The Zoo

Fiction by Daniel Wallace   
Illustrations by Harry Blair

We were listening to Vivaldi the night I died, the bed so soft, so warm, my wife of nearly half-a-century perched beside me with a cup of ice chips, there to wet my tongue, my lips. Even though I die at the end of it, this is not a sad story, really: I was very old, comfortable, cared for, weary and loved, loved my whole life long, ready to fade into whatever night was waiting for me. And of all the moments I might have conjured to accompany me as I was leaving, it was our very first date that I recalled.

Clara and I were grad students in English, just classroom friends, weeks away from defending our dissertations — hers on lute music in Shakespeare’s early plays, mine on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and the birth of modern science. I’d always liked Clara, but I think everybody did. She was smart but didn’t seem to care that she was, and made the rest of us — who were battling with each other, always burnishing the myth of our own brilliance — seem dumb. She was also funny, and the kind of pretty I was drawn to. Her nose was just a little longer than one thought it might have been, her eyes too big. They were emerald green, though, and rested on her big cheeks like marbles. Her knees were oversized for her long thin legs, like two snakes that had just swallowed one rabbit each. The truth was she wasn’t really picture-pretty at all, but carried herself as if she were, or didn’t care that she wasn’t, and that made her more beautiful than anyone I’d ever seen. She seemed wild to me, beyond anything I could ever capture. I was 27 and looked like a young man overly acquainted with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, by which I mean bookish in a sun-starved sort of way, shy around actual humans, shiny brown hair, still waiting for the peach fuzz on my upper lip to turn to fur. Somehow she let me know that she was free — “I’ve been kind of seeing somebody, but now . . . ” And she shrugged.

And there we were.

So we decided to go out for a beer one night. I picked her up in the first car I’d ever owned, an old Dodge Dart I’d bought used five years before, beaten and bruised, 210,027 miles and counting. There was a hole in the passenger side floorboard a mouse could have slipped through, and the engine was seriously flatulent.

“Nice car,” she said, hopping in. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, variations on which seemed to encompass her entire wardrobe. “Is it new?”

“Very funny.”

“Kidding,” she said. “But seriously, it’s a real car, right?”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m just having fun with you.” She punched me in the shoulder. “But honestly, want me to give it a good push? Happy to.”

She went on like this for a little while and stopped just before it became tedious. Maybe just a beat after it became tedious. But I was laughing. “For someone who doesn’t even have a car, you have strong opinions about mine.”

“I kid you,” she said. “But seriously.”

Off we went to a place called Brother’s, famous for its jukebox and onion rings and frosty beer mugs. We slipped into a booth and talked about what graduate students talk about — dissertation directors, anxiety, our cohorts and more anxiety. That was the thing: It was fine and fun and comfortable; we just got along so well. Even after a few minutes together it felt like we’d been coming to Brother’s forever and talking about nothing and laughing — when this guy appeared, an apparition materializing from the dark of the bar beyond us. Tall, wiry, a small face made angular by a well-trimmed goatee, and eyebrows like a mossy overhang. Our age. He was wearing a black jacket and a black T-shirt beneath it and black pants, and I’m assuming black socks and underwear as well. He sat down next to Clara — they clearly knew each other — and he smiled at me and shook my hand. A strong grip. Very strong.

Clara covered her face with her hands and moaned. “Jeremy,” she said, she sighed. “Jesus. Jesus Jesus Christ.”

Jeremy looked at me and rolled his eyes, like we were having so much fun and now Clara has to come and ruin it for us.

“I saw you and I had to say hello,” Jeremy said to her. Then to me, conspiratorially: “We were together, not too long ago. Clara and I.”

Clara nodded, but it was a grudging nod. I’m sorry, she mouthed to me.

Jeremy saw her. “You should be sorry,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “Jeremy. This is not the time or the place for this.”

Jeremy shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know why. This used to be our place.”

“Our place?” She mocked him. “We came here twice.”

Someone put two quarters in the jukebox and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” began to play. Clara looked at me. “We should go, Richard. This isn’t going to get any more fun than it already is.”

“Richard,” Jeremy said. “What a great name. May I call you Dick, Dick? Great. So, Dick, about how long have you and Clara been an item . . . Dick.”

I didn’t answer. I was in a difficult position: Clara and I really weren’t an item, yet; I didn’t feel it was up to me — or in my wheelhouse — to step up and eject the interloper from our midst.

But then, slowly, Jeremy’s smile dimmed and died, and he looked at Clara as if she were a hideous thing.

“You’re a coward, you know,” he said to her. “How could you just
. . . disappear? No call back. Nothing. Not cool. Not how you break up with somebody.” He looked at me, back to her. “Just . . . not cool. In case you didn’t know.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if she were about to plunge underwater.

Slowly, she exhaled.

“We didn’t ‘break up,’ Jeremy. We were never even really seeing each other, not like that. We were never even — .” She stopped, giving up the postmortem. “Listen. I’m sorry, okay? I should have called you or maybe written you back to say thanks and everything, it was great while it lasted but a talent-free hobo novelist who doesn’t know the difference between a semicolon and an ampersand is just not what I’m looking for in my life at this time. All the best, Clara.”

Jeremy tried to rally with a comeback, but he didn’t have one. “I’m not a hobo,” he said. “Just . . . between places.”

“For a year and a half,” Clara said.

Poor Jeremy. He had been defeated. “Raindrops” ended and began again. Jeremy shook his head, stared off into the faraway-somewhere. He looked like he was standing on the shore of a deserted island watching the ship that was supposed to save him sail on by. 

“Okay, well, I feel like it’s time for me to hitch a ride on the next prevailing wind! But before I go, I have a message for you, Richard. You’re going to be me one day. You’ll have the time of your life with this one. You’ll be so happy. It’ll be like the world went from black and white to color. Then everything will go to shit and you won’t be happy anymore because Clara will move on, and it will suck for you, just like it’s sucking for me now.”

By the look in his eyes he was taking a moment to relive some of the colorful times he’d shared with her, and he smiled. “But it will be worth it,” he said. “Because Clara . . . well, nobody is Clara.”

Then he stood, and just as quickly as he had come was gone, a shadow fading away into the darkness of the bar.

We paid up and left and walked to the car in the dusky quiet. We were a little unsettled.

A breeze ruffled the trees but fell short of the two of us, standing on either side of my car now in the gravel parking lot. No stars out yet but the moon was rising, low still and smoky white.

“Well, that sucked,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, but — ”

“But what?”

“You have to admire his pluck.”

“I love that word,” she said. “He’s not plucky, though. He’s . . . indecorous.”

“Unseemly.”

“Boorish.”

Looking down like there was something on the ground for her to see, her hair fell into her face and it was as if a big CLOSED sign went up. Even after she pushed it back behind her ears it was hard to really see her. “Jeremy,” she said. “Such a mistake. What if every mistake you ever made followed you around for the rest of your life? Like a parade of mistakes. The too-small shoes you bought, the undercooked chicken. Jeremy.”

