the faith of a mustard seed, to quote the mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, that all will be well.

A rusted iron plaque that stood for decades in my late mom’s peony border reminded: 

           

The kiss of the sun for pardon

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden 

Than anywhere else on Earth.

 

This well-loved verse is from a poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney, daughter and wife of an Anglican priest who reportedly was inspired to jot this particular stanza in Lord Ronald Gower’s visitor’s book after spending time in his garden at Hammerfield Penshurst, England. The poem later appeared in an issue of Country Life Magazine in 1913, gaining Dorothy Gurney a slice of botanical immortality.

Though I descend from a line of rural Carolina farmers and preachers, it wasn’t until I began roaming Great Britain as a golf and outdoors editor for a leading travel magazine in the late 1980s that the verdure in my blood asserted itself and my own passion for landscape gardening took root and began to grow like a Gertrude Jekyll vine.

In those days, it was my good fortune to write about classic golf courses and fly-fishing streams that happened to be near some of Britain’s greatest sporting estates and historic houses.

One of the first I visited in West Sussex was Gravetye Manor, the former home of William Robinson, the revolutionary plantsman who, despite being Irish, has been called the “Father of the English Flower Garden.” Robinson’s pioneering ideas about creating natural landscapes with hardy native perennials, expressed in his famous book The Wild Garden, became the bible of English gardeners and led to a gardening style now admired and copied all over the world.

I showed up there to stay one hot mid-summer afternoon when the 100 acres or so of woodlands and gardens were already past their peak. But like  Dorothy Gurney, I was so taken with the sweeping natural landscape that I spent an entire day just walking the grounds looking at plants and chatting with the gardening staff. Among other things, I encountered my first Gertrude Jekyll vine, planted by Robinson’s protégé who went on to partner with Surrey architect Edwin Lutyens to create some of England’s most acclaimed private gardens.

After this, every time I traveled to England, Scotland or Wales with golf clubs and fly rod in tow, I made time to seek out some of the most historic houses and private gardens in the Blessed Isles. During bluebell season, I wandered through the breathtaking New Forest National Park to Chewton Glen — where farm animals by law walk free — and moseyed over to Kent to play a British Open course I’d always dreamed of playing. I also spent a blissful summer afternoon checking out the structural plantings of diplomat Harold Nicolson and the sumptuous gardens of his wife, author Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst, an ancient Anglo-Saxon word that means “clearing in the woods.”

I spent a day with Shropshire rose guru David Austin, toured the amazing terraced gardens of Wales’ Powis Castle, checked out the stunning gardens of Stourhead, Hidcote and Kew — even eventually found my way to Hammerfield Penshurst where Madam Gurney was moved to poetry. There I was so impressed by the riotous blue-and-pink peony border — my late mother’s favorite garden flower — I vowed to someday make my own peony border. 

Back home in Maine, in the meantime, I cleared a 2-acre plot of land on top of our forested hill, rebuilt an ancient stone wall and began making my own mini-Robinsonian gardening sanctuary. My witty Scottish mother-in-law suggested I give my woodland retreat a proper British name, suggesting “Slightly Off in the Woods.” The name was apt. The garden became my passion.

In 2004, I set off to spend a year exploring two dozen private and public gardens and arboretums all over Britain and eastern America, learning that gardeners are among the most generous and life-loving people of the Earth. Among other things, I went behind the scenes at the famous Philadelphia Flower Show and England’s venerable Chelsea Flower Show, got to pick the brains of America’s most acclaimed gardeners at places like Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Jefferson’s Monticello, Pennsylvania’s Chanticleer and Longwood Gardens, and finished the year by spending six weeks with plant guru Tony Avent and three fellow plant nerds in the wilds of South Africa hunting rare species of plants. During this time I even helped design my first golf course and shape its landscaping, at times wondering if I’d perhaps missed my calling, though what is a golf course but a great big parkland in the tradition of Capability Brown?

One of the most surprising moments came when I called on John Bartram’s historic garden across the Schuylkill River from downtown Philly. I spent an enriching afternoon in the garden of America’s first botanist, learning that Thomas Jefferson frequently turned up in the garden during the long hot tumultuous summer he spent in Philadelphia composing the Declaration of Independence. According to Bartram garden lore, Jefferson jotted notes for his hymn of American democracy while reposing in the shade of a sprawling ginkgo tree on the grounds. The last time I checked, the ancient ginkgo was still standing.

For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture and botany were elemental passions of life. As Andrea Wulf writes in her wonderful and prodigiously researched best-seller Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation, a tour of English landscape gardens — like the extended one I took — helped restore Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’ faith in their fledgling nation during some of its darkest hours. Gardening also helped make James Madison America’s first true environmentalist.

“The Founding Fathers’ passion for nature, plants, gardens and agriculture is deeply woven into the fabric of America,” she writes, “and aligned with their political thought, both reflecting and influencing it. In fact, I believe it’s impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners.”

My book on America’s dirtiest passion, Beautiful Madness: One Man’s Journey Through Other People’s Gardens — was my most fun book to research and write. Since its publication in 2006, I’ve heard from gardeners all over the planet and have made plans for a follow-up book on the diverse gardening passions of America and the adventures of an early 20th-century plant hunter and Asian explorer named Ernest Henry “Chinese” Wilson, whose discovered lilies are probably growing in your garden today.

As any devoted gardener knows, the beautiful thing about a garden is that it is forever changing and never completed. Revision and evolution go hand in hand with making a garden flourish and bloom.

As another July dawns in the midst of a worldwide pandemic and sweeping protests in quest of long overdue social justice and an end to racism, it strikes me that American democracy is really no different from the botanical wonders of the world.

A true gardener’s work is never complete, likewise for a true patriot of the diverse and ever-changing garden that is America. The garden must be tended regularly, weeded and watered, nurtured and fed, pruned and tended with a loving eye.

The good news is, gardens are remarkably resilient. They can take a beating, endure violent storms and punishing drought, yet come back even stronger than ever as a new day dawns. As Jefferson, Adams and that Revolutionary bunch knew, the one thing a healthy garden or democracy can’t abide for long is neglect and indifference.

And so, as mid-summer and our nation’s 244th birthday arrive, I plan to spend even more holy time in my garden — church until further notice —  planning a new blue-and-pink peony border in memory of my late mama and thinking about what it means to be a good gardener and a true citizen of this ever-evolving garden we call America.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The Omnivorous Reader

Going Viral

Shedding light on dark days

 

By Stephen E. Smith

In the mid-’90s, Richard Preston’s nonfiction The Hot Zone was a bestseller. Based on a 1989 outbreak of an Ebola-like strain of virus in Reston, Virginia, the horrors depicted in Preston’s book kept this reviewer awake at night. Even though the sickness was confined to monkeys imported for research purposes, it took an Army medical team clad in spacesuits to exterminate the infected primates.

With ample time to contemplate the predicament in which we now find ourselves, I did what reviewers do: I read, albeit belatedly, other books about pandemics. I downloaded Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History, Sara Shah’s Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, and David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (there are umpteen other equally enlightening volumes I haven’t had time to pursue), and I discovered in each book a blueprint for the COVID-19 pandemic — disturbingly precise roadmaps for events over which we might have managed a modicum of control on a worldwide, national and personal level had we taken to heart what history and science has to teach us.

