Home by Design

Cooking for Julia

Cheesy olives and a smoky homage to one of the greats

 

By Cynthia Adams

When the spunky Southern writer Julia Reed died in September, it felt personal.

Reed was a character in her own stories, a real hoot and a holler, as my Mama Patty would have said. Her columns, design books and sassy cookbooks (one title was inspired by her mama’s spiking sangria with a kick of vodka) showed a penchant for storytelling and squint-eyed observations. 

Her New Orleans homes — one on First Street and a post-divorce duplex in the Garden District — were crammed with books, family heirlooms, paintings, antiquities but also found-objects like bird nests and turtle shells. She even called the new pad a “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a habit wealthy Victorians famously kept.

Reed’s memoir, The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story, was considered her best work. It was a love letter to post-Katrina New Orleans. (Reed’s Newsweek piece described a sign that advised NOLA looters: “Don’t Even Try. I am Sleeping Inside with a Big Dog, an Ugly Woman, Two Shotguns and a Claw Hammer.”)

Reed was classy — and wealthy — enough to upholster a pair of antique rattan chinoiserie sofas in hand-dyed silks. She bought vintage beauties from Magazine Street, where some of the South’s finest antiques wind up on offer. Her design sense was kicky and admired. 

She wrote One Man’s Folly about Furlow Gatewood, the gifted antiquarian who has restored several of the most beautiful homes to be found, gathering them all on his compound in Americus, Ga.

Reed not only knew Gatewood but stayed in one of his gorgeous homes, each of which are stuffed full of jaw-dropping treasures. They probably ate cheese straws, Gatewood’s favorite, and drank hard liquor. She no doubt brought her own deviled eggs and cheesy olives, which were touted in surprising places like The New York Times.

Cheesy olives, it was said, are the first party fare to be scarfed down.

The week she died of cancer at age 59, we were seeing two friends for Covid cocktails. It was time to drop my envy of Reed, her cool houses, great writing gigs and friendship with 95-year-old Gatewood, my celebrity crush.

I pored over her top five recipes, which the Gray Lady republished, determining to pay homage to Reed.

Even though her father was a Republican operative who worked for the Bush family, she was always diplomatic and her humor was bipartisan.

Once asked about a pol’s chances during a tony Washington, D.C. book tour, sipping vodka-infused sangria from a blue highball glass, Reed quoted Louisiana’s Edwin Edwards: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” 

The room dissolved in guffaws, because no matter where you stand on party lines, that was a bon mot.

(Actually, it qualified as a sangria-infused wet quip.)

But I digress. Cheesy olives sounded a lot like pigs in a blanket at first reading. Except, the dough, in addition to flour and egg, contains a block of cheddar and a hunk of butter. (And there is no pig.)

This was to be the virgin run of a stand mixer, bought years ago because of the rare color, a Chinese Chippendale green. It looked good on the counter.

Thus, learning why, a dough hook, which this mixer didn’t have, is a thing. Cheesy dough clumped like a primordial life form to the beaters, with gleaming chunks of butter grinning through.

Wrestling the goopy dough from the beaters, I fashioned it around each Spanish olive. The results resembled The Little Prince illustrations.   

I pried them off my fingers onto a cookie tray. The whole shebang required nearly an hour’s labor, the oven preheating most of those slow-moving minutes.

The oven was hot enough to singe off my eyelashes, brows and fine facial hair.   

Next up: Reed’s exemplary pralines.

I substituted light brown sugar in the recipe. Measuring, mixing and anticipating the first taste of those olives — I beavered on with the candy.

The whining mixer was nearly up to the task of folding evaporated milk into butter, pecans and sugar.

I mixed and mixed some more.

In the minutes stolen for a swift bathroom break, smoke had begun to billow from the oven. As in, call the fire station billows.

Turning off the oven I snapped on the oven light; the cheesy olives were pancake flat, bubbling in a screed of oil. That is, what oil wasn’t now pooled in the bottom of the oven.

It was as if I had just laid eight ounces of cheddar cheese and two ounces of butter on the oven’s bottom and hit “incinerate!”

The roiling smoke grew denser. I hesitated a second before opening the oven to grab the pan (rimless, another big mistake) and sprinted outside, our two dogs leaping and trying to get a good look.

After much swearing and flapping of towels and deployment of a floor fan, the kitchen smoke began to clear.

“I have always said that danger — or at least the possibility of it — is a crucial element of any good party,” observed Reed.

I was succeeding on that score.

The pralines would cook stove top, thank God.

I grimly set to melting sugar and copious amounts of butter in a double boiler. Standing over it with a cooking thermometer to gauge the perfect temperature, I couldn’t help but cuss a little. (I’d heard of good cooks who deliberately falsified recipes so nobody could steal their thunder.)

It was suspicious, how much fat burbled out of those disastrous olives, is all I’m saying. Then I noted: There was no mention of a double boiler.

With lined pans waiting, I finally spooned up the praline goo. Being no fool, I knew better than to make candy on a rainy day; it was dry as a bone outside. But — the pralines never achieved the glistening appearance Reed described.

No matter, I scraped the last, suspiciously granular bits off the side of the saucepan and tasted, burning my index finger and tongue. Yep. They were granular alright.

Setting up rapidly, the pralines looked more like coconut stacks from Cracker Barrel.

They did not look like pralines.

Earlier, we had made boiled peanuts, more Southern fare, and in a pique, I decided to make a cold soup.

The cheesy olives were misshapen lumps and the pralines were weird. But the peanuts were heavenly. I plunked them in a silver bowl and served up the whole shebang on good platters. Somewhere in the great beyond, Reed was having a belly laugh.  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine.

The Nature of Things

On Coming Full Circle

A writer and an artist collide in perfect, cosmic time

 

By Ashley Wahl

“Nothing happens by coincidence.”

Oprah might have said that. You may have read it in a Paulo Coelho novel. Cracked open a fortune cookie and found it there. 

In any case, you’ve heard some variation of this quote somewhere.

And then something happens to you — an experience so utterly serendipitous and strange that you wonder if it’s true, and if there isn’t some sort of cosmic force at play; some sleight of hand that gently manipulates collisions in space and time.

This is a story like that. It begins in 2012 when I was 25 years old and had just landed what would be my first cover story for O.Henry.

The magazine had just survived its first year in Greensboro. The cover story was about the Sternberger Artists Center, an Italian palazzo on Summit Avenue that, at the time of its construction circa 1926, was considered to be one of the grandest homes in the city. I interviewed Jeanne Tannenbaum, the great-niece of textile tycoon Sigmund Sternberger, plus a handful of emerging and established artists who rented studios there after the Tannenbaum-Sternberger Foundation donated the house to the United Arts Council of Greensboro in 1972.

I did not interview batik painter Henry E. Sumpter. I tried. But he did not want to be bothered from his work. The story ran in September.

Some of you may know that I relocated from Greensboro to Wilmington in 2013 to help launch O.Henry’s sister magazine, Salt. And in 2016, I moved to the North Carolina mountains, a soul calling that I still can not put into words.

Now, flash forward to September, 2020 — eight years and a slew of adventures after my cover story appeared in print. I’d just landed back at O.Henry to accept my new role as editor when, no kidding, I got an email from Henry E. Sumpter.

The email wasn’t addressed to me. How could Henry have known it was my second day behind the desk? And yet within this letter to the editor, the artist explained that he “politely rejected” the opportunity to be interviewed “some years ago” for many reasons — namely that the time wasn’t right — and said he was finally ready to open his studio door.

“At the time I was spending up to ten years and over 9,000 hours on certain works and did not want to be disturbed,” he wrote. “I now wish I had taken the offer.”

I cannot express what a delight it was to receive this note from Henry E. Sumpter. It felt like a signal from the universe that we were both in the right place at the right time. Or at the very least, it was a superb coincidence.