“That would suck a lot.”

“I was mean to him.”

“He asked for it.”

“Really?”

I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but I was on Clara’s side now. I looked back at Brother’s. I kept thinking Jeremy was going to follow us out here and stab me.

“I think we should make a mistake,” she said.

“Really?”

“We need to do something,” she said. “That or go home. And I don’t want to go home. Let’s do something stupid that will follow us around forever like undercooked chicken.”

“Sure,” I said, not really sounding like the devil-may-care-crazy guy she may have wanted just then. But what to do? I couldn’t think of anything: I’d always veered to the quiet, safe side of life. But she had an idea.

“You know what we should do?” she said. “Or what we shouldn’t do, I mean?”

She sat on the hood of the car and waited for me to join her. I did. This was as close as I’d ever been to her.

“What?”

“Go to the zoo.”

There was a small zoo in Bellingham, somewhere between a real zoo and a place where a bunch of animals had been collected from around the world and housed by a larger-than-life intrepid explorer in makeshift pens and a pit for lions and tigers, a skinny elephant, a fence for the giraffe, a cement island for the monkeys. The animals didn’t look abused, just disappointed.

“Great idea,” I said. “But it’s closed. It closes at dusk.”

“Who said anything about it being open?”

And she told me a story she’d heard, about an entryway at the bottom of the 12-foot-high metal fence, one you can slither through with ease, gaining access to the entire place. No alarms, no cameras. Just you and the animals in the dark.

“I know the way.”

“Sure,” I said, hoping to impress her with my newfound recklessness. I handed her the keys to the car.

“Really? Seriously?” she said, like a kid. “You’re up for this?”

Her face was so small I could cup it in one hand, and in the half-light of the parking lot outside of Brother’s she had the patina of a film from the ’40s. I think I was already in love with her. We got in the car and she looked at me, and it was as if she were saying, Are you ready? Because this is happening. If you’re going to wimp out this is your last chance. In just the few minutes we’d been outside night had fully fallen. A couple of frat boys came out of Brother’s braying at each other, and the tail end of a song comes out with them — “Raindrops.”

“Let’s do this,” I said.

She started the car and winked at me as she revved the engine. “Big mistake,” she said.

It was a terrifically muggy night but with the windows down I could feel a cool undercurrent to the air. I remember thinking that one day it would be fall, then winter, then spring and then summer again, and that whatever was about to happen will have happened a long time ago. The wind made Clara’s hair go wild, half of it flying out the window like streamers on a bicycle, the other half in her mouth and in her eyes, blindfolding her for seconds at a time. “I’ve got this,” she kept saying. “No problem.” Then she looked at me, mock-scared with a frightened smile, like the other part of her was saying, Don’t believe me! There is a problem! I don’t have this!

She took a sudden turn off of Greene Street, and then the road whipped around to the right, up and then down, the car beams breaking into what felt like a virgin dark. Just a pine tree forest, a forgotten road, nothing else.

She pulled over to the curb and cut the lights and we were under the cover of night.

“We’re here,” she said.

Gradually the world around me came into focus, and over the trees I could see the throbbing red light at the top of the WRDC radio tower. I positioned myself in the world and I realized we were in fact right behind the zoo, near a farm, an overgrown pasture. She put the car in reverse, pulled back, angled it, then turned the lights back on, spotlighting the secret entrance through the fence. She raised her arms into the air, fists clenched: victory.

“You’re pretty impressed with yourself.”

“I am,” she said, nodding. “As I should be.”

She turned off the car and threw the keys back to me.

“It’s go time,” she said.

The hole in the fence was big enough for a mandrill to crawl through. We got in on all fours. Neither of us said a word but communicated through hand signals and raised eyebrows and then suddenly — What’s that? Oh. It’s nothing. Continue . . . inching through the inky dark toward the animal quiet.

The woods ended, and we were on a path, dirt and gravel first and then lightly paved uneven asphalt. A yellow light spilled on the elephant cage, that fenced-in patch of hard dirt no bigger than a poor man’s front yard. There was no elephant there now — he or she was sleeping inside. I’d been here a couple of times, thrown a few peanuts over this wall. Clara looked at me. She was so excited she seemed to be vibrating. She leaned in close and stood on her tiptoes to whisper-yell in my ear: “We did it!” She held onto my elbow. “But it’s important to stay quiet,” she said. “That way they won’t know we’re not one of them. They’ll do things most people never get to see them do.”

It turned out that animals in the zoo at night do what most animals do. They sleep. It was absolutely still. The elephants, the giraffes, the monkeys, the spiral-horned antelope — they were all asleep. You could hear them; it was the humming sound of a living forest. Blue-black shadows everywhere. An ibis had a bad dream and shrieked, and a striped hyena answered (maybe it was an ibis, maybe a hyena), then it was silence again. What lights there were were kept low, and the moon was hidden behind a cloud. It turned out that sneaking around in a zoo full of sleeping animals was not unlike sneaking around in a zoo with not a single animal in it. Clara thought she saw something and gave a little involuntary gasp and turned and — it was a rabbit. She shrugged her shoulders, smiled, but I could tell she’d had high hopes for this adventure. It hadn’t lived up to its hype. “We can go now if you want,” she said.

I did want to go. I wanted to be back in the car talking about what had just happened, how great it was and can you believe that we actually did that? Clara had no idea how careful I normally was, how meticulous with my life, had no way of knowing that I was a man who folded his pants at the crease and arranged his shirts by kind and, within kind, color, whose life-plan was to be invisible on command, to follow directions, to go as far as a man with a Ph.D. in Frankenstein could go. So yes, I wanted to leave.

But she was just too defeated. 

If this were even our second date I would hug her, even kiss her until my kisses made her smile. A second date meant options. A first date, you couldn’t — I couldn’t — do more than take her hand. There was an old stone wall surrounding a duck pond, and I stepped up on it. It was only 2 feet high. Clara looked up at me and sort of laughed and said, “What are you — ?” but before she could finish the sentence I had my hand out and she took it and I pulled her up to stand beside me. “Listen,” I said. She listened and heard the same thing I did: almost nothing at all, just that humming sound. “Now listen,” and with my hands cupped around my mouth I shouted a quote from the book I had memorized: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

That did the job: The night blew up. The animals rose. Plodding out of his concrete bunker pounded the elephant, the curious giraffes loped into the moonlight, and the island of monkeys began to wildly chatter. Every animal was baying and woofing and screeching. The animal world had awakened — just for us.

“Richard,” Clara said, still in whisper-mode. Wings flapped in the dark above us, water roiled somewhere nearby. Clara grabbed my arm and pulled me close. Our shoulders bumped. “This is just . . . so great!” Her big eyes were wide, the size of saucers for a miniature teacup. The moon, the stars, the sky, the animals of the Earth, this beautiful woman, all here, before me — and I felt as if I had created a moment that had never been created before, never in the history of the world. And I was sharing it with Clara.