If you’re interested in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic, Quammen’s 2016 Spillover is by far the most informative — and the scariest — study. He focuses on zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, AIDS, rabies, influenza and West Nile, infections that sicken animals and jump to humans. COVID-19, although not identified when Spillover was written, is a zoonotic that has escalated into a pandemic via human-to-human transmission, and Quammen makes it possible for the layman to comprehend the viral dynamic at work. He explains in straightforward terms how global travel and exploding world populations make it possible for a virus such as COVID-19 to spread rapidly. We tend to view the spread of such a virus as an independent misfortune that happened to us (how else would a nonscientist see it?), but “That’s a passive, almost stoical way of viewing them,” he writes. “It’s also the wrong way,” making us susceptible to anecdotal testimony and false cures that might be harmful.

Quammen says that emerging diseases are the result of two forms of crisis on the planet — ecological and medical. “Human-caused ecological pressures and disruption are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading pathogens ever more widely,” Quammen writes. Logging, road building, slash-and-burn agriculture, the consumption of wild animals, mineral extraction, urban settlement, chemical pollution, nutrient runoff into oceans — most of what we call “civilizing” incursions upon the natural world — destroy the ecosystem. This destruction releases viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists and other parasites embedded in natural relationships that limit their geographical range. “When the trees fall and the native animals are slaughtered, the native germs fly like dust from a demolished warehouse.”

In 2012 Quammen asked this straightforward question, “Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of the rain forest or a market in China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?”

If we can’t predict the next pandemic, says Quammen, we can remain vigilant, we can monitor worldwide transmission, and take precautions. Argue as we may about how and why we got here, the fact remains we find ourselves in a frightening moment whose ramifications must be faced head on. Spillover allows the reader to do just that.

As thorough and graphic as the above-mentioned volumes are, they don’t truly immerse the reader in the personal misery visited upon the Spanish flu generation or on those of us suffering the most extreme ravages of COVID-19. But there are books of fiction — doses of focused reality — that do just that, books I’d read 50 years ago.

The first is Katherine Anne Porter’s 1939 Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of three “short novels.” Told in the third person, the title story lulls the reader into the complacency of daily life — until the influenza sweeps up and almost kills the youthful protagonist. Porter’s description is worth reading in full, but here’s a sample:

“Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand.”

Porter suffered bouts of influenza at least three times in her life, so she writes from an acuity borne of experience, and she’s careful to impress upon the reader that we are all cursed with the conviction that nothing terrible can happen to us . . . until it happens.

If Porter captures the suffering endured by a victim of the pandemic, North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe wrenches the reader’s soul when conveying the agony of watching a loved one die from the Spanish flu in Look Homeward, Angel. With Wolfe, the reader is always in danger of being consumed by his excessive wordiness, but it’s that verbosity that’s effective in conveying a terrible reality. Again, the writer’s words are worth reading in full, but here’s an excerpt:

“The rattling in the wasted body, which seemed for hours to have given over to death all of life that is worth saving, had now ceased. The body appeared to grow rigid before them. . . But suddenly, marvelously, as if his resurrection and rebirth had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration; his gray eyes opened. . . casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain mummers of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornfully and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.”

Books about death and disease don’t make for cheerful reading, but understanding the pandemic is better than succumbing to its ravages or losing a loved one to COVID-19. Wear a mask, wash your hands, social distance — and read wisely.  OH

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.

Almanac July 2020

By Ash Alder

 

Weeks ago, before what felt like endless days of rain, two flats of tomato plants mysteriously landed on your porch (how’d they get there?), and so you planted them deep in the sunniest patches of your garden.

A Cherokee Purple here; two Lemon Boys there; a Park’s Whopper by the lush trough of sweet and purple basil; and sundry grapes and cherries scattered about in various pots and planters.

Now, the earliest fruits are ripening, and each new tomato is simply miraculous. One catches the sun, drawing you near — an heirloom cherry among a small cluster of green and yellow fruits. You hold it gently between your thumb and forefinger, can almost feel the life force pulsing inside. Days from now, that tomato will be ready for harvest. Patience, the garden whispers, and you know it’s true: Nature never rushes.

On the other side of the yard, where the Cherokee Purple is soaking up the earliest rays of light, you admire how strong and healthy the plant looks — how fully supported. The advice you were given echoes back like a dream: plant deep; don’t be afraid to bury a few of the leaves; the stem will sprout new roots.

Plump fruit heavy on the vine, you contemplate, is the gardener’s crystal sphere. It tells of the future, yes (tomato pies and homemade salsas). But it also tells of the past — the sunlight and rain; the good fortune; the “invisible” strength, growth, and magic that took root beneath the surface.

Patience, you whisper, reminding yourself that you, too, have much to offer, even if you can’t yet see it. Sunshine or rain, there is wisdom taking root. Be generous with yourself. Allow whatever space, care and time you require. 

The cicadas have mastered this art form. Seventeen years underground, and here they are, screaming out in glorious ecstasy. Not a moment too late or too soon.

 

Homegrown Gourmet

If you find yourself with two pounds of homegrown tomatoes, and none of the following ingredients make you shudder (flour, mayonnaise, milk, cheese and butter), do yourself a favor and look up Laurie Colwin’s Tomato Pie. Summer supper seasoned with scallions and chopped basil, and can you say leftovers?

 

 

 

 

The Goddess Tree

On more than one occasion, I have gasped at the crape myrtle’s likeness to a Greek goddess. The smoothness of its multicolored bark. How its trunk and slender branches seem to embody such poise and grace.

Now through September, the crape myrtle blooms, its bright pink flowers fragrant in the thick, summer air.

Although its English name derived from its myrtle-like leaves and crinkled, tissue-like petals, this ornamental tree is native to China, where its name means “hundred days of red.”

While the crape myrtle is not a true myrtle, the myrtle is known as the flower of the gods, and is specifically associated with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.

Makes perfect sense to me.

 

The Grand Emergence

If you happened to hear — or are still hearing — the deafening hum of the million-plus “Brood IX” cicadas predicted to emerge in our state per acre after 17 years underground, then you have witnessed one of the fullest, most jubilant expressions of life on Earth.

Sometimes we forget how miraculous it is just to be here. And how wild. 

This dreamy month of summer, when the Earth is pulsing, buzzing, screaming with life in all directions, we remember. Ripe peaches and wild blackberries. Cornsilk and crickets. Butterfly weed and hummingbird mint.

Ripe whole peach fruit with green leaf isolated on white background with clipping path. Full depth of field.

It’s all a gift. 

The garden is ripe for harvest, and everything we need is here. Our only requirement, from time to time, is to celebrate our great fortune.

Happy Fourth of July, friends.  OH

Home by Design

Build the Wall!

Rooms are cool again, in the view of High Point Market’s Style Spotters

 

 

By Cynthia Adams

Every spring and fall, the High Point Market Authority handpicks a group of designers and trend-trackers to scour showrooms for top design trends and products. But how to get around the Market’s COVID-induced closure, the second in its 111-year history (the first being World War II)?

Like everyone else in America, the Market turned to Zoom in mid-May, bringing together tastemakers from around the country to highlight their chicest picks from websites and leading home-furnishing companies’ new product lines. In a virtual confab, Rachel Cannon, Nancy Fire, Joanna Hawley-McBride, Don Ricardo Massenburg, Rachel Moriarty, Ivonne Ronderos, Victoria Sanchez, and Keita Turner presented their finds and posted them for viewing on the Spotters’ Pinterest boards. 

Allow me to break down some key takeaways.

Recent lockdowns made us miss rooms. As in, rooms with walls and doors. Doors that close.