And so I clicked on the link to his artwork. I gasped. And a week later, I am back at the Sternberger Artists Center, where Henry has rented space for 38 years.

It’s a rainy Friday morning. Henry is outside feeding two of the four feral cats he has named. They are cream colored. Thomas and Tomás, he tells me. His studio space is in the garage.

Inside, large gray wall panels neatly display nearly 20 framed reproductions of his contemporary works, each of which seems to be a colorful, intimate glimpse into the artist’s dreamscape.

“People describe my work as ‘Otherworldly,’” says Henry, who is standing in front of a reproduction of a piece called Salem Treasures. The five subjects, all inspired by real people the artist met and studied in Old Salem, are working with the land, you might even say communicating with it. Just behind them is a circle — Henry calls it a “spyglass” — that contains a barn, a church, three hay bales, a stone walkway, several trees, a row of pole beans, and what looks like ancient buried treasure in plain sight. All of this, plus the 250,000 tiny multicolored dots in the background, was done on a massive swath of fabric using fiber reactive dyes, a small paintbrush and hot bees wax applied with a tjanting (pronounced “chanting”) tool. 

“I don’t know anything about anything,” says the artist, who grew up in Myrtle Beach, SC. “I just let the spirit, or God, what have you, lead me.”

But Henry does know a thing or two about batik, an ancient Indonesian art of wax-resist dyeing that predates written records. He discovered the technique in 1964 when an art professor introduced him to world-renowned batik artist Leo Twiggs (also born in SC). And as Henry said, many of his ideas come from dreams.   

Circles are a reoccurring motif in Henry’s work. And moons. His colors are earthy, joyful, peaceful. Most of his scenes are an amalgam of the places he has known — High Rock Lake, for instance, paired with a stand of trees from Greensboro’s Bryan Boulevard. Or the flamingos that used to visit Myrtle Beach. He tells me he has no interest in painting “pretty” people.

“People are energy,” says the artist. His eyes soften, and there is a peacefulness that becomes almost palpable in the room. “I paint the essence.”

Henry is in his mid-70s with a booming voice to match his hefty build. He loves telling stories, often trailing from one to the next before catching himself. He does not move with particular grace or ease, but when he speaks of his artwork, Henry becomes almost childlike, seemingly free from the limitations of body and mind, at least for the present moment.

He shows me an original batik painting called Mid-Afternoon Orgy, completed in 1971 when he was a Private First Class in the U.S. Army. Despite its suggestive name, the artwork, which measures 30 x 52 inches, is not overtly sexual. There are ten figures dancing beneath three suns. The style was influenced by cave art. Think of the modern depiction of Kokopelli. That’s the feeling: playful and jubilant. 

“This is my most Picassoesque piece,” says Henry. It’s priced at $500,000. Truthfully, if Henry had told me that a collector was on her way to pick it up, I would not have been surprised.

Henry keeps most of his originals upstairs in the home’s former servants’ quarters. 

He shows me more from his “Hidden Treasure” series, including a reproduction of Reseeding the Rainforest.

There are over 300 trees in this painting — “trees behind trees,” Henry points out. There are green trees and purple trees, rows of sacred trees with “curative powers.” Henry’s son, Adrian (now 41), was in fifth grade when the seed for this painting took root. Adrian was studying the Amazon rainforest at school.

“People don’t know what treasures the Earth holds,” says Henry, “They forsake them.”

And as he points out the shadows cast in all directions, something clicks. Inside the mind of the artist, there is more than one source of light, more than one way to see.

I see Henry’s son, Adrian, in his artwork. I see the essence of his wife. I see the places he’s been. I also see a vision for the planet that is filled with hope. Cosmic forces at play, gently manipulating collisions in space and time.

“Every day of my life I see the Earth as being something beautiful and new,” says Henry E. Sumpter. “And it’s getting newer.”  OH

You can visit Henry E. Sumpter’s virtual gallery at
visualdesignsstudio.com.

Contact editor Ashley Wahl at awahl@ohenrymag.com

A Case of Holiday Kismet

For Marc and Mary Powell Young DeLille, High Point’s historic Wilson House was nearly theirs before they saw it

By Cynthia Adams   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

Twelve years ago, Marc and Mary Powell Young DeLille had completed a renovation on Hillcrest Drive in High Point’s Emerywood neighborhood, and the resulting improvements (including a brand new kitchen) were just as they hoped. The DeLilles, experienced renovators themselves, were contented. 

That is, until a remarkable property known as the Lucy and J. Vassie Wilson house, one listed on the National Register of Historic Places, lured them inside for just a peek at its Federal Revival style.

The unforgettable date was December 24, 2008. Mary Powell Young DeLille — whom everyone in High Point knows as Mary Powell — says what happened next was not exactly expected. (Was it simply a stroke of good fortune, or a bit of holiday kismet?) 

“It was Christmas Eve. We were at my mom’s for dinner. She mentioned the house.”

The Wilson House!

Mary Powell and Marc exchanged looks and her Realtor mother, Carol Young, didn’t hesitate a minute. After all, the occupants were no longer there.

Carol said knowingly, “Let me go and get my key to the lock box.” 

The couple rose up from the table, thinking it would be interesting to look — where was the harm? They could pop over and be right back in a tickety-boo — resuming their celebration. 

The Wilson House was one the DeLilles had long admired.

“And, I love to go into homes,” Mary Powell adds. But she also felt that frisson of knowing; her house intuition kicked in. 

Even from the street, this particular house was a seducer. 

The historic Wilson House stood out in its grandness and exceptional features — not to mention the many practical positives. It was situated on a generously sized half-acre corner lot. A separate three-car brick garage with an upstairs three-room apartment (intended for servants’ quarters) was accented with the same eye-catching green tile roof as the one on the main house.

Well . . . A thought flickered through Mary Powell’s mind: the Wilson House was big. 

Face it, she thought. It was a lot of house — as it was over 6,400 square feet. And then another cautionary thought: We really like where we are.

Consider that Mary Powell is interested in historic preservation.

The National Register revealed details about its architectural significance. The two-story brick Wilson House is considered “high style” Federal Revival in design — and what style! — which meant it possessed unique embellishments. These special features include arches over the front windows, with bas-reliefs of garlands and urns. 

The 1926 home had a stately semicircular entrance portico with columns and stylized Corinthian capitals.

The symmetrical design incorporated an open porch with Doric columns on the east side. On the west was a porte-cochère with Doric columns, allowing for access via the side of the house. Over both sides were Chinese Chippendale-style balustrades.

The porte-cochère had since been widened to allow for modern SUVs — versus the slimmer Packards or Pierce Arrow roadsters driven in the Roaring Twenties. 

Carol Young knew the house well, having shown it in the past. Better still? The Federal beauty with a green tile hipped roof had just been reduced in price.

As the DeLilles followed Carol through the double doors it was evident. Here was the stuff that house addicts like the DeLilles live for. The Wilson home was remarkably intact; no calamities had befallen the house, nor unfortunate modifications to its many charms.

Mary Powell grins, recalling that memorable moment on Christmas Eve. 

“We walked in — you know when you find the right house. It spoke to me.”

It was grand but not stiff, with 10.5-foot ceilings that made the spacious house seem enormous. The impressive double doors opened directly to the living room with an original Federal-style mantle and plaster embellishments. 

The plaster walls (in excellent condition) were accented by deep plaster crown moldings and raised box molding that resembled wood. 

“It had a lot of inlaid floors,” Mary Powell noted. They were also immaculate, red oak laid in concentric rectangles. Black walnut and sycamore had been used for a contrasting border. 

French doors on either side of the fireplace opened to the porch. A smaller room on the right was designated as the study on the existing blueprints conveyed with the house.