But I woke up more than the animals. The zoo actually had a keeper. I saw him before I heard him, the beam of his super-powerful flashlight bouncing off of everything.

“Who’s there?” he called out, in a deep voice. “You’re trespassing, assholes. And yes, it’s a felony, and yes, I will prosecute. Do not think I won’t. Course I’ll let you spend some time in the hippo pond first, goddamn it.”

 

He sounded tired, and very serious. This had gone too far for me, and for Clara. She was frozen against my side, had stopped breathing I think, statue-still. I took her hand and we jumped down from the wall. I had no idea now where the hole in the fence was, but what choice did we have but to try and find it? We ran into the woods. I scratched my face on the lower branches of a pine tree and could feel the stripes of blood across my cheeks. But we didn’t stop running. The zookeeper could hear us, of course, and shined the light into the woods following our path. “Come out come out wherever you are, moron,” he said gleefully. He followed the sound of us, sweeping his light through the forest, coming closer. I had no idea where we were. But we came to a huge tree, and I pulled Clara behind it, wrapping my arms around her until we were as small as two people could be. The light of his flashlight fell all around us, but not on us. We were that close to being seen — inches away from being caught and caged. But we were not.

He gave up. “Damn it,” he said to himself now, thinking we were long gone.

Then he turned around and headed back the way he came.

Still pressed up against me she looked up at me and smiled.

“You did it,” she whispered. “You saved us.” She kissed me on the cheek, but her eyes did not leave mine. “Richard,” she said, “that was truly magical.”

And I thought, I actually remember thinking this as we huddled together behind that tree: in 30, 40, 50 years — whenever she buried me — no matter what may have happened through the decades of our life together, this was what I’d remember, this night, the story she’d tell too many times to our children, our grandchildren, our oldest friends, the story of that night we broke into the zoo and woke everyone up. And not because it was the best thing that ever happened to us, but because it was the first. It set the tone, she’d say, for the rest of our lives. That night at the zoo we were in our own cocoon, arms encircled, closer than close. She burrowed into me, and we stayed that way for a while, longer than we needed to, until the night returned to its rhythms, until all the wild animals in the world went back to sleep.

So of course, out of all the moments of my life, this would be the one I chose to see me out.

I felt a chip of ice on my lips, a damp cloth on my forehead. I didn’t know if my eyes were open or closed, but it was all dark now, and getting darker. I found my wife’s hand and held it.

“Clara,” I said. “Oh, Clara!”

Yes, your name was my very last word, so sweet I said it twice.

“Clara?” Gwendolyn said, and she shuddered, seemed to freeze and harden as if she’d died herself. “Richard, who is Clara?”

And I might have told her, but it was a long story from a long time ago, and by then it was much, much too late.  OH

Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish and, most recently, Extraordinary Adventures. He lives in Chapel Hill, where he directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina.

Tea Leaf Astrologer

Aries
(March 21 – April 19)

You know those little peppers used on Thai menus to indicate the spice level of the dish? Well, it’s a three-pepper month for you, Aries. And while that may seem mild compared with the blistering, full-body high you’re accustomed to, perhaps it’s time to shift your focus toward the subtle energies in your life. Single? No need to go sending up flares. Love always finds you. But you’re not a dish for just anyone. 

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Taurus (April 20 – May 20) 

Get ready for a reality check. Or don’t. It’s coming for you either way.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

When it comes to love, you’re only fooling yourself.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Somebody’s got shiny-penny syndrome.

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

The door is unlocked. 

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

You’re going to have to speak up.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Don’t think of it as backtracking. Think of it as recalibration.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Two words: healthy boundaries.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

You’ll want to change your shoes for this. 

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Does the term “energy vampire” mean anything to you?

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

You couldn’t wipe off that grin even if you tried.

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

You’ve already hung the moon. Now it’s time to enjoy it.  OH

Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla.

Home by Design

Eccentrics of
Latham Park

Public grounds along Buffalo Creek
entertain a cast of characters

By Cynthia Adams

Living in sight of Latham Park affords premium viewing (for free!) of 24-hour reality programming.

At the onset of coronavirus-fueled frustration, park going surged.

Lots of posing occurred in the park, with professional photographers forced out of studios. Women and men leaned into gnarly trees as pros and amateurs snapped away. A girls’ sports team pirouetted on a small rise, one long favored by golfers who perpetually have ignored the “No Golfing” signs. They air hugged, bumping elbows, posing while socially distanced.

Romance, too, played out on grass-stained quilts. Couples lugged cold drinks and takeout to make-out exhibitions putting Love Island to shame.

For some reason, Latham Park, among Greensboro’s first, has never been funded at the level of the city’s other parks, despite its age and popularity. No lovely plantings nor gazebos, no special features whatever except for a trail and rusting old exercise stations.

Beyond that, nothing but a few old benches.

Occasionally, gang members tag the park signs. Pranksters even lugged away two bolted-down benches. We were stunned one morning to find one abandoned near Elm Street and Buffalo Creek.

This bench had a pervy history. A flasher once stationed himself there. Now, only the concrete pads remain. Kudzu, another local pest and natural predator, further menaces the trail.

After lockdown, the surge receded as suddenly as it began. The park returned to its usual tempo and a rotating cast of walkers, joggers and occasional eccentrics.

A couple of tuba players rehearsed on a remaining bench, bleating and booming on their unwieldy instruments. Tubas are the manatees of the music world, seldom glimpsed in the wild.

An agreeable cyclist we call Beep repeatedly shouts “Beep!” as he often bikes with orange peel covering his teeth like an orthodontic retainer.

Beep began hailing us as “Sarah and Abraham!” when my husband avoided haircuts during lockdown.

Miata Man chugs cautiously around the park perimeter on area streets before securing his car in a parking lot, carefully storing the tag in the trunk.

We don’t know Miata Man, but we would like to.

Butch recently moved away. He cut through the park on forays to the service station for snacks. Like us, Butch walked in all weather — even in moonlight. He kept an eye out for suspicious behavior, frowning on drugs and littering. He regaled us with stories about the mayor, whom he phoned to keep apprised of such things. We miss Butch.

Mysterious Patchouli Girl walks past with an instrument on her back, wearing folk costumes. The scent lingers in the air, once she has passed us.

Sometimes, the truly weird happens in the park. One dawn, a yellow tent appeared near Buffalo Creek. The camper’s breakfast bacon smells drifted through the air. The park floods, mind you, and we were alarmed by their perilous campsite. It happened more recently when an orange tent pitched up.

But this year, a doozie.

As I tugged at a weed in our courtyard, hubby appeared, eyes wide, furtively motioning. He hissed, “Big, fat man in sheet!”

I could only stare back.

“Golfing! Hurry!” he urged, motioning toward the park. “You can see his skimpies!” (Skimpies are unmentionables where he grew up.)