This is a reversal of many seasons’ worth of pooh-poohing discrete spaces. Season after season, tastemakers regularly demonstrated an aversion to them. And not only in print. On HGTV, home flippers would walk in and size up a fixer-upper. Right off the bat they would eye existing sheetrock or plaster walls with the sort of suspicion normally reserved for a sewage leak.

“We need to open this up!” the renovator would declare giving said wall the stink eye. “First thing we’ll do is take out that wall!” 

No matter if there was a 1911-era fireplace in that wall oozing charm, the problem was, that mantel and fireplace required a wall. And walls, if not absolutely essential and load bearing, a renovator term one quickly learned, were verboten.

Having flipped a few houses myself in my single days, I would wail at a hallmark Fixer Upper scene in which Chip and Joanna Gaines proceeded to take a sledgehammer to an architectural detail or quirk that gave a house character. The end result was an open-concept house erected within the gutted shell of a formerly unique structure.

But the times, Children, are a-changin’. 

After sheltering in place, working and home-schooling children, there were just so many days of hearing “Baby Shark” without losing brain cells. Or hearing one’s partner booming away on yet another Zoom call. Or clearing away the breakfast mess before a Skype call could occur.

Weary Mamas and Papas and empty nesters learned there is something to treasure about personal space when one had so little.

After years of open floor plans, the Style Spotters agreed, there is a great realization:

“Open plans are going to change,” one declared.

If you lack the skill set to build a wall in the time of a pandemic, buy a screen, the designers suggested in May. 

Something else the Style Spotters uttered grabbed my attention: comfort. Comfort and coziness are useful in uncertain times, they agreed unilaterally.

So, soft edges (featured on a cabinet by Theodore Alexander) or the organic (citing a Clubcu Oak French Console with a handmade look) were deemed pleasing.

Art and accessories with lots of texture also made the tastemaker’s cut. As did things “organic, creative, imperfect,” or “global and glam” — all reassuring design choices.

In a pandemic-scarred world, “Home is going to be the hub of everything,” one said. 

The humble entryway or grand foyer is changed and weighed with practical needs  (shucking off clothing or sanitizing our hands), as more than one urbanite designer allowed.

Rachel Cannon, whose Zoom space was neutral, tasteful and quiet, says she likes to design for introverts like herself. Though seeking calm in her color palette, she confessed she was not as enamored of the Pantone color of the year, Classic Blue, as her Style Spotting compatriots. Illustrating her preference for soothing elements, Cannon cited Hickory White’s case goods. 

On the opposite end of the personality spectrum, the boho-loving camp did not seek calm. They chose geometric, bold, sexy furnishings among case goods and furniture, as well as art and accessories. They liked candy colors that smacked of fun and games. The radical chic designers favored effusive and tribal-inspired designs in fabrics. Prominently mentioned was Shipibo textiles, created by the Peru’s indigenous Shipibo-Conibo people.

The Style Spotters responded unanimously to a question about favorite projects: The entire group expressed their enthusiasm for designing powder rooms. “You can take risks!” one suggested. As a bonus for extroverted designers, the style-savvy added: It can be bold!

So skip to the loo, my darlings! It may have a dearth of toilet paper, but it does have walls and lockable doors, suitable for when one simply has to shut out the noise. Or corona-avoid everyone.  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

The Style Spotters program is co-sponsored by Crypton Fabric and Studio Designer. More information about the Style Spotters program and the 2020 team can be found www.highpointmarket.org/products-and-trends/style-spotters.

Rescue Me

A Loving tribute to the dogs that found us

Photographs by Bert VanderVeen

Moose

Fourth time’s the charm

Lauren Riehle and her husband, Josh, are veterans of the animal rescue circuit. She serves as executive director of Red Dog Farm Animal Rescue Network, a remarkable organization started in 2006 by Garland and Gary Graham that has saved and placed, through its network of volunteers and foster families, more than 50 different species and 4,000 different animals, ranging from emus to cats, hedgehogs to dogs, into new homes.

Two years ago, the Riehles lost their beloved German Shepherd mix, Harley, a wonderful dog that served as a therapy dog and helped Lauren teach about animal rescue in the classroom. “We were heartbroken to lose Harley,” she says. “We absolutely adored that dog.”

They agreed to keep an eye out for another large breed dog that would  get along with Penny and Gibson, a pair of highly independent Shelties the couple adopted over the years.

A year ago, Red Dog Farm’s small animal specialist, Haley Garner, phoned Lauren to say that she’d found the Riehles’ next dog — a 4-month-old male German shepherd puppy that had already had three different owners. “Naturally, my question to Haley was what was wrong with the dog?”

The short answer is nothing. The pup had been with potential owners who, for reasons ranging from work schedules to personal allergies, simply could not give the young shepherd the kind of home he deserved.

Lauren and Josh decided to take in the pooch as a foster case. “We were frankly blown away when we met him,” Lauren picks up the tale. “He was almost the spitting image of Harley and such a really sweet dog. We decided to add him to our family.”

The first thing the pup needed was a permanent name. “We sat on our back deck and considered a lot of different names. Josh, who is 6-foot-8, wanted a big-dog name, and so did our son, 7-year-old Drew.”

“The boys,” as she calls them with a laugh, settled on the name “Moose.”

Since that time, Moose has lived up to his name in numerous ways. In just one year, he weighs in at 85 pounds, growing so rapidly the couple decided to have his DNA tested to determine if he might have some Great Dane in him. The test confirmed that aptly named Moose was a pure German Shepherd — just a very large one.

“It’s uncanny how similar he is to Harley,” she reports. “He loves to run and tumble in the yard with Drew and Penny our younger Sheltie, though she makes it clear who is really in charge. Gibson, who is 15, prefers to simply ignore him — which is hard to do since he’s still growing and is really one big goofball, always ready to play.” Lauren reports that Moose has become Drew’s favorite playmate. “They love to lie together on the couch watching movies. He doesn’t grasp the whole social distancing thing,” she adds with a laugh.

Like his beloved predecessor, Moose is also very gentle and smart. Lauren envisions him possibly someday becoming an outstanding therapy dog himself.

“He seems to have the perfect personality for it — loves people and other animals. Everyone is his friend.”

Moose is living proof, she adds, that rescued animals often find their way to the place — and the people — where they were meant to be.

— Jim Dodson

 

Amazing Gracie

100 proof Bull

Maybe we can blame it on very good bourbon.

Two years ago this November, as my wife Wendy and I were returning by car from Chicago where we’d shared Thanksgiving with my daughter and her fiancé’s family, we decided to stop at the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, to pick up some Christmas spirits and toast our expand family.

During the sampling tour, we fell into conversation about our first meeting with Walnut, a muscular brindle pit bull that Maggie and Nate rescued from a city-run animal control center in Chicago just hours before the dog was scheduled to be put down. Walnut’s previous life on the embattled streets of the Windy City’s South Side left him emotionally scarred and with few options. He had twice been adopted only to be sent back to the shelter for aggressive behavior.

As a desperate final gambit to save him, friends who worked as volunteers at the shelter — “a place full of stray street dogs nobody ever comes to see, much less adopt,” as Maggie describes it — placed Walnut’s otherworldly face online for Valentine’s Day, prompting my daughter and her squeeze to swoop in and rescue the big fellow in the nick of time. The addition of Walnut expanded their family to four, including a sweet beagle mix from Tennessee named Billie Holiday that Maggie rescued during her years in New York City.