At the rear of the downstairs was the dining room, which had the original crystal chandelier, complete with the original plaster medallion.  Off the dining room was a small sunporch. There was a breakfast room, with original cabinetry, and also the kitchen with storage and pantry. 

Almost all the original features in the house had remained untouched. This was the sort of property that makes house lovers a bit weak in the knees.

Sobering, cautionary thoughts did percolate for Mary Powell. The kitchen could use updating. So could the baths; albeit there were charming arches over the showers and tubs.

Christmas Eve resumed as the DeLilles left the house. 

Would they tackle a historic renovation this big and grand?

“We thought about it and thought about it. We just had to do this,” says Mary Powell.

“It’s my husband’s baby too,” she smiles. 

In her single years, Mary Powell Young envisioned a future as a sculptor and painter, creating art and attending gallery openings.

That changed soon after she graduated from the College of Charleston with a fine arts degree. That she ended up returning to her High Point hometown, she admits, sort of surprised her. But her family had deeply set Triad roots, given her father’s career as a veterinarian and her mother’s real estate career.

Mary Powell also shared “this house thing” with her mom — meaning she loved houses in an equal opportunity way, especially down-on-their-luck ones. Ones needing love, she says. 

Her mother had an idea right after Mary Powell’s return: They should tackle a fixer-upper. 

Mary Powell’s first project was 1013 Johnson Street near the JH Adams Inn. Known as the Dalton-Bell-Cameron Craftsman Bungalow, it had partially burned in the mid-1990s.

The project turned out so well that her mom suggested she become a contractor.

Mary Powell flirted with the idea of doing it. “But 1013 Johnson Street was my contractor’s course,” she laughs.

“I liked the idea of saving houses,” she adds. However, the reality of becoming and being a contractor — first putting hours into studying, getting a license and then spending long hours handling paperwork, pulling permits and getting projects bids — was unappealing. Instead, she got her Realtor’s license, joining her mother in the business.

Yet the renovation bug had bitten her. Her early success was appealing enough that she kept renovating promising houses. She had worked on six properties when she first met Marc DeLille, who is in commercial real estate. 

The restored Dalton-Bell-Cameron Bungalow remained the DeLilles’ home for 10 years. It was where she initially lived as a single woman undertaking renovation projects, and where she remained after marriage and while beginning a family. 

The couple moved on to other homes, renovating and improving their way through High Point properties.

In 2013, the Dalton-Bell-Cameron Bungalow suffered near devastation after the DeLilles’ had sold it. After a second and far more serious fire the bungalow languished and was nearly razed until six years later, when it was restored yet again thanks to the High Point Preservation Society.

Mary Powell is both a member of the High Point Historic Preservation Commission and the Junior League; the Junior League chose the bungalow as a showhouse. (See the feature story in the November 2019 issue of O. Henry.)

Since meeting and marrying Marc, Mary Powell says they undertook three house renovations together. 

“Someone called me a house Sherpa one time,” she laughs. “The artist in me loves houses.”

Within months of seeing the Wilson House, the DeLilles owned it. In nearly 100 years, the property had only been owned by four people.

Yet it had been well kept. “We did nothing to the living room apart from painting the ceiling,” says Mary Powell. “It said, ‘Make me pretty again!’” She quickly claimed the original library as her office and the sleeping porch for an art studio.

Mary Powell put her art training to good use. Marc erected scaffolding so she could restore the bas-relief stucco garlands on the front exterior.

“Chunks were falling off. I made plaster molds, got Bondo and layered it. All the swags above were gone. I did the relief first then the stucco.”

It was challenging work, but “I had to redo those!” she says, calling the garlands “the signature of the house.”

They expanded the master bedroom’s ensuite bathroom and closets, preserving the arch over the shower. The master bedroom retains the original fireplace, one of two in the house.

“I’m an immediate gratification kind of person,” she laughs. “As an artist, I love making something pretty again, something screaming for help.”

By example, Mary Powell kneels on the sunporch floor. She excavated layers of old tile to expose a penny tile mosaic beneath in excellent condition.

The kitchen was redone just last summer. The DeLilles retained the original buffets and pantry and copied the kitchen’s floor — a pattern of walnut inlay in red oak — carefully replicating it in the new portion of the kitchen. Fortunately, they owned the original blueprints, so it was simple to identify load-bearing walls and the home’s plumbing and electrical systems.

With four bedrooms and three and one-half baths, the house is roomy and accommodating. Architectural Digest once called the house a “combination of high-classical design and funky iconoclasm.”

As landscapers buzzed around the property in autumn, Mary Powell revealed their latest “COVID project,” which involved reviving an outdoor lion’s head fountain. “We Realtors hear that term all the time — everybody had a COVID project this year. People are doing a lot of decorating.”

The fountain, now working again, is the prime feature of the original sunken garden and terrace behind the garage, which also appears on the 1926 blueprints.

With new landscaping and a new area for the family to entertain outdoors, the garden space is serenely private.

“We bought chairs from the Amish Trading Company for the garden,” Mary Powell says, “but had to wait given the demand for outdoor seating during the pandemic — when everyone wants to move gatherings outdoors.”

As a friend says, you can find the DeLilles working on their property almost any weekend. The artist within admits the work isn’t completely done.

“I would love to update the boys’ bath and the garage apartment,” Mary Powell adds.

The large floored attic, where a former owner’s children used to roller skate, is still another project. These will hold the interest of an addicted do-it-yourselfer, a trait the couple share.

“The Lucy and J. Vassie Wilson House ranks among the finest, and retains excellent integrity,” reads the National Register application. In making the house their own, it has certainly become pretty again. And the DeLilles’ most successful project — “Yet,” adds Mary Powell with a knowing smile.  OH

Wandering Billy

A Time to be Blunt

Filmmaker Maurice Hicks wishes he didn’t have to talk about it, but he does and so he will

 

By Billy Eye

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

— Alice Walker

I spent an afternoon with filmmaker Maurice Hicks over lunch at Natty Greene’s recently. We talked about A Letter to My Son, a short film he made in 2015 that has become an unexpected, though not entirely welcome, cultural touchstone due to recent events.

A Letter to My Son is a heart-wrenching, unflinching monologue focusing on an African American man as he speaks to the son he may or may not have in the future, conflicted as to whether it would be appropriate to usher a child into an imperfect society where all too often, it seems, black lives don’t matter.

There are so many resonant moments packed into this emotionally drenching 10-minute soliloquy, like this one: “I’m afraid that every time you go out on a Friday night, I’ll quietly say, ‘Lord, please bring him home safe.’ That with every urgent news flash bulletin on the TV I’m hoping, I’m hoping that’s not my son laying dead in the streets. That’s what continually swirls through my head. You see, I’m afraid that now . . . I’m afraid to have you. Afraid to bring you into a world that damn sure doesn’t feel like it’s welcoming you.”

“I made it as a cathartic exercise,” Maurice says. “To kind of work through my frustrations and some of my concerns about the way the world was headed socially and how African Americans, and particularly African American men, were being treated.” The “letter” was a way for the filmmaker to process confounding, self-perpetuating, systemic injustices. “So, full disclosure, one night I got tipsy on Crown Royal and was just bearing my soul on the page. I wrote it in two hours.”

Maurice turned to writing partners and friends he trusts for honest feedback before committing to filming what could be seen as a contentious script.

“I suggest to anyone who writes something that they feel is true to themselves — that they want to be true to themselves — that they should have people they can bounce ideas off of who will be honest with you about how something could potentially be perceived,” he says. “I spoke to Dave Norris, the producer of the film, and asked, ‘Can some of these statements fly? Because I’m being particularly blunt in the film.’ And he was like, ‘Do you believe in them? Are they true?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely, they’re all true. These are all instances that happen on a regular basis and they’re well documented.’ And Dave said, ‘Go for it.’”