As I crept to look, a very large man was negotiating his body into a sedan.

Was he wearing a sheet?

He sped off. Was it, perhaps, clothing? Tie-dyed? Nope, hubby said.

“Like he cut a hole in a white sheet and — wore it like a caftan!”

Had he ever seen him before from his park-facing office?

Apparently, yes, but — normally the man wore nothing.

“I mean, no shirt. He usually comes to the park with a club in hand, wearing skimpies. Undershorts.”

But golfing in a sheet? I spluttered. 

“I was on a work Zoom, or I would have been able to get your attention before he was leaving,” he retorted. “It was a sheet.”

Puzzled, I tugged at the weed, whose roots extended to Middle Earth.

What to call him? Toga Man? Sheet Man?

The root would not surrender: It whispered, “Just a park goer, you fool. A weed in the garden of life.”  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Bookshelf

April Books

Compiled by Shannon Purdy Jones

If you live in my neighborhood, I guarantee you saw me out as early as February, pacing lazy circles around my barren yard and muttering to myself. Not, as it might appear, doing anything nefarious or unhinged (at least not to date).

No, I was mentally mapping where in the garden the perennials would reappear and where between them the new year’s plantings might go. Next, of course, I was wandering the perimeter of the raised beds, plotting out this year’s vegetable rotation. Thankfully, after a few years now, my neighbors know the drill and are no longer worried for my sanity. As soon as the ground thaws, I’m itching for it: cutting in compost and starting seedlings and feeling the soil under my fingernails. Waiting until the correct time to plant before hitting the local nursery to browse is an exercise in self control I have yet to master.

Thankfully, the wait is over. The last frost date is just around the corner, so it’s time to dust off our rakes and hoes and fill the world with green things. Not only will you get some gorgeous blooms and delicious veggies for your efforts, but our pollinator neighbors will reap the rewards too. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener looking for some new ideas or someone who’s never grown a single tomato, we’ve got some great books to get you outside and growing. See you out in the sunshine!

Plant Grow Harvest Repeat: Grow a Bounty of Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers by Mastering the Art of Succession Planting by Meg McAndrews Cowden 

Discover how to get more out of your growing space with succession planting — carefully planned, continuous seed sowing — and provide a steady stream of fresh food from early spring through late fall.

Drawing inspiration from succession in natural landscapes, Meg McAndrews Cowden teaches you how to implement lessons from these dynamic systems in your home garden. You’ll learn how to layer succession across your perennial and annual crops; maximize the early growing season; determine the sequence to plant and replant in summer; and incorporate annual and perennial flowers to benefit wildlife and ensure efficient pollination. You’ll also find detailed, seasonal sowing charts to inform your garden planning, so you can grow more anywhere, regardless of your climate.

Plant Grow Harvest Repeat will inspire you to create an even more productive, beautiful and enjoyable garden across the seasons — every vegetable gardener’s dream.

Pollinator Gardening for the South: Creating Sustainable Habitats by Seth Danesha Carley and Anne M. Spafford 

This step-by-step guide will answer all of your questions about how to create beautiful gardens designed to welcome beneficial pollinators across the South. Combining up-to-date scientific information with artful design strategies, Danesha Seth Carley and Anne M. Spafford teach gardeners of all levels to plan, plant and maintain successful pollinator gardens at home and in shared community sites. Everyday gardeners, along with farmers, scientists and policy makers, share serious concerns about ongoing declines in bee and other pollinator populations, and here Spafford and Carley deliver great news: Every thoughtfully designed garden, no matter how small, can play a huge role in providing the habitat, nourishment and nesting places so needed by pollinators. This book explains all you need to be a pollinator champion.

• Covers USDA hardiness zones 6, 7, 8 and 9, including 12 Southern states.

• Explains what makes pollinators happy — bees, for sure, and many others, great and small.

• Brings science and art together in gardens of all types, including urban, food, container, community, school and large-scale gardens.

• Provides step-by-step instructions for choosing locations, preparing soil and garden beds, selecting the best plants, considering seasonality in your garden design, managing your garden throughout the year and much more.

• Richly illustrated with photographs, design plans, and handy charts and lists.

Grow More Food: A Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Getting the Biggest Harvest Possible from a Space of Any Size
by Colin McCrate and Brad Helm

Just how productive can one small vegetable garden be? More productive than one might think. Colin McCrate and Brad Helm, former community supported agriculture growers and current owners of the Seattle Urban Farm Company, help readers boost their garden productivity by teaching them how to plan carefully, maximize production in every bed, get the most out of every plant, scale up systems to maximize efficiency and expand the harvest season with succession planting, intercropping and season extension.

 Along with chapters devoted to the Five Tenets of a Productive Gardener (Plan Well to Get the Most from Your Garden; Maximize Production in Each Bed; Get the Most out of Every Plant; Scale up Tools and Systems for Efficiency; and Expand and Extend the Harvest), the book contains interactive tools that home gardeners can use to assist them in determining how, when, and what to plant; evaluating crop health; and planning and storing the harvest. For today’s vegetable gardeners who want to grow as much of their own food as possible, this guide offers expert advice and strategies for cultivating a garden that supplies what they need.

Grow Now: How We Can Save Our Health, Communities, and Planet — One Garden at a Time by Emily Murphy

Did you know you can have a garden that’s equal parts food source and wildlife haven? In Grow Now, Emily Murphy shares easy-to-follow principles for regenerative gardening that foster biodiversity and improve soil health. She also shows how every single yard mirrors and connects to the greater ecosystem around us.

No-dig growing, composting and mulching smartly, and planting a variety of edible perennials that attract bees and butterflies are all common-sense techniques everyone can use to grow positive change. You’ll also find detailed advice on increasing your nature quotient, choosing plants that cycle more carbon back into the soil, selecting a broader variety of vegetables and fruits to improve overall soil fertility, rethinking space devoted to lawns, and adding companion plants for pollinators to “rewild” any plot of land.

Exquisitely photographed and filled with helpful lists and sidebars, Grow Now is an actionable, hopeful and joyful roadmap for growing our way to individual climate contributions. Gardening is climate activism!  OH

Shannon Purdy Jones is store manager and children’s book buyer for Scuppernong Books.

O. Henry Ending

Mulch Ado

How moving a compost pile
lifts a family’s spirits

By Cassie Bustamante

“Oh, you’re a fitness trainer,” my doctor said. “This’ll be easy. Just imagine you’re doing a crunch.”

After a few more core exercises, my wriggling baby boy entered the world. We spent two glorious days in the hospital with doctors and nurses guiding our every move. Babies don’t come with user’s manuals, but bookstore shelves are lined with guides, and websites are loaded with tips for navigating those first years. We got this, my husband and I conveyed through exhausted, new-parent eyes.