Walnut quickly bonded with his new owners and Billie Holiday, yet his emotional issues, perhaps a form of doggie PTSD, a propensity to lose control at sharp noises and around certain kinds of people and small yappy dogs, led to a year of challenging rehabilitative work with a trainer.

“In truth, he kind of flunked out of the class,” Maggie concedes with a laugh, “because he never really learned the difference between play and aggression. But we weren’t about to give up on him. On the plus side he turned out to be very loving and responsive, a big needy child.” Their experience with Walnut seems to confirm the wisdom of top dog trainers that there’s no such thing as bad dogs, only bad owners.

In any case, as we headed for our hotel in the beautiful Kentucky hill country, my bride mused: “You know? Seeing Walnut and Billie makes me think maybe we should adopt a rescue, too.”

I reminded her that we already had two terrific dogs — a wise old gal named Mulligan (I call her “The Mull”) that I found running wild and free as a pup beside a busy highway a dozen years ago, and a sweet-tempered purebred, middle-aged golden retriever named Ajax (a.k.a. “Junior”) that I’d given Wendy for our 10th wedding anniversary. Mully was almost 13. Junior was now 8. Did we really need a third — and a rescue?

“Wouldn’t hurt to look,” she came back.

Not 40 seconds later, she showed me a photo on her iPhone. “So what do you think of this dog? Her name is Cardinal.”

I saw a chocolate-brown dog with a bright white chest, intelligent eyes and alert ears. Festively draped with colored Christmas lights, she was the shelter Dog of the Month sponsored by Lucky’s Pet Resort & Day Spa in Greensboro.

“That looks like a pit bull,” I warily pointed out.   

“I know.” Wendy said. “Doesn’t she look sweet?”

Cardinal had been a resident of the Guilford County Animal Shelter for months, a refugee from the streets of south Greensboro, assumed to be roughly 2 years old, “sweet-tempered and loves to play,” read her police file, er, shelter profile. “Good with other dogs.”

Wendy gave me what I call The Look. “I think we should save her.”

And so, one week later, I drove out to Lucky’s to pick up my wife’s Christmas present, wondering what kind of challenge lay ahead. I’d spent the week reading up on pit bulls on the American Kennel Club’s website  and other sources and was surprised by what I learned.

Pit bulls were created by cross-breeding traditional bulldogs and English terriers, which produced a tenacious animal used in pit fighting until the British government outlawed the sport in the mid-19th century, at which point dog-fighting went underground. In his fascinating 2006 New Yorker essay on what prejudice against pit bulls can teach us about racial profiling of both human beings and dogs, writer Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that though pit bulls have been responsible for numerous well-publicized attacks on humans in recent years, not to mention becoming the targets of civic bans, evidence is overwhelming that the breed is no more aggressive and dangerous than other large breeds — unless trained to be so.

The line that just jumped out at me from a leading expert in canine behavior: “A mean pit bull is a dog that has been turned mean, by selective breeding, by being cross-bred with a bigger, human-aggressive breed like German shepherds or Rottweilers, or by being conditioned in such a way that it begins to express hostility to human beings.”

In Britain, I also learned, pit bulls are especially prized for their gentleness with children and are often trained to be therapy dogs for their keen intelligence, devotion and responsiveness to positive human interaction. Also, not every pit bull is the same breed.

Young Cardinal turned out to be a Staffordshire bull terrier. I read up on her type, too.

“From his brawling past,” noted the breed’s American Kennel Club profile, “the muscular but agile Staffordshire bull terrier retains the traits of courage and tenacity. Happily, good breeding transformed this former gladiator into a mild, playful companion with a special feel for kids.”

That was promising. Sort of.

Then there was this from the Staffordshire Bull Terrier Club of America:

“They are tough, courageous, tenacious, stubborn, curious, people-loving and comfort-loving, protective, intelligent, active, quick, and agile . . . Staffords love to play tug-of-war and to roughhouse, but YOU must set the rules and YOU must be the boss.” SBTC goes on to say that the Staffords’ alert, muscular appearance is very striking. They look tough, and that can be a positive deterrent to thieves. But because of their natural fondness for people, most Staffords tend to protect people and not possessions. “A Staffordshire bull terrier desires, more than anything else, to be with its people.” Quoting a chapter from Steve Eltinge’s The Staffordshire Bull Terrier in America, the site concludes: “From the time he awakens in the morning until the quiet of night, a Stafford lives life to the fullest.”

Cardinal seemed worth the risk, though she did have one major issue.

Though young, she suffered from an advanced stage of heartworms that was being kept in check by monthly medication. We were warned that if we adopted the dog, she would need an expensive and lengthy treatment regime to save her life. Among other things, her movements would need to be restricted and she should not be allowed to run for months for fear of sudden cardiac arrest.

Truthfully, as I drove out to Lucky’s to sign the papers and pick her up, I was still having a little debate in my head. Did we really want to bring a damaged pit bull of unknown origin into our happy dog family? Did I mention that we also have a cranky old cat, saved as a kitten from the gentrified streets of Southern Pines? His name is Boo Radley, and he’s highly independent and not just a little pushy. How would Boo take to a pit bull? Or worse, vice versa?

The first thing we did was give her a new name. A new life warranted a new name. I lobbied for “Santa Claws” but we settled on “Gracie,” a name we hoped she would grow into.

And grow she did.

Over the next year, she put on almost 20 pounds, indicating she was much younger than believed.

After some initial tension with our two resident dogs, they quickly settled into a friendly routine with Gracie actually deferring to the household grande dame, Madame Mully, who only grows agitated and rushes in to nip the newcomer whenever she sees me rough-housing or playing tug-of-war with Gracie, her two favorite games. We took to calling Mully “The No-Fun Nun.” The funny thing is, if she wished to do so, Gracie could inflict terrible damage on the old girl. But she doesn’t. Gracie politely defers every time.

Junior, on the other hand, became Gracie’s best pal, the two of them typically sharing a couch — or their owners’ marital bed — whenever possible.

Even Boo Radley has developed a guarded affection for “The Bull,” as I often call her — especially during morning walks when she drags me around the neighborhood on her leash, striking fear only into the hearts of fleeing rabbits and squirrels dumb enough to invade our backyard. I even trained her to snap carpenter bees out of the air.

Almost everything about this once-lost dog, I must say, has proved heart-warming and amazing.

In short, she is everything a Stafford is said to be: tough, courageous, tenacious, stubborn, curious, people-loving and comfort-loving, protective, intelligent, active, quick and agile as a world-class athlete.

Thank God she doesn’t care for good Kentucky bourbon.  
— Jim Dodson

Pilot

Seen in Mississippi, Herd in N.C.

Having flown in from Greensboro, there I was at the Sonic Drive-In in Pearl, Mississippi.

“You sure came a long way,” said a guy who’d struck up a chat, “just for a dog.”

Yep! About four states and 750 miles. Suddenly I felt rather stupid about it. Just what was I doing, adopting a dog I hadn’t even met, in a place so far from home?

I was a bit lost, honestly. Three months before, I’d seen my beloved border collie, Sully, get hit by a car on Church Street. Later at the vet, I stroked him and said goodbye before he was put to sleep. Not long after, in a round of layoffs, I lost the job I’d loved for 10 years.

Now, two weeks into unemployment, here I was, tired and anxious and worried that I’d made a very foolish mistake.

It was all my friend Teresa’s fault. Several weeks after Sully died, she saw an online posting for a beautiful, 7-year-old tricolor border collie in Dallas. He was a much-loved pet, but a family situation was forcing the owner to rehome him. (And, key fact: A rescue group had volunteered to deliver the dog.)