The film stars Cranston Johnson, at the time a relatively unknown actor who’s since been tapped for a number of prominent motion picture and network TV roles including Detective Hanson on Hap and Leonard for SundanceTV and Luke Taylor on Filthy Rich, a FOX series that premiered this fall. “I knew that Cranston could easily breathe the humanity into the film that it sorely needed because I feel like many groups of people, I’m not going to name names — but many groups of people are almost immune to black anger. Black rage does nothing for them.”

Instead, Maurice attacked it from a different perspective. “When you’re coming from a place of vulnerability and fear,” he says, “it’s a softer approach and I feel like that can penetrate hearts much easier than just this constant anger. Too many people have seen that. And while I think it’s more than valid, some people are tired of it and it’s not working for them.”

Filming took place at locations all around downtown Greensboro over two shorter-than-expected days. “It was like magic when we did it,” Maurice says of directing his 10-page script. “It’s literally just a block of text for ten pages. From start to finish, Cranston did the entire thing in one take. All the subsequent takes were just for coverage. I really wanted to focus on Cranston’s performance.” What emerges is an Oscar-worthy achievement.

A Letter to My Son was selected for more than 20 film festivals in 2015 including RiverRun International, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the Southeast. Cranston Johnson picked up a few awards including Best Actor in a Short at Rahway International Film Festival that year. “I won an audience award a couple places,” Maurice says. “I lost track because, while those awards are all important, I didn’t do it for that.”

Longleaf Film Festival screened the short in 2015. This year they’ve invited back a cadre of filmmakers to host an event called FilmExchange featuring stories revolving around the African American experience, police brutality, discrimination and inequity in America. “They asked me to be a part of it and I was completely on it,” Maurice says.

Still, Maurice would like nothing more than for this film to be totally irrelevant — a moment lost to the past. He describes the recent attention to A Letter to My Son as a bittersweet reality. “It was my hope as a writer, as an African American man, that one by one these issues would be eliminated so that the short would become invalid. It would be like, ‘Oh, wow. That was a really unfortunate place that we were in all those years ago, but I’m so happy that’s not the case today.’” But it has not come to pass.

“I hate to say this, but every time an African American is killed under suspect circumstances, my phone rings off the hook, emails blow up. So it’s bittersweet because I love talking about it and bringing attention to the situation, but at the same time it’s another painful reminder that there is truth from this story, that it is valid, that the dialogue is worthy of conversation.”

Maurice Hicks insists he’ll always answer the phone, respond to those emails, show up at the festivals when asked but, “I can’t wait for the day that I don’t need to show this anymore, don’t need to talk about this again. We’re not there yet, so I’ll still be there every single time they ask me to run my mouth.”  OH

Billy Eye is O.G. — Original Greensboro.

Food for Thought

Savoring What’s Here

Like sunlight in the quiet corners and memories of Thanksgivings past

 

By Bridgette A. Lacy

As Thanksgiving approaches, I am reminded of the holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. Two angels are talking about the fictional George Bailey, a do-gooder businessman almost swindled by a competitor but saved by his community.

One angel asks what’s wrong with George. “Is he sick?”

The other responds, “No, worse. He’s discouraged.”

This has been a disheartening year.

I live alone and work from home but the coronavirus pandemic has heightened my isolation. I miss the sisterhood of my yoga classes. Going to the grocery store has become a crazy game show where you race up and down the aisles to see how fast you can get the items on your list and get out of the store. I miss the pampering of getting my hair washed, cut and styled. Not to mention pedicures.

The social isolation of not being able to hug a friend is depressing. I miss my monthly lunch outings with friends or going to hear an author reading at the local bookstore. I worry about my mother, who suffers from pre-existing health conditions. I grieve the deaths of public servants like Congressman John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who made it their life’s work to leave the world better than they found it.

More than ever, we really need to gather around a table, hold hands and remember what we have to be thankful for. But the growing threat of the continuing spread of the coronavirus along with the flu makes us rethink how we’re going to celebrate the big feast.

The pandemic has forced me to prioritize the essentials: faith, family and friends. And of course, food.

I find myself calling on my ancestors for strength, thinking about my maternal grandparents who lived through the Great Depression and learned to depend on each other. It was also their home where I spent some of my most memorable Thanksgivings.

I am missing my grandmother, who would often be waiting on the front porch to greet us on our visits. During the warm months, she would be sitting in the green porch chair and as our station wagon pulled in front of the house, she would dance a jig to greet us.

My grandfather, whom I affectionately named Papa, prepared for our arrival with turkey, country ham, sweet potatoes and his homemade yeast rolls and coconut pies. He also stocked up on beaucoup candy and nuts for our collective sweet tooth.

I savored the time with my extended family during those luxurious meals, when aunts, uncles, cousins, as well as my parents sat at the broad square table set with my grandparents’ Noritake china with delicate pink-and-blue flowers filled to their platinum-trimmed rim. Thanksgiving was the ultimate Sunday dinner, where our bodies and spirits were nourished with good food and family stories illustrating survival and making do.

This holiday season will look different for many of us. Once again, I am reminded that Thanksgiving is about appreciating what you have, not what you have lost.

My friend, Mike, blessed me all summer with zucchini, summer squash, tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplant from his garden, along with jars of homemade preserves, jellies and pasta sauce. I relished creating mouthwatering salads and vegetable dishes from his bounty shared with me.

Writing buddy Frances sent me two beautiful purple batik face masks I wear all the time. We talk for an hour at least once a week about whatever new series we are watching on Netflix, like Bloodline or The Great British Baking Show. We are craving interesting storylines or pastry and bread making.

At the beginning of the pandemic, former co-worker, Lisa, met me at the farmers’ market and gave me a hundred-dollar bill to help me get by until paychecks started flowing again. We chat every couple of weeks, commiserating about our new normal and updates on finding necessities such as toilet paper and paper towels.

Like many of you, I’ve had to find new ways to share in the communal act of breaking bread and celebrating life. But in the isolation and quiet, I am hearing the birds chirp in the morning, I am taking the time to pull out my good china and sip on a cup of peppermint tea. I linger as I take in the sunlight when it hits the kitchen corner with the small bouquet of yellow-and-orange gerber daisies and roses.

This year has made me more mindful of how I spend my time. It has reminded me that our mortality is not limitless. It truly is a wonderful life. I want to use mine wisely and with great appreciation.  OH

Bridgette A. Lacy is the author of Sunday Dinner, a part of the Savor the South series by UNC Press and a finalist for the 2016 Pat Conroy Cookbook Prize. She’s an award-winning journalist with a public love affair with food and culture.

Homemade with Love

Photographs by Bert VanderVeen

Something about homemade jams, pickles and syrups feels sacred and primal. As if linking us to a time when we worked with the Earth and grew our own food and baked our bread from scratch. Certainly they suggest a slower pace of life, one perhaps many of us glimpsed during stay-at-home mandates this year. And like anything homemade with wholesome simplicity and the freshest ingredients available, they always, always taste better than store-bought. We found four local home goods makers who are keeping the art of DIY alive and well, either for practicality or, more often, the simple joy of it. 

Mary’s Pretty Good Jams

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

By Billy Ingram

“What I’ve discovered is, if you make jam the same day that you pick the berries, it yields the best flavor. So that’s what I do,” says Mary Perko who, for over 40 years, has been making jams and other confectionaries the way Great-Grandmother did. Mary’s Pretty Good Jams — which include, to name a few, strawberry, black & blueberry and spicy peach flavors — are the finest nectarous spreads money can’t buy. Mary gives her flavorful fruit preserves away.

Six years ago her husband Dana was transferred from Alabama, where they’d lived for 20 years, to Greensboro. “I struggled a bit with homesickness,” Mary says. “What grounds me is doing what I did in Alabama, making jams, cooking, baking and then giving it all away.”