Sixteen years later, our eyes are a different kind of tired and the silent glances exchanged are more anxious than adoring. There are few, if any, field guides to parenting the modern sulky teen — something that explains the array of inexplicable mood shifts or identifies the meaning behind a glare or sigh. Toss the world of social media and a pandemic into the mix and not even the so-called parenting experts are experts anymore.

Last spring, we were all feeling pandemic fatigue in our house. Missing the connections that come through sports, my son was sinking into a worrying place. I wanted to toss him a rope, but I wasn’t sure I had anything strong enough. After all, I’d never lived through the experience of being a teen boy, let alone during the time of COVID.

Each morning, I’d tote my youngest male prodigy to preschool, reflecting on the unsettling silence of his older brother during the short drive, wondering what it would take to unlock the happy kid we knew was in there. Ironically, an answer to my prayer lay closer than I knew — almost at the end of our own driveway.

A mountainous mulch pile stood at the foot of our neighbor’s yard. As I passed by the house several days in a row, I noticed the mound wasn’t shrinking. Something American politician and orator Robert Ingersoll had said back in the 1800s — as true today as ever — rang in my head: “We rise by lifting others.”

I texted my neighbor: “Let me send Sawyer down to help you with that mulch. He’s had a ton of experience hauling and spreading it and knows what he’s doing.”

When he arrived home that afternoon, I cheerfully pounced. “I volunteered you to help our neighbors spread mulch!” I exclaimed. He rolled his eyes and began muttering excuses not to go. Finally, he shrugged and agreed, if only because spending time there meant not having to deal with me. Sometimes you take a win any way you can get it.

Two days later, he made his trek down the street, garden gloves in hand. Watching him go, a tightness crept over my chest and I choked up a little, knowing this was what he needed. Call it a mother’s hunch that we sometimes rise by lifting others’ mulch. Plus, it’s a scientific fact that once a mother has a child, she can no longer keep her feelings, opinions or the occasional proud tear inside.

When Sawyer returned home, red-faced and sweaty, he was wearing something I hadn’t seen in some time — the beginnings of a smile and a glimmer of pride in his eye.

I tried to play it cool even though I could barely contain my happiness.

“Well,” I casually inquired, “how did it go?”

If we don’t have plans tomorrow,” he said, “is it OK if I go back to help again?”

I told him that would be just fine with me.

The spark was back.

And so was that proud little tear.  OH

Cassie Bustamante is the digital content manager for O.Henry. Subscribe to her witty roundup of Greensboro events in our weekly newsletter, O.Hey, at oheygreensboro.com.

Botanicus

Pick a Peck of
Peppers

From heat to sweet, there’s something for every palate

By Ross Howell Jr.

Now that the azaleas are blooming, what better way for gardeners to dream of summer’s bounty than by thumbing through seed catalogs or browsing the internet?

I was searching for hot peppers. A friend told me she loved eating ghost pepper jam — though it made her sweat.

I hadn’t thought about eating one. I just liked the name.

You know the internet. Soon, I was reading how the ghost pepper was supplanted as the world’s hottest chili pepper by the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, which was supplanted by the Carolina Reaper, a pepper grown next door in the Palmetto State.

I can’t eat hot peppers. But I like growing them. However, I grew up eating peppers my mother harvested from her garden. Sweet, elegantly green bell peppers.

Turns out I found a kindred spirit.

Julie Hale is the community garden coordinator for Greensboro Parks and Recreation.

“I can’t eat the hot ones, either,” Hale says. “But I like growing them because they’re so beautiful.”

Last summer in Keeley Park Community Garden, she ran a program called One Hot Summer.

“The idea was that we’d teach hot pepper growing and eating,” Hale says. She spent weeks researching the 13 varieties she’d try in the garden demonstration bed. She also developed a field guide for the plants.

The guide includes color pictures, growing times to maturity, what to expect in terms of size and shape, and how hot peppers can be used in food.

“It was important to select varieties that weren’t too hot,” Hale says. “Some people just don’t like much heat or can have a bad reaction.”

In addition to seeing the demonstration bed, participants also could take free plants home to try in their gardens.

“The Jaloro Jalapeño is a variety we shared with folks who signed up for our program,” Hale says. She chose the Jaloro — developed at Texas A&M University — because of its mild flavor. Its yellow color is also unusual.

“Most people think jalapeños are only green in color,” she adds. Since the Jaloro is small, it could be grown in a container if people didn’t have garden space.

Best of all?

“It’s very productive,” Hale says. “We had lots of extra peppers we donated to the food bank.”

Another big producer is the Aji Dulce Spice Pepper, an heirloom originating in Venezuela.

“One of my favorites,” Hale adds. “The plants were covered with peppers all season.” She also recommends the Dulce’s small, thin-walled fruit that offers just a hint of heat. “Great to dry and grind for spice,” she concludes.

Another standout was the Czechoslovakian Black Hot Pepper, which is highly ornamental, with white-streaked, lavender flowers and purple-green leaves.

“With beautiful purple-black fruits, ripening to red,” Hale says, “it was the most commented-on variety in our demonstration.”

Another star pepper was the Mad Hatter, developed from a variety called Bishop’s Crown.

“Featuring spaceship-shaped fruit and minimal heat, this pepper also got a lot of comments,” Hale says. It was voted “very delicious” by official taste-testers at the garden.

Other hot peppers Hale grew were Sally’s Hot, Xochiteco Hot Pepper, Grenada Seasoning Spice Pepper, Carolina Cayenne, Aji Chinchi Amarillo, Baron Poblano, Jasmine Rissie, Hungarian Paprika Spice Pepper and Biquinho Yellow.

And for folks like me, who can’t abide spicy heat, Hale had the Ashe County Pimento. Cultivated in the Appalachian Mountains near Boone, it’s an heirloom sweet pepper with a flattened bell shape.

“Delicious when fully ripe,” she adds.

Hale grew most of the pepper varieties from seed. She recommends Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (SouthernExposure.com) in Virginia and Johnny’s Selected Seeds (JohnnySeeds.com) in Maine.

Summer is a day nearer.  OH

Freelance writer Ross Howell Jr. asks that you put this Parks and Recreation program on your garden calendar: “Intro to Backyard Composting,” Thursday, May 12, 6–8 p.m., Keeley Park Community Garden. Call Julie Hale, 336.373.4549.

Book Wrapt

What constitutes a home library varies from one book lover to another

By Cynthia Adams

Imagine a library with 51,000 books towering two stories to the ceiling, amassed by Johns Hopkins professor Richard Macksey. Though Amazon’s Kindle debuted 15 years ago, print survives. Writer/actor Stephen Fry declared in 2013, “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”

In January, The New York Times released a photo of the late Macksey’s dream library, which included extraordinarily rare editions. The image was retweeted nearly 40,000 times in a mere month. Although the library was dismanted after Macksey’s death in 2019, the Baltimore bibliophile, a towering intellect, curated a stunning dreamscape of books reaching two stories in height, with the surreality of a movie set.