I was intrigued. A good dog is like a good husband: Hard to find. I love border collies — herding dogs bearing an intelligence and loyalty that make them trustworthy, playful and affectionate. But with no sheep to keep them busy, I need that rare border collie blessed with a calm temperament — an “off switch,” as folks say. In short, I like a working dog whose favorite part of the day is lunch hour.

On a video the owner sent, the dog appeared smart and strikingly laid-back. His eyes, though, sealed the deal. I saw a kind, eager-to-please nature in his gaze. I’ve had collies since I was a child; this, my instinct said, was a good one. 

When the rescue group’s delivery offer fell through, there I was, my heart pounding as I waited to meet my new best friend.

Now, I’ve done enough online dating to know that photos, even videos, can be deceiving. The “real thing” is often different, often a disappointment.

An SUV with Texas plates drove up, and the dog jumped out. I took one look and saw the intelligence, the graceful herder’s gait, and most of all those kind brown eyes.

I knew: I’d come a long way, and it was worth the trip.

He had a name, of course: Pilot. And in the year since he’s been my companion, my hiking buddy, my solace, my guide. When we walk, he’s always ahead of me, leading the way. And each time he cranes his neck around to make sure I’m still following, then flashes his happy grin, I know I didn’t go too far for a dog.

Life works funny sometimes. We don’t always know where we’re going and sometimes we’re surprised at where we end up. Sometimes that spot is the Sonic Drive-In in Pearl, Mississippi.
But if we’re lucky, we get a Pilot to guide us home.    — Lucinda Hahn

Bundle of Joy

Christine Catania gives a new meaning
to dog-boarding

Christine Catania’s widely known as the Triad’s Ice Queen, a shortened version of her mobile business, Ice Queen Ice Cream. But she is, in fact, a softie who serves frozen treats and saves rescues.

Catania was content with her pack of two that included Moxie, an “adorable and super smart” 12-year-old mixed breed found in 2008 wandering in the snow, and Lulu, the American Staffordshire terrier/boxer/beagle “steamroller of love,” who was down on her luck when Catania adopted her through Dr. Janine Oliver and Alison Schwartz of All Pets Considered. “I never wanted three dogs, but thought I could foster a puppy,” says Catania.

Then along came Joy.

Primarily American bulldog, with a distinctive black-and-white mask, which is all-natural, and a perfect foil during a pandemic, Joy, who will be 1 year old on July 12, was born while being fostered by another family. “Her mom was at the Forsyth County Animal Shelter and was being fostered while she had her puppies. Her family fell in love and adopted her” Catania explains. Having grown up among animals in her native New Jersey (“Our childhood friends were parrots, parakeets, horses, dogs, cats, guinea pigs . . . we had a zoo!”), Catania was no stranger to fostering dogs. She regularly volunteers with Merit Pit Bull Foundation in Greensboro whose mission, she says, is one of rescue and outreach for pit bulls.

“I’ve always loved pit bulls since my sister adopted one from the shelter in New Jersey in 1998,” she recalls. “She had her throughout her life; she was an extraordinary dog.”

She has since sought rescue organizations after her move to the Gate City to study art at UNCG and began fostering some nine dogs ago, her first attempt being her most ambitious: a 130-pound Great Dane.

Learning to work with socially anxious animals and those with separation anxiety or fear aggression, Catania takes advantage of “so many resources and training online, with free websites on YouTube.” Patience is also key.

“I’m calm and patient, and take little steps,” she explains.

Not that she needed to worry about anxiety or aggression in her newest charge, who even accepts her rescue cat, Steve. “She was so perfect!”  Catania recalls, her affection for Joy palpable.

At 44.9 pounds of “pure muscle,” Joy — named for Joymongers craft beer — is athletic and “also the smartest and most endearing, the most incredible puppy,” Catania says. Joy is also agile and sufficiently fearless enough to have begun mastering paddle boarding. Catania’s partner, by the way, has a standup paddle boarding business.

Catania says the dog likes to hit Lake Brandt and “jumps right on the board” kitted out in her own lifejacket. Joy even has a Facebook page dedicated to her water sporting fun: Joy, the SUP Synergy SUP PUP.

It’s a good life for the pooch and her two stepsisters, especially when Catania, a self-described “homebody,” prepares unusual flavor combinations for Ice Queen in her home time. Her treats are many and varied, but Ice Queen’s specialty are 15 varieties of handmade ice cream “sammiches” with whimsical names such as King Kong, Big Bird and Midlife Crisis — sized petite or Mac Daddy.

And for canines?

Pupsicles, of course, made of yogurt, honey and peanut butter. Catania creates them for dog-related events and has occasionally sold the treats for the benefit of animal rescue. During the pandemic she has sold human and dog treats through her web site,
www.icequeenicecream.com, and made donations of “sammiches” to front-line workers at Cone Hospital, when she wasn’t tooling to planned stops throughout the Triad in her gaily painted converted short buses, Snow Drop and Shortcake. One hopes, with warmer, humid days approaching, she’ll be able to tour randomly, selling “sammiches” to humans and keeping a supply of pupsicles on hand “to give to puppers.”

Catania doesn’t charge for these, she quips merrily, “because dogs don’t carry money.”    — Cynthia Adams

A Rose by Any Name

David and Pamela McCormick’s new addition

If Charles Dickens had written dog stories, the unlikely journey of a redbone coonhound named Mocha that became a Rose would make a true page-turner.

Just over 18 months ago, the young female dog wandered up to a house in southern Virginia, emaciated and pregnant. The stray was pitifully hobbling on three legs, probably the result of an unhappy run-in with a car.

The next day, the folks who took her in served as midwife for the birth of eight puppies. Through their family connections to Sedgefield Animal Hospital and Red Dog Farm Animal Rescue Network, the pups are placed in foster homes. All were soon successfully adopted.

Their sweet mama was treated at Sedgefield Animal Hospital, undergoing a procedure that removed the damaged ball and socket of her shattered hip, allowing new cartilage to form a “false” ball joint as the hip heals. The prognosis was good. In time, even her limp would fade.

As all of this was happening, David and Pamela McCormick were thinking their 12-year-old, female Cairn terrier, Coco, could use a new companion following the recent demise of their older male Cairn terrier, Charlie.

With the assistance of Alison Schwartz of All Pets Considered, the McCormicks brought home a young rescued female Dachshund only to find that the match was not a good one. “She was a little too wild for Coco’s tastes,” says David, an IT specialist who works at UNC-Chapel Hill. Wife Pamela is a schoolteacher.

A short time later, however, the McCormicks checked out the Facebook videos of Schwartz’s weekly Pet of the Week segments with Lora Songster of WMAG-99.5 radio. When they heard Schwartz describe Mocha as “about the sweetest dog imaginable,” they decided to go have a look — and found, in January of last year, the perfect rescue to adopt.

There was only one apparent problem.

“We couldn’t have a Coco and Mocha under the same roof,” says David with a laugh, “so we gave her a new name that really seemed to suit her: Rose.”

Early on, Rose was extremely shy with her new owners, however, preferring to initially stay in the large fenced backyard of the McCormicks’ house off Fleming Road. She also suffered nightmares. “Blood-curdling screams two or three times a night. We would sit down and hold her,” David provides. “It probably took six months to get over those.”