From the very beginning, ingredients have been locally sourced. “I’ve been fortunate to find strawberry fields in Kernersville along with blackberries, blueberries and peaches at my favorite of favorites, Blueberry Thrill Farm in Gibsonville.” Mary calls venturing out to the farm her counseling session. “Picking for me has been somewhat of a ‘zen’ experience. It’s quiet, there are no cell phones, you’ve got the birds chirping, blue skies and all of this bountiful fruit that is just absolutely amazing. I can pick ten gallons of berries in an hour or so.”

Recently she’s added sweet and tangy chow chow to her repertoire with yellow squash, zucchini, onions and jalapeños grown by nearby Smith Farm, Ingram’s Farm and Parsons Farm. “I am also part of the CSA program at Guilford College. That’s been my source for peppers.”

Mary’s Pretty Good Jams has developed quite a following over the decades. Last year over 300 Mason jars of ambrosial delight made their way around the U.S.A. “This year I’m about at that level now and it’s not even Christmas,” she said in October. “The recipients are friends back in Alabama and around the country, neighbors, former neighbors and my coworkers.” For Mary, there is no greater reward than seeing others enjoying fruits of her efforts. “It’s just something I enjoy doing,” she says. “Some days I think, ‘Should I start selling these at the Farmers’ Market?’ And I might, but I’m not sure how many people would spend six bucks for a jar of jam.”

Not everyone gets the golden ticket. Should you discover one of Mary’s Pretty Good Jams under the tree, Santa obviously thinks you’ve been very good this year.

 

Elderberry Magic

Helping people heal with Syrup and More

By Jim Dodson

Jennifer Zullo is a woman with a passion for helping people, as evidenced by the pleasure she derives from her two jobs.

Her day job is coaching college students with learning differences at Guilford College, High Point University and Greensboro College, using her years of training and work for social services and the high court system of the British Government to improve the lives of young people facing challenges.

“It’s very rewarding work,” Zullo confirms, “helping young people unlock their potential and find their way through college. But my most fun job is what I do almost every Monday.”

That’s when this energetic mother of two young sons spends five or six hours in the community shared-use kitchen on Clifton Road. As part of the Out of the Garden Project, the Triad’s most successful nonprofit feeding program, she makes and bottles her homemade Syrup and More Elderberry Syrup, a natural remedy for colds, flu and general nutritional health that has developed a passionate following of its own over the past five years.

The idea was born in her own home kitchen in Greensboro when she decided to find a natural way to improve the immune systems of her own young sons, Aaron and Abram. “I’d been reading about the benefits of organic elderberry syrup and had a friend in Florida who made her own. That inspired me to do my research and start working on recipes of my own.”

The one she eventually developed is a delicious syrup that combines both organic American and European-grown elderberries with locally sourced raw honey, rose hips, hibiscus and a variety of spices well known for their healing properties like clove, ginger and cinnamon. Elderberries have long been considered a powerhouse boost to a healthy immune system, slam full of vitamins A and C plus high levels of iron, a traditional winter remedy for colds, flu and allergies.

Her next step was to go through the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market’s innovative Kitchen Connects GSO program and gain certification with the Department of Agriculture.

Her mission to produce a delicious high-quality syrup that was also priced below other elderberry products on the retail market was compatible with Out of the Garden’s work to ease food poverty across the region.

“The reason I do that is because I don’t think we should have to lobby for health care when we already pay a fortune for it,” she says, pointing out that her organic vendors honor this noble goal by giving her a discount on everything from elderberries to honey, thus keeping the retail price down.

“I love making this syrup, and I love the idea of helping people,” she adds. “I would probably give it away if I could.” She produces anywhere from 50 to 100-plus bottles of elderberry syrup per week and sells every bottle she makes.

With demand on the rise and winter on the doorstep, you can find Jennifer Zullo’s marvelous elderberry syrup at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, All Pets Considered, Sunset Market Gardens in Reidsville, Black Dog Home & Café in Jamestown, Local Roots Coffee Bar in Kernersville, Pleasant Garden Country Market and The Budding Artichoke in High Point.

For more information and a complete list of locations, visit www.syrupandmore.com.

 

Pincha DryRub

Because it’s good on everything 

By Ashley Wahl

Perhaps this isn’t the first origin story to have started inside of a Virginia Tech frat house in the 1970s, but for Kernersville resident Mark Stoehr, it’s certainly the most memorable. 

Stoehr, whose name is pronounced like “grocery store” (insert his slight Southern drawl), recalls sharing a house with his fraternity brothers, cooking supper and cleaning the dishes once a week.

“I kept pulling down all the spices I used for making hamburgers or whatever I was cooking, and one of my brothers finally said, ‘Why don’t you save yourself some trouble and mix them all together?’”

Thus, Pincha DryRub was born.

Of course the recipe has evolved since Stoehr’s college days, fine-tuned years later when he started cooking whole hogs. Now he’s got his dry rub down to a science: Herbs (sage, sweet basil, rosemary, cilantro, dill weed, marjoram and thyme), spices (paprika, cayenne, chili powder and black pepper) and vegetables (ground celery, granulated onion and green bell pepper), plus ginger, turmeric, garlic powder, mustard seed, sunflower oil, sugar and salt.

The label suggests using Pincha for meat, stew and sauces, but Stoehr says you can rub it on anything and everything you cook, which he does.

It’s not too hot, but heat isn’t the point. A good dry rub should enhance the natural flavor of the meat, not distract from it.

Throughout his 33-year career as a product engineer for Analog Devices Inc., Stoehr designed computer chips and their test systems. Pincha DryRub was a side hustle, more a labor of love than necessity. But the demand was there. Mostly he sold it to his colleagues.

Three years ago, following his retirement from Analog Devices, Stoehr turned all of his attention toward Pincha. He wanted his rub in stores, and so he first pitched it to the owner of Musten & Crutchfield Food Market in Kernersville, where he frequently shops.

“He didn’t have anything like it,” says Stoehr, “and so he bought a case of it. Now he usually buys a couple cases a month.”

Pincha DryRub is currently available at over 20 locations in North Carolina and Virginia, including shops in Kernersville, Colfax, Browns Summit, High Point, Winston-Salem and Greensboro. He sells the largest volume to The Extra Ingredient at Friendly Shopping Center and Gourmet Pantry in Blacksburg, Va., not far from the old frat house where it all started.

He convinces stores to carry his rub by doing what he’s done since college: He cooks for people. Usually chicken or hamburger. Because when you experience Pincha the way it’s meant to be experienced, says Stoehr, it sells itself.

And for the vegetarian?

“It’s great on vegetables,” he says.

Take an onion, he suggests. Scoop out the middle. Add a bouillon cube (obviously vegetable broth, although that’s not what Stoehr would use), butter and a pinch of Pincha.

“Wrap it up in foil and cook it for an hour,” says Stoehr.

In other words, let the dry rub speak for itself.

Pincha DryRub is available at The Extra Ingredient in Friendly Shopping Center, Gate City Butcher Shop, Town & Country Meat and Produce, and Al Aqsa Meat Market in Greensboro. For a complete list of locations and more information, visit pinchadryrub.com.

Cookie Gurlie

Pure joy — and ingredients — in every bite

By Ashley Wahl

It’s impossible not to smile when you see Cheryl Pressley at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market on Saturday mornings — and not just because she’s the Cookie Gurlie. It’s the joy in her eyes. The glow of a woman who is here doing what she loves.

Cheryl Pressley just might have been put on this planet to bake gourmet cookies.

Gourmet cookies, folks.

Her trademark slogan — A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand — is the gentle nudge one just might need to hear when trying to choose between the Ginger & Mo, for instance, and the Alfajore (that’s Latin American shortbread filled with homemade dulce de leche).

You can’t argue with that.