Macksey was book wrapt — i.e. enchanted by his own home library.

George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore library contained 20,000 books, many of them first editions. When eight graders are taught North Carolina history, field trips to Biltmore Estate provide a breathtaking example of what it means to be book wrapt and want to assemble a library.

Gen Z and Millennial readers, whose affection for printed books mirrors screen-time fatigue, still dream of such a place. A real library, it is variously estimated, requires 1,000 titles — or 500 — or fewer. With the advent of e-books and so many people downsizing their homes, a small assembly of treasured volumes, artfully displayed, is very much a library.

On these pages you find a number of book-wrapt Triad readers who have created personal libraries with varying numbers of titles and configurations — the largest of them symbolically filled with family heirlooms, like a Victorian cabinet of curiosities — yet all of them inspire.

Sharon James is snugly book-wrapt in her Stoney Creek study/library. She is surrounded by artwork, collectibles and books as she works from home for a company that conducts international hospital inspections.

Here, she spends hours. Her husband, Tom, a High Point University economics professor, keeps a desk nearby.

“I love the warmth of books!” Sharon James says. “I have them lying around in every room. I love leather-bound books, the richness of their color, and I often wonder what prompts someone to write what they do.” Countless other volumes spill into the downstairs. Like many book collectors, James recently undertook a purge to make way for more. This led to a discovery that some favorite titles were duplicates. Lucky friends inherited those.

“I have always had to have bookshelves in my homes,” James says. “If there were none, then I had them built as I did here. Nothing is more relaxing to me than sitting in my favorite French chair, with a good book and a glass of wine. And once I start reading and am into it deeply, I hate being disturbed!”

A former nurse, James enjoys “biographies about women who do great things,” prizing a first edition of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing. She is an avid collector of English and American antiques, so amasses books on the decorative arts.

This is a common thread among bookies: Private passions are revealed in their private libraries.

Recent New York transplants Rick and Randy Burge-Willis own approximately 1,500 to 2,000 volumes and remodeled to accommodate the excess. (See March 2022 O.Henry: www.ohenrymag.com/a-leap-of-faith.)

“There were existing bookshelves in the living room, but our previous home had a ‘main’ library and a ‘kitchen’ library. When we moved here, we only had enough space for about a quarter of our books. It seemed natural to turn our large office space into a library, so we had half of the walls lined with bookshelves.”

They were careful to maintain the original pecky cypress paneling. “We also wanted to mirror the classic moldings and trims of the rest of the house.”

Cookbooks comprise the former restaurant owners’ largest collection, “from church cookbooks to James Beard – award winners, including every edition of the Southern Living Annual Cookbook since 1979.”

Ashley Culler’s Emerywood home library literally rose from the ashes. It is a pastiche of past and present — a mini-Biltmore, but she says their previous library was far grander.

Leather-bound volumes collected for decades burned in a fire that ravaged the entirety of High Point’s Shadowlawn, a French Revival Tudor, in a Gothic style straight out of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. No personal images of the architecturally significant 1926 house survived.

Their current home is a smaller version, one that stood mere yards away. It is a beautiful echo of Shadowlawn, destroyed in 2010 by a Christmas fire. (See December 2016 O.Henry: www.ohenrymag.com/out-of-the-shadow-of-shadowlawn.)

The Cullers bought the carriage house that lay in its shadow, renovated decades earlier by Harold and Peg Amos. Over two years, the Cullers incorporated a few pieces from the ruins; stone from fireplaces, a few leaded glass windows, and a salvageable rear entry, and made it their own. (The Amoses had sold them Shadowlawn, as well.)

The “new” library built by the Amoses in the converted carriage house, as I wrote then, “most demonstrates the fineness of rooms in the lost house.” A paneled library, complete with a soaring, beamed ceiling, plaster friezes, marble fireplace, leaded windows, spiral staircase and balcony, is the Cullers’ “favorite room.”

Hundreds of collected leather-bound books in the Cullers’ former library were destroyed, along with family pictures, memorabilia and all but a few salvaged items — including a sword from Braxton Culler’s time at military school.

“He said to me, ‘I wish I had my sword back.’ So, one day I went through the ashes and the rubble, and I found it,” says Culler, who took the blackened sword to a local jeweler for cleaning and polishing.

“I surprised Braxton with that, giving it to him a year later.”

It again hangs by the fireplace.

Now, their library features inherited, irreplaceable family items: a “worry” chair possibly bought in the Far East by Jack Rochelle, Ashley’s father, and a cock-fighting chair that was possibly reproduced by Globe Furniture, where he was president; an opium pipe from Burma; solid mahogany elephants that Braxton Culler acquired in Honduras; a bust of Rochelle by his niece, Kitty Montgomery, wearing his top hat from the Sedgefield Hunt.

But the most prized of all is a handmade chess table made for Rochelle and presented by Globe artisans on Christmas Eve in 1952. Here she now plays chess with her grandchild.

“Braxton’s daddy’s dog tags from the war,” are on the mantle, Culler says. At last, new photos from their parents, fill the room. It’s become a repository of memories.

The fire’s hidden blessing is this, Culler says: “We are able to incorporate treasured heirlooms into our newer home.”

Like Culler, many book lovers experienced a library lost.

They discussed how downsizing forces more attrition, less accretion.

Retired Greensboro anthropologist Tom Fitzgerald now raids Little Free Libraries while out on walks in Sunset Hills, returning later to donate. He reads extensively, but no longer stocks a personal library.

Attorney Charles Younce, lover of biographies, history and fiction, keeps stacks of books by his bed — but, he says regretfully, no library. He is winnowing out possessions, something he counsels friends to do.

Former Greensboro librarian Pam Norwood and her husband, Phil, downsized a library of 2,000 books when they retired. They culled in earnest. “We kept about 200 books,” she estimates. “We have books in each of our little condo’s rooms. There is not a room for a separate library.”

Norwood buys books, borrows from the public library and reads on Kindle when traveling. “I have been accumulating books all my life, and we still have some books from our childhoods.”

Bibliophile Regula Spoti, a Swiss transplant to the Triad, was inspired by Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books. She buys e-books monthly but estimates now owning 150 books despite “giving books away liberally — and I only want meaningful books in my library.”

Greensboro reader Nancy Jones belongs to several book clubs, now keeping a minimum of 300 books in her home. “I have four different areas with books collected — one whole wall book-cased in my family room with mostly books, a few art objects. And a lawyer’s bookcase at the end of my hall.”

Virginia Cummings, avid reader and fellow “bookie,” created a wall of bookcases in a living room filled with books she and her husband still pull off the shelf to reread. “I love to see my family and friends browsing and conversing about the books,” she writes. But there’s a caveat: “One son, who reads classics, tries to sneak them back to his house.”

The Tender Bar, based on J. R. Moehringer’s book, features a scene in which the writer’s uncle opens a closet stuffed with classics. These, the uncle says, must be read before he can consider himself educated.