The McCormicks’ patience eventually paid dividends. As Rose’s hip healed, the nightmares ceased. “It’s funny,” he adds, “It’s almost as if one day she woke up and realized she was where she really belonged. Ever since then she has been a joy in our family; even Coco, who had no interest in another dog, accepts her. She’s a big goof, actually, loves to run and play, sometimes spins crazy circles. She howls with pleasure for her supper. And every day she wakes up delighted to see us — even if we’re away only a few minutes.”

The McCormicks report that Rose adores her daily 2-mile walk around the neighborhood. “The transformation has been amazing to see,” adds David. “She is healthy and full of energy and really one of us now.”    — Jim Dodson

 

Abiding with Bella

Paw de deux

Mary Cole has always been an inveterate walker. “It’s what I enjoy,” she says. Growing up in Leicester in the Midlands region of England, she was accustomed to taking “long walks and treks” by herself. In those days, she kept a cat around the house for companionship, but it wasn’t until her late husband, Trevor, presented her with a golden retriever as a wedding present that dogs became central to Mary’s life. “I’m a shy person,” says the self-professed loner and animal-lover. “Give me a good book and I’m happy. Give me a drink and you don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth!” she quips. “But I love my own company — me and me. Me and me get on just fine — and Bella, of course. She thinks I’m wonderful.”

Thanks to Bella, a tail-less, 8-year-old dachshund/beagle mix with perhaps a touch of terrier, Mary never walks alone. The two often stroll through the green expanse of Guilford Hills Park and its suburban environs, and before the pandemic struck, along the wooded trails of Military Park. Its closure, along with the local libraries’, was “a great sadness” to Mary, who would often drive by the closed gates hoping to find them open again. In the interim, Country Park would have to do. “I walk Bella a lot, Mary explains. As in, three times a day. “We both like to eat,” she adds. “I can’t imagine what we’d look like if we didn’t!” 

Mary and her current husband, Ervin, whom she met while working as a receptionist at PBM Graphics (“because of my accent,” she jokes. “Open my mouth. Get a job.”) adopted Bella four years ago through Thomasville’s Ruff Love Rescue. Then called Esther, owing to a star-shaped marking on her chest  (“I can’t imagine calling her Esther!” exclaims Mary), they had noticed the dog, as well as a whippet on the organization’s web page. At the arranged meeting in High Point, Ruff Love’s representatives introduced three dogs, Bella being the last. “She came trotting in and sat between Ervin’s legs. So we said, ‘Well, that’s it, then,’” Mary recalls. A bonus was the fact that Ruff Love would return the adoption fee after two weeks, should dog and owners be incompatible.

But that’s hardly the case with Bella, “a very mannerly girl,” as Mary describes her genial sidekick, though she’s cautious around other dogs during their turns around the neighborhood (and, of course, the Coles’ other rescue, a feral cat named Nala). “People approach you and say, ‘My dog’s friendly.’ Oh? Good for you. Mine’s not,” Mary says, explaining that Bella has been known to “rear up” around aggressive canines, especially if they’re unleashed.

Ervin sometimes ribs Mary about her lax dog training, especially while she’s watching reruns of Cesar Millan’s Dog Whisperer. Mary’s retort: “We’re happy as we are. We don’t want to be too good. Good people are boring. Good dogs are boring as well.”    — Nancy Oakley

 

Baxter

A port in the storm

We were in Lowe’s in Southport, as our condo seems ill-fated with storms frequently hitting the tiny town, requiring us to make constant repairs. 

Our dog Patch has been going on these hardware store forays and anticipates the treats from Lowe’s staffers.  

He was in the cart, munching happily on a dog biscuit, when I felt a tap on the shoulder.

“Is that a wirehaired fox terrier?” a young woman asked. I explained that Patch was a Schnauzer, though liver-colored. You might mistake him for an overgrown hamster. He appeared in O.Henry two years ago when he was a mere pup.

 The young woman, Melissa, had several boisterous, chatty red-haired children hanging off her cart. Small hands grabbed for Patch. She told me they, too, had a terrier. Then, her face crumpled. Hers had to stay out in the yard because he sometimes snapped at the children.

“We won’t be able to keep Baxter,” she said sadly. “We want a situation for him like your dog’s.”

I digested this. “You mean, you want to place him?”

“Yes,” Melissa said. “Baxter’s been living outside the last four years. He’s 5.”

I asked for contact info and pictures, explaining we had sometimes helped place dogs.  

“Maybe you’ll want to try keeping him inside again?”  

She shook her head doubtfully.

My husband had been investigating wirehaired terriers. This seemed providential.

That same night, lightning flashed and rain lashed as thunder reverberated. I thought of a little terrier relegated to endure it alone. Sleep was fitful.

We reluctantly returned home the next morning, knowing Baxter deserved help. 

Was I insane? There was no calm in the inner storm of our family life. Work was intense; more important, my mother was dying.  

In a few days, messages arrived with a picture of Baxter, appearing too thin and in need of a bath. But he was a beautiful animal.

We exchanged texts. She had him groomed, and when I saw the picture of the little guy all spiffed up, my heart sank further. How could she possibly give him up?  

I assured Melissa we would help place him, urging her not to surrender him before we could return. I asked friends if they might be interested in adopting Baxter. No dice.

Meanwhile, my mother was worsening.  

While I was with her, my husband, Don, drove back to Southport to pick up Baxter but was conflicted. “What if this dog is a problem?”

Of course, he has problems, I thought privately.

Days later, Don had a list of offenses: Baxter was having accidents in the house. He was aggressive over toys.

Would he harm easygoing Patch? 

We arranged to have Baxter neutered. Diana Singleton, a trainer, met with us to evaluate him. 

“Don’t leave the two alone for six weeks,” she advised, looking at Patch. “You need to be sure this dog can be trusted.” 

Don was grim about Baxter’s potential. “He’s a jerk,” he pronounced. “He growls at me. Offers to bite me. He chews up all of Patch’s balls. Takes every single stuffed animal outside. He doesn’t obey.”  

What I saw was a dog who had been shoved outside to fend for himself. He feared everything: even a gentle rain caused him to scuttle back through the dog door. Baxter, like me, was overwhelmed. When I hugged him, he stiffened, offering a low, ominous growl, and I fought back tears of frustration.

My mother died within weeks. Baxter had to have absorbed that tumult, possessing exquisite animal sensitivity.

As I see it, Baxter and I are both in recovery.  

Seven months on, Baxter is slowly relaxing. He’s eating, walking and playing with more abandon. His limbs are looser. He offers me occasional licks on the ankle before shyly looking away.

“He’s smart,” says Don. “And is settling down really well as his tension lessens and he understands us. And, we are learning to understand him. He’s a vocal dog, not an angry dog. He loves to lick and chew and hang on to his toys. But,” my husband concedes, “He does not bite. I misread him as a biter.”

He acts more and more like a dog who belongs to someone.  

He belongs to us.

And we are going to be OK.

– Cindy Adams

Stay-At-Home Improvement

Minus social dates, many folks updated their digs
during COVID-19 closures

By Maria Johnson   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

 

 

Every time one door closes during a pandemic, another door opens at a paint store.

For many homeowners, the combination of spare time, bored children and a $1,200 stimulus payout from the feds has led to a serious outbreak of home-and-garden projects.

Several of our readers took the opportunity to zhuzh their surroundings — maybe because things you can tolerate during the normal sprint of life make you go ARRRGHHH! during a lockdown.

But as these readers prove, when life gives us ARRRGHHHs, it’s possible to make them into AHHHHHs!

A Moveable Makeover

“Home is Where We Park It.”