And given that her ingredients are the freshest and purest she can find — we’re talking unrefined pure cane sugar, spices from a local vendor, eggs and butter from local farms and, when in season, fresh berries and figs grown right here in Greensboro — you’re going to want that second cookie.

If Pressley had to pick just two of her gourmet creations forevermore (luckily she doesn’t, but she kindly played along), she would have a Chocolate Dippity Doo!! in one hand, a Not Yo’ Momma’s Chocolate Chip in the other. 

All the best cookies have stories.

Why chocolate chip?

“When I was a kid, probably like most kids, that was the first cookie that I attempted to bake.”

She had seen what Wally Amos, as in Famous Amos, was doing and thought: If he can make cookies, then I can too. 

Her family said hers were better.

“But, you know, they love me,” quips Cheryl.

As for the Chocolate Dippity Doo!!, a customer favorite studded with dark chocolate chunks, toffee and walnuts, dipped in dark chocolate and “finished with a sprinkle of Mediterranean sea salt,” this was the cookie that awakened Cookie Gurlie as we know her.

One of Pressley’s relatives had recently undergone chemotherapy and experienced what’s called taste changes.

“I was trying to think of a flavor combination that would excite her taste buds,” recalls Pressley. She made what was essentially a Chocolate Dippity Doo, but something was missing. Then she remembered her grandma’s advice: You always have to have a little salt with your sweet.

“The salt really balanced the sweetness,” says Pressley.

And that’s when she added the double exclamation points to the name, which you can hear in her voice.   

Baking cookies for her cousin-in-law allowed Cheryl to play with wild flavor combos. She shared her creations with friends and family, who gave her feedback. She fine-tuned her recipes.

When her cousin-in-law died six years ago, Pressley thought her cookie adventures were over. But then something unexpected happened. She started getting calls from people requesting cookie orders. Like, lots of calls.

Cookie Gurlie became a business in what felt like the blink of her sparkling brown eyes.

Cheryl now bakes up to one thousand cookies a week. She says the best part of her business is the connections she makes with her customers.

For many, her cookies unlock childhood memories.

“People share their stories with me,” she says.

As the holiday season nears, you can expect to find year-round Cookie Gurlie favorites like Chocolate Dippity Doo!! and Ginger & Mo (made with black strap molasses and topped with black and white cracklin’ sugar). But save room for her ineffable sweet-potato cheesecake — it’s not a cookie, but nobody says a balanced diet excludes cake.  OH

Find Cookie Gurlie at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville St., Greensboro, every Saturday from 7–11 a.m. or online at www.cookiegurlie.com.

November 2020 Almanac

By Ashley Wahl

November is the sculptor and the stone — ever chiseling away, ever clarifying what has always been, gently unveiling the mystery.

Near-bare branches reveal ash-gray skies, crisp silhouettes in all directions and a panorama so clear you wonder how you never noticed what you’ve never noticed.

The veil is thin. Like trees with lungs, deer stand silent, eyes wide, ears spread like radio antennae. There is nothing and nowhere to hide. Even the last of the leaves have let go — not yet of their branches but of their need for sunlight. No more churning out chlorophyll. No more illusion of green. Only dappled yellow and mottled orange, the brilliant scarlet truth.

November is the last of the apples, zucchini bread warm from the oven and the cold sting of autumn in your eyes and bones.

In a flash, an earful of waxwing ornament the tender branches of the dogwood, pass its red berries from bill to bill like children sharing candies. You heard them before you saw them. And like a dream, the birds have vanished as suddenly as they arrived, the berries gone with them.

November guides you inward.

You are standing in the kitchen now, cradling a hot beverage until your face and fingers thaw. It doesn’t happen all at once, this softening. But sure as the final leaves descend, the grace of the season will become clear: Things fall away to reveal what matters most. And with all this space — this bare-branched view of the brilliant scarlet truth — there is gratitude.

You give thanks for what is here now, the cold sting of aliveness and the warmth within the mystery.

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Turnip Eater

It’s turnip season, and if that doesn’t thrill you from tongue to root, consider the words of Pliny the Elder, who maintained that the turnip “should be spoken of immediately after corn, or the bean, at all events; for next to these two productions, there is no plant that is of more extensive use.”

In Roman times, the globular roots were hurled at unpopular public figures much in the way disappointed groundlings chucked rotting fruit at Shakespeare’s duds.

There are more practical uses, of course.

During World War I, bread and potato shortages gave birth to the “Turnip Winter” of 1916–1917. German civilians subsisted on them. And in World War II, when biscuits and mutton were scarce, guess what? The turnip was there, best in savory Lord Woolton pie, named for the Minister of Food who popularized the dish in 1940.

Turnips are low in carbs and packed with nutrients.

Roast them in butter. Mash them with sage. Pan-fry their greens with sweet onions and garlic, balancing the bitter with brown sugar, salt and apple cider vinegar.

In 2018, Tasmanian farmer Roger Bignell accidentally grew a world record-breaking turnip that weighed a whopping 18.36 kilograms (that’s over 40 pounds). Imagine unearthing that sucker, a root the size of a border collie! Not so easy to hurl.

If Charles Dickens used the word “turnip” in a novel, he was likely referring to a country bumpkin. But it’s a gift to be simple, and when life gives you turnips, you might just get creative with them.

Quiet Time

The full Beaver Moon rises on Monday, November 30. It’s time now.

The beaver retreats to its lodge, the squirrel to its drey. The bumblebee burrows underground, alone, dreaming of honey and clover.

The creatures lead the way, but we, too, turn inward.

Warm wishes and good health to you and yours this holiday season. May your hearts and cupboards be full.  OH

O.Henry Ending

Don’t Forget to Write

For our family, the mailman was more than just a welcome sight — he was a lifeline

By Ruth Moose

As a child during World War II, I lived with my grandparents on a farm near Cottonville in Stanly County, North Carolina. With gas rationing, there was no traffic and so quiet we could hear the mailman long before we could see the cloud of dust his car made on the unpaved road. In a world turned upside down and torn apart, mail was the only thing we could count on.

We lived for the mail. It meant the world to us. We had the radio and a weekly newspaper, also delivered by the mailman. But letters told us the people we loved were safe.  At least for the time being.  My grandparents’ four children were in four corners of the world: my father stationed in France; my Uncle Tom a navigator with the Army Air Corps in London; my Aunt Pearl, an Army nurse, was with MacArthur’s troops in the Philippines; and my Uncle Edgar, who had just graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a masters in physics was in Washington, D.C., and alternately, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Each of them wrote a letter home every week. You could depend on it.  And my grandparents wrote back.

When two weeks went by without a letter from her daughter, my grandmother was more than worried, fearing the worst. She sent inquiries. Discovered my aunt was in this country, hospitalized with a mental and physical breakdown. But she was alive and recovered.

The mail not only brought letters each week but also a brand new, fresh copy of my grandmother’s favorite reading, The Saturday Evening Post. That was her recreation, her relaxation, her reward at the end of each long, worried day. On special occasions the mailman might bring a box of Whitman’s Sampler, picked up from a PX somewhere I’m sure. We rationed a single chocolate a day as long as it lasted.

The mailman also brought books! My aunt in D.C. was a librarian and regularly mailed me books, books that were read aloud to me until I taught myself to read. Poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Adventures of Peter Rabbit and others. Books were magic doors to a larger world and gave me a lifelong love of the printed word, of learning, of no greater pleasure than reading.

When the war was over, they all came home, wounded in body, mind and spirit, but thankfully alive. They continued the weekly letters home and to each other the rest of their lives.