Moehringer’s first bosses at a bookstore explain that every book on the shelf is a miracle; “it was no accident they opened like a door.” Whether that door is discovered within a grand library, like Vanderbilt’s, or a closet, like his uncle’s, it opens us too.  OH

Almanac

April

By Ashley Walshe

April is a child of wonder, lord of the mud pies, the crown prince of play.

Yesterday it rained so hard the earthworms learned to swim. Today, the peepers are peeping. The sun is out. The prince of play gathers the essentials:

Large wooden spoon? Check.

Mixing bowl and pie tins? Check, check.

Measuring cups? Don’t need them.

There’s a watering can full of rain on the back porch. Or, there was. The boy squishes across the yard, settles onto the floor of his squashy kingdom.

Mud sings as sweet as any muse. But you must know how to listen.

The boy closes his eyes, readjusts his flower crown and scoops up a wet heap of earth. He dabs a little on his face. He squelches his fingers through it. He digs into the mire with his toes.

Eureka!

This is what the mud said:

In a large mixing bowl, combine two parts squish and one part rainwater. Wriggle your toes as you stir, mixing until the first hummingbird graces the first bearded iris.

When the cottontail rabbits multiply, fold in a dash of wet grass and a fat pinch of redbud before transferring to pie tins.

As the robins pluck their breakfast from the lawn, top with generous layer of dandelion leaves.

Garnish with snakeskin, snail shells and a
dollop of wisteria.

The sun will take care of the rest.

 

Fairy Rings

Spring is doing what spring does best. The earth is softening, once-barren landscapes now bubbling with tender buds and blossoms. In the garden, asparagus rises like birdsong. And after it rains? Enter Marasmius oreades, aka, the fairy ring mushroom.

If ever you’ve stumbled on a near-perfect circle of these buff-colored, wavy-capped fungi, perhaps you’ve smiled at the amusing “coincidence.” Or maybe it spooked you, particularly if one popped up on your own lawn. (Note: These boomers are known to kill turf.)

Myth and folklore refer to these circles as “fairy rings.” Can’t you almost see it? A wild band of wee folk dancing among these mushroom portals?

Tempting as it may be to step inside a fairy ring, myths warn against it. Long of the short of it, those who are lured inside become captives of an unseen realm where hundreds of years can pass in a blink.

On the subject of fair warnings: The fairy ring mushroom is actually a choice edible with a sweet quality that has made its dried caps the star ingredient of more than a few macaroon and cookie recipes. (Go on, look them up.) But this innocent wildling does have a toxic lookalike. Best not to harvest unless you know for sure. And, certainly, withhold from sautéing them.

Foxglove

How did the pretty foxglove get its name? Etymologists have spun many theories. In 1847, William Fox Talbot proposed that “foxglove” may have derived from “folks’ glove,” especially since the Welsh called the flower maneg ellyllon, aka, “fairies’ glove.”

This much we do know: They are bumblebee magnets.

If ingested, the common foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) is highly poisonous to people and animals. In this case, looks can’t kill. But one could see why the Scottish called them “witches’ thimbles.”  OH

Life’s Funny

Hanging in the Balance

Notes from land, sea and air

By Maria Johnson

It was one of the all-time best Christmas presents ever: a red plastic folder from my engineer husband, Jeff.

Ah, but this wasn’t just any festive red folder lying under the tree.

The title page said: “Trip to Florida: Swimming with Manatees.”

The following pages, printed from a PowerPoint presentation he’d made (not kidding) explained how we’d get there; where we’d stay; what we’d do.

The main attraction, hanging out with manatees, was something I’d wanted to do ever since two newspaper colleagues gushed about snorkeling with sea cows 30 years ago.

But I had no clue until I started brushing up on manatees — 1,000-pound mammals that resemble a cross between a big seal and a small whale — that they’ve been very much in the news lately.

That’s because there’s a state-backed program in Florida to feed them romaine lettuce. That’s because a record number of manatees died last year. That’s because the sea grasses they eat have been choked out by algae blooms. That’s because of fertilizer runoff, sewage discharges and the like. And that’s because . . . ta-da, humans.

Merry Christmas.

Still, I was in a cheery mood as we boarded our nonstop flight to St. Petersburg. The sun was shining, the plane was on time and no one at the gate had stopped me because my suitcase was possibly — i.e. definitely — over the weight limit.

I smiled the smile of a scofflaw.

We buckled up as one of the attendants pantomimed what to do in case of an emergency. The engines revved. A couple of seats over, a white-knuckled woman squeezed her eyes shut and started her mantra: “Please Jesus, please Jesus, please Jesus.”

I decided it might be a good time to study the survival cartoons tucked into the seat-back pouch in front of me. I’d never done that. And don’t necessarily recommend it.

But just in case you’re interested, here’s the gist:

If an oxygen mask drops down in front of you, yank on it, put it on, then help the expressionless child who, according to the card, will be sitting right next to you.

If you look out the window and see you’re about to crash on land or water, put your head between your legs so the child will not be able to read your lips.

If you happen to land in one piece and leaving the plane on an inflatable slide is an option, do not jump onto the slide as if you’re having a big time inside a bouncy house. Sit down and slide gently. You won’t have to explain this to Zen-child because they’re way calmer than you are. (Who is this kid, anyway?)

And finally, don’t wear high heels as you leave the plane because if you puncture that freakin’ slide, and the people behind you can’t get off, your fashionable ass will be the last one on the life raft.

I’m just reading between the cartoon lines here.

Conclusion #1: Flying in an airplane is like riding in a bubble. A thin film of safety surrounds you.

Conclusion #2: Don’t wear heels. Ever.

I needed to get my mind on something else. I leafed through a magazine I’d brought and landed, naturally, on a story about a filmmaker and entrepreneur who has been experimenting in Arizona with an enclosed Earth-like environment — imagine a big terrarium, with people — because he’s convinced the actual Earth is going to break up with humans by saying something like:

“Listen, it’s not you; it’s me. Nah, I’m lying. It’s you.”

You might remember that someone else tried to create a sort of miniature Earth — with the idea of eventually hurling it into space — in Arizona in the late 1980s. The experiment was called Biosphere 2, and it failed, basically because the oxygen ran out and the knockoff environment was not complex enough to replace it.

The story pointed out that oxygen accounts for about one-fifth of the air we breathe, and once atmospheric oxygen drops below 19.5 percent, human cells start showing signs of distress.

Guess what the oxygen level was in the latest Arizona bubble after four hours?

Seventeen percent.

I closed the magazine. It seemed like the universe was trying to tell me something. Other than don’t wear heels.

I got the message again a couple of days later, as we wriggled into wetsuits and snorkels and slipped into the 72-degree water of Kings Bay near Crystal River, Florida, a favorite manatee wintering spot because of the warm springs that feed the river.