So reads a playful decal on the refrigerator inside the Mercer family’s camper, a 2008 Trail-sport that has transported them to many beautiful places, geographically and emotionally. Deb Mercer, husband Andy, and their three kids pulled the 29-foot trailer on a tour of the United States when Andy retired from Air Force active duty in 2012.

With extra downtime this spring, Deb focused on beautifying the camper’s overwhelmingly brown interior because, as she puts it, “It was ugly when we bought it. Most campers really are.”

Guided by a blog post (“My $500 Camper Remodel That I Did All by Myself,” at proverbs31girl.com), the Mercers spent two months transforming beige blah to farmhouse fresh.

Thanks to gallons of paint and yards of peel-and-stick surfaces (vinyl hardwoods, wallpaper and countertop contact paper) plus “shiplap siding” cut from lightweight floor underlayment, and new upholstery stitched from canvas drop cloths, the kitchen perks in crisp black and white. Ditto the bathroom, now gleaming with vinyl tiles and punctuated by a turquoise cabinet.

The camper no longer appears tuckered out from its travels. Neither do its travelers, who crash on new mattresses and bedding, which means the family can once again let the good times roll.

What the Deck?

You’ve heard of lake life — the kicked-back lifestyle of people who live at water’s edge?

Well, Liz and Greg Pendergrass embody deck life, the al fresco aesthetic of people who regularly walk the planks.

“We bought the house for the deck,” say Liz Pendergrass. “It’s almost the full length of the house.”

Every few years, the couple spends two weekends washing and staining the weathered boards. But COVID-19 — and its captive audience — presented another option.

When grown sons Christopher and Peter came home for little brother John’s drive-through graduation from St. Pius X Catholic School, the Pendergrasses summoned all hands on deck. Then they passed out brushes and rollers.

The weekend after John’s Thursday graduation from 8th grade, the family of five sealed the deal, working as a team to apply a new color of semi-transparent deck stain: natural cedar.

Turned out, it was orange. Really orange.

“My youngest son said, “This is like rolling on macaroni and cheese,” according to Liz, who panicked. Silently.

“It’s kind of like a woman who colors her hair a totally different color, and she looks at it and says, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done?’ Then a couple of days go by, and she says, ‘You know, I kind of like it.’”

Now, Liz loves her hair. Er, deck. It’s so much brighter than before, partly because she bought some cushions for the deck, and son Peter helped to arrange the potted plants differently. Liz especially loves the palms that decorated her church during the Easter season.

To be clear, and to keep Liz from going to “heck” for swiping palms, we should say that Liz works in the office at St. Pius X, and she waited until the plants went into the trash after church’s highest holiday. “That’s when I snatched them — and resurrected them,” she says.

New life for the palms.

New life for the deck.

And no one goes to heck.

 

Beachy Keen

The family that stays (and stays and stays) together, renovates together.

At least that’s true in the home of Annie and Mike Vorys.

“It’s how we bond,” says Annie, O.Henry’s digital content manager.

When the lockdowns snapped into place, she and Mike decided to overhaul three adjoining rooms: foyer, living room and dining room. The project became a family affair with daughter Liv, 8, and son Matt, 7, using a chop saw and nail gun (under Mike’s close supervision) to help make board-and-batten wainscoting, a new side table, two end tables and side-by-side coffee tables.

As a Mother’s Day present, Mike built a round table for the dining room. Annie’s mom scored some white grommet drapes from Goodwill. A repainted chandelier and new can lights illuminated the room’s improvements.

In the living room, Mike crafted two floor-to-ceiling bookcases with interior lighting. Annie livened all three rooms with bright blue paint, cinching the nautical feel of the project. “Our favorite place in the world is Lakeside, Ohio,” Annie says, referring to the resort community on Lake Erie. “Everything is very beachy in the house where we stay.”

Family photos and mementoes adorn the walls: a fly-fishing rod Mike’s dad made; red-and-white Boy Scout signal flags from Annie’s father; a poem penned by Annie’s late sister; and sheet music autographed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer of the hit musical Hamilton, a favorite of Annie and her mom.

From the living room ceiling hangs a mobile of ginkgo leaves by Greensboro sculptor Jay Jones, reminding Annie and Mike of their son Carpenter, who died at birth in 2012. The hospital put ginkgo leaf symbols on the doors of bereaved families as a sign of strength, peace and hope.

“We took things that reminded us of the most important people in our lives and put them up,” Annie says.

 

Backyard Bliss

Around Christmas, architect Steve Johnson drew up plans for several backyard projects that he and his wife, Erin, figured would take a year to complete.

Then came a pandemic, and suddenly the Johnson family was awash in time and children with no after-school plans (read: free labor).

“I looked at my wife and said, ‘Maybe it’s time to teach them how to spread mulch,’ ” says Steve, director of design and construction for Presbyterian Homes, an organization that builds and runs retirement communities.

Steve worked from home and office this spring. Arriving home mid-afternoon to relieve Erin — who was also working from home, overseeing the kids’ online schooling, and chipping away at a doctorate — Steve pulled 15-year-old Emma-Claire and 11-year-old Nolan off their Xbox, TikTok and cell phones and into the yard for a few hours of “sweat equity”.

Together, they created planting beds, tucking in flowers and shrubs plucked from local nurseries and from Erin’s parents’ yard. Steve built a beefy cedar frame for one hammock and draped another sling from frame to tree, creating a hangout duplex.

“My wife and I like to sit out there and talk in the evenings,” he says.

For the kids, he designed and built an elaborate support for a stand-on Swurfer swing. The kids lobbied for a swimming pool — motion denied — but they did score a trampoline with sprinkler attachment atop a cushy mulch pad.

The result was a private playground that the whole family can take credit for. “We’ll sit out there on the back deck, and the kids will be like, ‘You know, I remember the day we put that in,’” says Steve.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. She can be reached at ohenrymaria@gmail.com

O.Henry Ending

The Misunderstood Cicada

Fearsome-looking, the singing cicada is really just a big love bug

By Bill McConnell

 

This is a face only a mother could love.

Or is it?

Bulging red eyes, wide apart atop an alien-looking head. Six hairy legs, long lace-like wings and a pudgy, waspish body. 

Meet the cicada, nature’s predominant singing insect. 

This summer, the state is due for a bumper crop of these noisy, tree dwellers, says Jason Cryan, an entomologist from the the Natural History Museum of Utah.

“In some areas, we could see 10 times more cicadas than normal,” says Cryan. “I think it will be fascinating.”

What’s fascinating to an entomologist is cicadapocalypse. But before hightailing it out of here, consider this: The brood of cicadas emerging from the ground right now has been patiently waiting for  . . . 17 years.

Unlike annual garden-variety cicadas, these are a genus scientists call Magicicada. They live in the eastern half of the United States, and, depending on your point of view, look either like something out of a horror movie or an adorable puppy.

“I think they’re really cute,” says Chris Simon, a professor at the University of Connecticut who has been studying cicadas since 1974. “Their big red eyes . . . the pretty orange wing veins . . . the way their wings catch little slices of light . . . they’ve just got a lot of character.”

Any way you slice it, 17 years is a long time. Almost no other insect lives that long. So what are cicadas doing all that time in their subterranean homes?

Not as much as you might think. They mastered social distancing long before the rest of us. No card games or Friday afternoon happy hours. There the time is spent trying to grow as fat as possible by sipping fluid (xylem) from tree roots.

When their genetic alarm clock rings and ground temps hit 64 degrees, cicadas claw their way 8 inches or so out of the ground, climb the nearest tree to pop out of their brownish exoskeleton.