After my grandfather died, the farm was sold and my grandmother lived three months at a time with her four children: my aunt a school nurse in New Jersey; my uncle on the faculty at N.C. State in Raleigh; Uncle Edgar teaching at Georgia State; and my family in Albemarle. Always letters back and forth, specialty cards for all the occasions. Cards to be kept and displayed on mantels and dressers. Cards to be re-enjoyed for days and weeks following. Not the same as today’s emails, a blink here and gone forever. I remember getting an e-condolence card after my husband’s death and crying in frustration. If the sender really wanted to send some sympathy, they could have bought a card, or written a note, signed, addressed, stamped and mailed it. An e-condolence was a quick click and no more thought than that. Obligation over.

Sadly none of the old letters survived. Tossed in the purging of estates after a death; nieces, nephews, cousins, grandchildren who saw them as only pieces of paper, not family history.

During the pandemic, I’ve being purging files, boxes from storage and attics. Deep in one box I was amazed to find my letters to my husband, who was then my boyfriend during our four college years. He had somehow, somewhere, kept them and they had survived many moves, packing and unpacking. Don’t tell me emails could do that. Not in a million years. Yellowed and with three-cent stamps, the letters tell the story of a summer romance that lasted over 50 years. I’ve been reading, alternately laughing and crying. We were so young.  So 1950s crazy and scared. The question is: Will my sons want these letters? My grandchildren? I can only hope.  OH

Ruth Moose taught Introduction to Writing Short Fiction at UNC-Chapel Hill for 15 years. Her students have since published New York Times Bestsellers and are getting Netflixed. She recently returned to her roots in the Uwharrie Mountains. 

Simple Life

They Only Come out at Night

by Jim Dodson

 

They came out of the darkness the other night, devouring everything in their path.

I simply opened the front door to feed the cat his supper and there they were, maybe forty or fifty strong, creeping ever closer, waving their little doo-dad tentacles. 

No, it wasn’t the Walking Dead, seriously early Trick-or-treaters or even yet another pesky campaign poll worker getting a last-minute word in before the presidential election. 

It was, in fact, Helix Aspersa, better known as the common American brown snail, a veritable army of ravenous garden slugs on the move. There must have been a dozen already tooling around our front porch, sluggishly speaking, with maybe 30 or 40 more scaling the porch steps while a Seal Team Six of snails ruthlessly swarmed our innocent Jack-o-lantern. 

Rufus the cat looked strangely oblivious to this mayhem, I should add, waiting calmly by his outdoor bowl which, I hasten to mention, was half full of snails finishing up his evening leftovers. 

I quickly shut the door, trying to decide what to do, wondering if our cat had begun herding homeless snails in his free time. It’s not every day one’s home, family and holiday decorations fall brazenly under siege by common garden slugs.

Following her long day at work, my bride was 20 feet away in the kitchen calmly listening to relaxing New Age piano stylings and making adorable ghost cookies for her staff and to mail our grown-up children who can explain the theory of relativity but never learned to check a bank balance or bake. 

“What’s, up?” she casually wondered, noticing my suddenly pale countenance. “You look as if you’ve seen a real ghost.”

“Remember the snake?”

She shuddered. “Thank God I wasn’t here to see the snake!”

Earlier in the week, while she was off at a conference sorting out the state of higher education, I blithely opened the kitchen cabinet to fetch my morning Quaker Oats and discovered a small, brown snake with an exotically banded black head curled up gazing curiously at me, more or less at eye level. He or she looked almost as surprised to see me as I was to see he or she. 

What does one do when one finds an exotic snake with designs on one’s preferred oatmeal?

I calmly put the small snake in a large juice glass and carried it upstairs to my computer to see if it might be the rare Black-headed Amazonian Fruit Tree Snake that, if bitten by it, gives victims hallucinations in which one appears to be on tropical vacation with a Hollywood movie starlet. Victims are frequently known to awaken feverishly calling out a young and fetching Kim Bassinger’s name, pre-Alex Baldwin, but in this case there was no such luck. It was just something called a Southeastern Crowned Brown Snake, a small and harmless little dude with a big name that likes to eat bugs and probably decided to come in from the cold and see what bugs we had on offer. 

My wife’s response to news of a snake in our kitchen cabinet was immediate and quite emphatic, even though I pointed out that I carried it out to a nice rotten log in the adjacent woods and sent it on its way. 

“Eew, eew, eeeewwwww,” she said, more or less direct quote. 

“Did the snake come back?” she demanded to know now, setting aside her cookie cutters. 

“Nope. But we have other visitors from the wild,” I was forced to tell her. “I think Rufus may be inviting them home. By my count, at least 60 or 70 are out there. Come see for yourself. Prepare yourself for a shock.”

She poked her head anxiously out the door and her floury hands flew to her mouth reminiscent of Tuesday Weld in Psycho. Come to think of it, maybe it was Janet Leigh who actually starred in Psycho, though whoever it was she was as crazy with fear as Kim Bassinger was after years of marriage to Alex Baldwin. 

“Eew, eew, eeeewww!” wife exclaimed. “What should we do with them? No trick or treaters will get near our porch with 500 garden slugs on it.”

I quickly looked up garden snails and discovered that in many countries the common terrestrial gastropod mollusk – which is in the same family as abalone and whelks – are regarded as a culinary delicacy. The Helix pomatia, in fact, is the famous garden snail favored by millions of French diners, an actual cousin of the very slugs devouring our Jack-o-lantern. 

“Maybe we could eat them,” I suggested, wondering if perhaps this was what Rufus had in mind when he invited them home. “We could harvest and deep fry them and serve Southern-style escargot to our friends this weekend.”

Another possibility related to snail mucous, I added, which has been shown to cure everything from acne to gunshot wounds. Moreover, in certain places in rural Italy, live garden snails are swallowed whole as a remedy for ulcers – which would make a decent Halloween movie if nothing else.

This idea – and the one that preceded it – got about as much traction as a slug on roller skates, I’m afraid.

“I don’t care what we could do with them,” she protested. “Just make them go away the way you did the snake. Just look at our poor pumpkin!”

She was sadly correct, of course. Slugs eat everything organic in their paths, leaving behind only a silvery sheen once their mucous trails dry. In ancient times, according to Pliny the Younger, seers read the silvery residue for accurate clues of coming plagues and social upheaval. I’ll confess I wondered if slug mucous might actually predict who would win the presidential election, which seemed at least as accurate as most polls in swing states.

Okay, in the interest of not frightening the children, a brief pause here for some much-needed levity: the world’s only known Halloween joke actually involving a garden slug! Fully appropriate for all ages!

So this old guy who hates everything about Halloween – the annoyingly cute kids, the absurdly over-priced candy, the over-bearing parents who roam the neighborhood in chatty packs armed with flashlights and hip-flasks – hears his doorbell and opens the door to find a tiny princess holding out her pumpkin candy bucket.

“Trick or treat!” the princess chirps sweetly. 

The old guy grumbles and gives the child a quarter, slamming the door, hoping that’s the end of it.

A few moments later, though, the bell rings again.

This time he finds a small garden slug standing there holding out its own cute candy bucket.

“Trick or treat,” says the garden slug.

“Are you kidding me!” explodes the old guy, who in a fit of fury snatches up the slug and hurls it as far as he can into the darkness, shutting the door and turning off his lights.

Three years later the doorbell rings again and he opens the door to find the same garden slug standing there. The slug is not amused.

“Hey, pal,” he says, “what was that about? It took me three years to be back here. Forget the quarter. You owe me a buck!”

A common way to eliminate garden slugs, I learned in the midst of our pre-Halloween ordeal, is to put out a cup of beer and let the snails drink themselves to death. Another approach is to put salt on them, which causes their little bodies to shed water and shrivel up in agony.

In truth, I couldn’t bear the thought of having the painful deaths of 75 garden snails on my conscience, so I shut the door and decided to sleep on it. That night I dreamed that Kim Bassinger had invited me on a trip down the Amazon, but that’s quite another story and not appropriate for all trick or treaters. 