Our guide, Rob, a former Marine who’d gotten sick of working under fluorescent lights in a warehouse, swam to a spot and pointed down.

We dipped our masks under the water just in time to see a gentle giant glide by.

Rob waved us to another spot, closer to the edge of the cove, where a manatee and her calf noshed on sea grass. The grass grew only in a narrow band, where the sunlight could reach it.

The manatees slipped away faster than we could follow. Rob had told us not to chase them. We were to disturb them as little as possible. We were in their home, he said.

The wind whipped the palm trees on shore. Our captain, Glenn, who described manatees as “the ultimate hippies,” waved us aboard. We’d try another spot. We might get lucky, he said, because a cool front was moving in, and the manatees, ever sensitive to the Earth’s whispers, would respond by eating more.

He piloted the boat to another cove, where we descended again and peered into a world vivid with darting fish and waving crabs and swaying grasses that gave off tiny bubbles.

Several yards below, on the sandy bottom, a mama manatee and her nursing calf hovered.

We hung there in a loose circle on the surface, rocked by the waves and the rhythmic rasps of our breaths moving through the snorkel tubes. With ears submerged, we could hear the squeaky patter of mom and baby.

The torpedo-shaped calf, all 7 feet of it, detached and rose to the surface, its curvy face passing a few feet in front of mine. Smoky spirals of milk streamed from its thick hound-dog upper lips.

Its eyes were round, calm, trusting.

Its blunt snout breached the surface and took in air.

I floated there, enchanted. We were to touch the manatees only with one hand — and only if they touched us first.

Mom and calf drifted away.

A few minutes later, as we paddled toward Rob, who’d made another sighting, Jeff tapped my shoulder with urgency.

I looked over. A huge manatee was moving right beside us.

Its sandpapery skin brushed Jeff’s hand as it slipped by peacefully.

We smiled around our mouthpieces.

It was their home.

And our honor.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Art of the State

Wild & Whimsical

Anne Lemanski’s fanciful patterned creatures

By Liza Roberts

If you’ve seen any of Anne Lemanski’s cosmic, colorful animal sculptures in person, you know they look as if they might twitch, or pounce, or slink on by. The skins that cover them — psychedelic prints and unexpected patterns — somehow add to this unlikely effect. Perhaps her multicolored tiger, or her ocelot, or her amazing rabbit, has emerged through a looking-glass portal from some magical realm and wound up in our own?

You’re not far off.

Lemanski’s Spruce Pine studio is, in fact, an otherworldly laboratory of creation where she doesn’t just make an animal, she learns it inside out. She studies its physicality and psychology, figures out how its haunches tense when it sits back, how they loosen in a run, how its brow might scowl at distant prey. Then she replicates all of that with copper rods she bends, cuts and welds into a three-dimensional sculpture, an armature. In an upstairs made of shipping containers, another act of creation happens, guided not by realism but by intuition. Here, she will create a skin for that armature, make it out of digital photographs or prints or collage or all three, and print it on paper. She will draw and cut a pattern as if she were making a dress or a suit and sew it all on, piece by piece, with artificial sinew. Her tools — wire cutters and an X-Acto knife — are the same, simple ones she has used for 30 years. She has no assistants.

On a warm and wet spring weekend, Lemanski is learning mink. Her giant mastiff, Dill, sits nearby. Photographs of minks in every position and resolution surround her, filling a wall and every tab on her computer. She’s learning about what minks eat, how they’re bred for coats, about the recent killing of 17 million COVID-infected mink in Denmark. “Millions! I’m not exaggerating. I was horrified,” she says, shivering. The armatures for a few minks in different positions are underway; one is complete. She holds it in her hands. “Once the armature is done, that’s the most important part of capturing the animal,” she says. “I ripped this one apart like three times. And finally, one day, it just clicked.”

With the armature complete, Lemanski moves on to the mink’s skin, leaning into the collages that form a significant counterpart to her sculpture. Comprised of illustrated images from the pages of pre-1970s textbooks, comic books, picture books and children’s encyclopedias, Lemanski uses her X-Acto knife to combine, say, giant squid with convertible cars, pigeons with mermaids, skeletons with alphabet blocks, chewing gum with polar bears. There are butcher’s maps for cuts of meat and colored-dot tests for colorblindness, and constellations and cockatoos — a century’s worth of illustrations shaken and stirred into a cocktail of nature and man, science and myth, technology, geometry, and things that are cool. A series made during COVID, Metaphysical Mineral, explores the properties of a series of eight different minerals. Quartz includes a high diver in a ’50s-era swimsuit, a white stallion and a swarm of bees. Sulphur gets a winding snake, a stick of dynamite and a cigarette.

These individual component images are one of a kind and cannot be replicated; to do so would be to lose the unmistakable texture and character of the Ben-Day dots used in printing from the 1950s to the 1970s (made particularly recognizable by the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein). “I’ve tried [copying them], and it just doesn’t work,” she says. So when she uses these images in a collage, Lemanski tacks them down lightly with a little loop of tape so she can take them off and use them again. This technique also adds to the three-dimensional look of the collages once they’re printed.

She credits a residency at Charlotte’s McColl Center with launching this kind of work. Inspired by the possibilities of the center’s large-format digital printer, she made 12 small collages and printed them in huge dimensions. These prints ended up forming the basis of a solo exhibition at the center that also included sculpture, in this instance a “three-dimensional collage” that incorporated some of the printed collage animals themselves. A 4-inch image of an impala in one print, for instance, became a life-sized impala sculpture in the center of the room that she “skinned,” in a meta twist, in digital prints of the tiny image’s own fur. “That was a challenging piece to make,” she says.

So was the Tigris T-1, a freestanding, life-size sculpture of a tiger balancing on a ball, that was acquired by noted collector Fleur Bresler for donation to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., a career-catapulting moment Lemanski is still pinching herself about. Her work is also in the permanent collections of the Mint Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Asheville Art Museum and in many private collections. It’s even found its way into wallpaper as part of a fanciful line of sly, butterfly-and-bird-bedecked prints made in Schumacher’s Peg Norris collection, a collaboration between Charlotte gallerist Chandra Johnson and interior designer Barrie Benson.

What’s next is what excites Lemanski most. Lately, she’s been working on an animal that’s captured her imagination for a while: a horse — a life-sized Appaloosa. “Who doesn’t love a horse?” she asks, as she works out the intricacies. “The hooves and ankles of a horse are extremely complex; they’re bulbous, they’re angular, and that’s where all the business happens.” Also in the hopper: her first piece of public, outdoor art — another large animal — to be cast in aluminum. It could mark the beginning of a whole new oeuvre.

“I really am looking forward to the work I’m going to make in the future,” Lemanski says. “I think it’s going to be on a large scale, and I just want to keep pushing the work forward… It’s the unknown of the future that keeps me going.”  OH

This is an excerpt from Liza Roberts’ forthcoming book Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, to be published by UNC Press this fall.