It’s like The Wizard of Oz when it goes from sepia tone to color. 

“Their wings glisten like glass at first,” Cryan observes. “It’s still amazing every time I see it.”

Fortunately, or unfortunately, people in the Triad are going to see a lot of nature’s little miracle this year. “The treetops may be filled with cicadas,” Simon notes, “but they are harmless to humans and animals.”

Truth is, cicadas, while fearsome-looking, don’t bite, sting, run red lights or get in the express line with 13 items. Unlike locusts or katydids, cicadas don’t devour crops or cause plagues. (We’ve already got one of those, thank you.).

About the worst thing cicadas do is — pee on us. In some places like Singapore, eco-tourists pay for this unique experience called “cicada rain.”

Cicadas singing together can be noisy. Depending on their size and species, they can sound like birds, a flying saucer from a 1950s science fiction movie or someone throwing water into very hot grease.

A large group of cicadas can make as much noise as a car radio turned up full volume.

These lovable habits aside, cicadas are misunderstood. People tend to judge them solely by their appearance. Beauty in the eye of an entomologist or 13-year-old makes moms shriek.  

What cicadas really like is sitting in trees during the summer and singing the day away to impress bug-eyed females — you may be able to hear them now. 

Oh, and procreating.

In fact, that’s the main reason they’re here, confides Cryan. 

“Basically, they’re sex machines,” he offers, in a hushed tone. 

Eat, sing and do the wild thing. Lay a few hundred eggs. Then die. 

While lovable, cicadas aren’t the sharpest crayons in the box. Start your lawnmower or anything with an electric buzz and you may trigger a cicada lovefest.

If a confused cicada mistakes you for its mate, don’t panic. Look it squarely in its compound eyes and give the critter a gentle flick. “Not even in your wildest dreams,” you mutter. 

Chances are, it’ll fly off, dejected, no doubt looking for some motherly love.  OH

Bill McConnell is a freelance writer who still believes in the power of science. You can bug him at mcconnell@carolina.rr.com.

Life’s funny

Set In Stone

Finding solace in the rocky lessons of nature

 

By Maria Johnson

He stopped suddenly on the trail ahead of me.

His eye had snagged something on the forest floor.

“We’d have something to work with here,” he said, nodding toward some mossy rubble. “I see some with good flat sides.”

He stepped through a blanket of dry leaves and stooped to dust off a level stone. This would be the foundation of his cairn, a dry stack of rock.

It didn’t take long for him to find a second stone, an orb the size of a jack-o-lantern, with an L-shaped niche chipped out.

He set the stone gently over one edge of the table rock. It nested snuggly, one hip flaring to the side.

“It’s nice if you can find a little bit of a cantilever,” he said.

Jim Overbey has been stacking rocks for a long time. He messed with them in the creek that ran through his childhood home, the Rolling Roads neighborhood of south Greensboro. After graduating from Ben L. Smith High School — “I’m a Ben L. man,” he says proudly — he packed off to N.C. State, where he became a student of horticulture, a grower of gardens, a man of plants and earth and, underneath it all, rock.

Sometimes, on pretty weekday afternoons, he and his college buddies would drive to Moore’s Wall at Hanging Rock State Park, or to Stone Mountain, to wedge their hands into crevices and pull themselves up rock faces that, in some places, leaned backward, beyond vertical. When the rains came, they scaled down off the big rocks and chilled under the overhangs, where they noodled with smaller rocks.

They stacked stones for fun and for competition — who could make the coolest, tallest, most precariously balanced tower? —  but they never lingered for long because, sooner or later, the rain would wash out the day’s plans, or the sun would pop out, or set, and the Spider-Men would motor back to school, never expecting to see their loose stacks again.

Someone or something would knock them down, of course. But that didn’t stop Jim and his friends from building them during college, and in Jim’s case, for years to come. Whenever he walked the woods, he stacked.


“It’s a form of meditation for him,” says his wife, Mary. “He’s an artist.”

His dusty hands reach back in time. For as long as modern human’s have trod the earth — 300,000 years, give or take a few thousand — we have stacked rock, sometimes crudely, sometimes artfully, often to show the way to a spring, a trail, a property boundary or sacred site. Stonehenge. The faces of Easter Island. The pebbles left on Jewish graves by those who remember. All stones, all signs.

In the last few years, I’ve spotted cairns in the middle of rivers — showing the races most hospitable to kayakers — and on steep glacial mountainsides — indicating the next best step in a field of fractured flagstones.

Though some parks and sanctuaries frown on cairns— and label as vandalism the moving of any natural features — rocky towers have always come as a relief to me, a sign that someone has gone before me, found the way through and cared enough to inspire others.

That’s why I smiled the first time I saw one of Jim Overbey’s cairns. I was walking with a friend deep in the forest. We looked down the fern-studded slope and saw something next to a creek. An animal? A small person?

Close inspection revealed the stone-cold truth: a cairn. We delighted at the sculptural beauty of the stack, which was about 4-feet high. Farther down the trail we saw other rocky arrangements, some of which seemed to defy gravity.

They marked not a trail, but a feeling: a reverence for the balance of nature.

Later, I discovered that Jim had built most of the cairns, and I learned just how much he leans on the wisdom of the woods.

In 2015, his son Tucker, a lover of nature, a graduate of Ragsdale High School and then a 20-year-old student at Appalachian State University, died of a heroin overdose.

To honor his memory, Tucker’s family and friends created A Poet’s Walk, a trail within the Knight Brown Nature Preserve just outside Stokesdale, near Belews Creek Lake.

On the trail, Jim Overbey again expressed himself in stone, building steps through a dry creek and leading up to a handsome varnished wooden bench. His employer, A&A Plants in Browns Summit, where he’s the landscape designer, donated some large stones as way-finders.

One of them, at the trailhead, bears a dedication composed by Tucker’s mom, Mary. She ends with a quote from the poet William Wordsworth: “Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher.”

Recently, I asked Jim to share the lessons inherent in stacking rocks.

First, he said, pick a spot that offers plenty of rocks to work with. Then stay put. Use what’s around you.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Either the rocks will “bite” or they won’t. Spin them around, try different angles. If they don’t jibe, move on and try a different combination. You’ll feel it in your hands when the fit is right.

Whether your stack is shaped like a column, a pyramid or a weathered bolt of lighting, balance is a must.

Quickly, quietly, Jim picked up five nearby stones — each weighing 20 to 30 pounds — and stacked them, on edges, in ways that seemed improbable. They appeared to float, as if suspended on a vertical string.

I started a stack. It was OK. I topped it with a mosaic of hickory nut shells: lipstick on a rock pig.

Then Jim held up a prize: a curved stone that reminded me of a half-eaten slice of watermelon. He offered it to me.

But how could I incorporate it?

Take off the top two rocks, he said.

I did and started playing with the watermelon rock.

This way? Nope.

That way? Nope.

Try standing it on the back of the curve, Jim suggested.

The stones bit.

I stepped back, laughing in amazement.

“Even if I wanted to move this, I don’t think it would work anywhere else,” I said.

Jim agreed. Every stack and every rock within it, made of particles laid down ages ago, fused and cleaved and chipped by forces much greater than us, is unique to its own time and place — ephemeral, beautiful, and profoundly irreplaceable.

The only option is to enjoy it while it lasts.

“It has to stay here,” Jim said. “It’s yours, but it’s not yours.”  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. She can be reached at
ohenrymaria@gmail.com