In the morning, the slugs were gone – vanished back to their little snail beds with tummies full of our fresh pumpkin. I carried our decimated Jack-o-lantern to the same woods where I let the snake go and tossed it into a place where other wild critters might enjoy it. 

Rufus the cat tagged along. I’m still convinced he’s somehow at the center of this little drama.

Then I went back and spread a little salt on our porch and put out a nice new pumpkin for any trick-or-treaters – or presidential poll workers – brave or foolish enough to knock on our door.

For the record, the silver slime said the presidential election, alas, was too close to call. 

 

This Simple Life was originally published in October 2016. 

Simple Life

Some years back, I wrote this in tribute to a beloved colleague at the magazine who was preparing to move home to England. We share a love of beautiful English slang.

Bob’s the Word

By Jim Dodson 

 

A beloved English friend named Serena returned from a lengthy visit home and popped into the office the other day.

Naturally I asked how her trip to England went. 

“It was lovely,” she said. “Though the weather was perfectly awful. As usual, lots of whinging about that.”

She wondered why I was smiling.

I explained that I hadn’t heard that word since the days of Sid Vicious.

She smiled. “What word?”

“Whinging.” 

The English have given us many fine things across the Ages, from Magna Carta to mushy green peas, from the Beatles to Rumpole of the Bailey. But for my money their slang is without peer on the planet, almost Shakespearean in descriptive scope, probably the reason the Bard used so much of it in his own writing.

To “whinge,” it should be perfectly obvious, simply means to complain to the point of being such a nuisance someone is likely to advise you to “stuff it.”

That’s also a nifty phrase I picked up on my first trip to England in 1977. To set the stage, Elvis had recently toppled off a toilet in Memphis and the Queen was celebrating her big Jubilee party, 25 years of sitting on a throne of her own. 

I rolled into town on a stormy night, a day earlier than friends of my folks were expecting me to arrive, and found that every hotel was filled to overflowing  with  Jubilee revelers.  A grim youth hostel on the Belgrade Road agreed to take me in for five quid, however, providing a mattress in a basement full of Bulgarian teenagers on holiday who’d never heard of deodorant. At least in the morning the establishment sent you on your way with a free bowl of corn flakes.

As it happened, I had a date in the country that beautiful Sunday morning, catching an early train out of London to the ancient Roman spa town of Bath (which properly rhymes with “moth”] to have Sunday lunch with the family of one of my dad’s old Army chums. All I knew of the Turner family was that they resided on a “estate farm” outside of town and had two daughters about my age. What followed was nothing shy of a bloody crash course in British slang.

As rain clouds gathered outside Bath’s ornate train station, the tiniest car I’d ever seen wheeled up with the most beautiful girl I’d laid eyes on behind the wheel. Her name was Claire. She had violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor, a face that could have made Heathcliff leap into the sea. The car was a wheezing mustard-colored Austin Mini. I could barely get both legs and my backpack inside. 

“Looks like it’s about to start raining stair-rods,” she declared, slamming the Austin in gear and zooming off. “Mum fancies a walk to the Black Swan after lunch so you can see a real English pub. Do you have your Wellies?”

I had no idea what she meant and was too tongue-tied – or simply terrified by her driving – to ask as we banged along frightfully narrow hedgerow lanes. 

“Cool car,” I managed to say as a giant truck loaded with hay ran us partially into the ditch. Claire barely flinched.

“Bugger these lorries,” she swore. “Yeah, it’s a bit of an old clanger, this. My dad restores them. This one belonged to him and mum.” She glanced at me and grinned. “I believe they shagged in it like bloody rabbits.”

Here was a word I knew thanks to my Southern exposure to Beach Music.

“I can shag,” I volunteered. “My brother’s girlfriend showed me how.”

Claire gave me a disturbed look. 

She turned out to be the Turner family’s spirited youngest daughter, 17, in her sixth form and about to take her A-levels, whatever that meant. She had plans to soon go off to college in Bristol and become a pre-school teacher. She asked how old I was.

“Twenty-three,” I replied, feeling like a babe in the woods.

“Ah,” said Lady Claire with a knowing nod. “Almost a gaffer, I reckon.”

Her older sister Kat came out from the city in her own elderly Austin.  She was my age exactly, a resident of the South side of London – the “grotty end of Clapham,” she explained over a lunch that included bangers and mash and a baked aubergine that turned out to taste a lot like my mom’s eggplant parmesan. 

 Kat of Clapham had florescent pink hair and a safety pin through her right earlobe. She’d moved to London hoping to become a news presenter for the BBC but was studying international relations at the University of London. In the meantime she was working as a hostess at a punk rock club in Chelsea.

“Couldn’t stand this bloody boring place when I was growing up here,” she confided to me during our after-lunch hike to the Black Swan for a pint with Claire and their folks, Jack and Silvia. “ All rich toffs and blue hair pensioners in Nike trainers round these parts nowadays. Know what I mean, Bob?”

I simply nodded, wondering who Bob was. 

Silvia and Jack, parents of Kit and Claire, couldn’t have been more welcoming. Jack was retired from IBM and restored Austin minis for fun. Silvia worked for a local solicitor, which sounded like dodgy work. What exactly was this  most attractive mother of two, I wondered, soliciting? Mum and Dad were both dedicated ramblers, I learned from Silvia as we drank warm beer at the Black Swan.

This turned out to mean that Silvia and Jack were active in Britain’s charitable walking society, an organization that had nothing to do with my brother’s first car. Silvia and Jack believed it was every walker in the nation’s God-given right to enjoy complete legal access to every piece of property in the realm, including the Queen’s.   

“Oh, bollocks,” grumbled Kat. “Here comes Tom the yob.”

“Oh stuff it, Kat,” her younger sister told her.

Tom was Claire’s boyfriend, a strapping lad who looked like a young Albert Finney. He’d just gotten off work from a local stable. Claire wished me well and went off with Tom, breaking my heart.

“You must stay the night,” Silvia insisted. “Kat can show you the baths and drive you back to London tomorrow.”

I was in no hurry to sleep with the Bulgarians again so I happily agreed.

The next day Kat showed me the town of Bath’s famous Roman baths then she drove me back to London, inviting me to “crash” at her “flat.” My modest Southern nature prevents me from telling what happened next. Let’s just say it was a fine example of international relations. I’ve never been able to look at florescent pink hair the same way ever again.

 On the plus side, Kat turned out to be a great tour guide, walking me all over the city of Shakespeare and Sid Vicious. She even took me to her punk rock club where I stood out like a pork chop at a bar mitzvah. I showed her how Americans “shagged,” which caused her to punch me and dissolve with laughter. We had a fine week in each other’s company, swapping native slang and hitting museums and pubs.  Kat was fascinated by the American South and wondered if my daddy might be a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  I almost hated to have to tell her he was just an ordinary advertising executive.

“I love how y’all talk down there,” she declared with the worst Southern accent ever attempted by an English-speaking human being. “It’s so bloody primitive.” 

Finally, she drove me to Kings Cross Station to catch the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh. Or maybe it was the Caledonian Express. I forget which.

Truthfully, I hated to go.  Kat and London had charmed and cheered up my primitive soul. I think I fell a little bit in love with both sisters that week.  Eat your bloody heart out, Mr. Dorsey. 

“Righto, Bob,” she declared, giving me a firm peck. “On you go. Watch out for Scottish blighters in wooly skirts! No soppy whinging now. Stay in touch.”

We did, too – at least for a time. 

 I later learned Kat got married and went to work for John Major. Someday I half expect to see Britain has elected its first prime minister with pink hair.

This is why I thanked my lovely English friend Serena for unexpectedly bringing back some nice memories from my first trip to her homeland. 

Looking back, I can’t whinge too much about how things worked out. 

Know what I mean, Bob?