Tag: Feature

Haw River Mushrooms literally strike paydirt with organic farming techniques

By Ross Howell Jr.  •  Photographs by Sam Froelich

For many, mushrooms are the Rodney Dangerfield of the plant world. They get no respect. Heck, they aren’t even called plants anymore.

Up to the mid-19th century, scientists categorized fungus as nonchlorophyll-producing plants. But German botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary (1831–1888), who spent much of his career studying plant blights, slime mold, wheat rust, and the like, realized that what he was observing wasn’t plant material at all, but something different.

In the process, de Bary was able to show that potato blight was spread by fungus. This was a big deal, since hundreds of thousands of Irish a few years earlier had perished in the Great Famine. For his discovery, de Bary would be recognized as the father of mycology, a branch of biology devoted to the study of fungi.

Mushrooms differ from plants in that they secrete digestive enzymes to process food, which makes them more closely related to animals than to the vegetables we buy at farmers’ markets. To me, that’s a little creepy.

So you have to respect any farmers’ market grower who opens an online presentation with the words, “I’m Laura Stewart, and I grow fungus for a living.”

And Laura Stewart — along with her husband Ches — is the reason I’m turning into the gravel drive of Haw River Mushrooms, an organic farm outside Saxapahaw, a town on the banks of the Haw River. The town’s name was influenced by a Native American tribe first chronicled as the “Sauxpa” by Spanish explorers in the 16th century.

Along the driveway some pickups are parked. To the right I can see a couple semitrailers. Next to them stands a low cinder-block skirt and a metal superstructure for what looks like a soon-to-be-completed growing house.

I park by a big oak tree and step out of the car. Two men are working in front of a big shed at a substantial piece of equipment I don’t recognize.

A woman drives up in a dark minivan. She pulls a lock of auburn hair behind an ear as she gets out, gathering items from the front seat. She closes the driver’s door with a hip. Her hands are full of keys, mail, a cup of coffee and a half-eaten muffin. She smiles, looking at me quizzically.

“You must be Laura Stewart,” I say.

“Oh, my goodness,” she says. “We’ve been so busy I forgot! I just did a mushroom growing program at my daughters’ day care. Have you been waiting long?”

“Just got here,” I answer.

We walk toward a pretty farmhouse with a vegetable garden by the porch. Inside, I’m greeted by a big, friendly shepherd dog named Isaac.

Laura introduces me to her husband Ches, a compact, powerfully built man who’s just about to head out the door with an interviewee for a full-time job at the farm. Ches and I shake hands.

He tells me he’s from South Carolina and was interested in horses when he was younger.

“My background’s agricultural,” Ches says. He attended Middle Tennessee State University Auburn University, and received a master’s degree at Clemson University. “All I ever wanted to do was farm,” he adds.

Ches and the interviewee head out the door, Isaac trotting along behind them.

Laura and I sit down at a thick-legged dining table. She tells me she and Ches founded Haw River Mushrooms in 2012, when each of them still had full-time jobs. Ches was working for a company as a crop adjuster and she was education director at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, a nonprofit organization in Pittsboro that encourages people in the Carolinas to grow and eat local, organic food.

Like Ches, Laura has seen a good bit of the country, too. She studied at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and received a master’s degree in management at Antioch University in Seattle, Washington. The couple met in Columbus, Ohio.

“Our first date we went to Polyface Farm,” Laura says. My initial thought is, well, maybe that’s the name of a fancy restaurant in Columbus.

Was I ever wrong.

Polyface Farm — the “Farm of Many Faces — is located in the Shenandoah Valley near Swoope, Virginia. For anyone deeply interested in sustainable, organic agriculture, the farm is a place of pilgrimage, offering a variety of educational tours, programs and seminars.

Back in 1961 William and Lucille Salatin purchased a worn-out, eroded property and settled there with their young family. Rather than follow the conventional principles of farming at the time, they used nature as a pattern and began the long process of organically restoring the land.

The Salatins planted trees, built compost piles, dug ponds and moved grazing livestock daily using electric fencing. They were pioneers in grass-fed beef production. Along the way they invented portable sheltering systems for cattle, chickens and rabbits, and introduced sustainable methods for raising pigs in woodland areas.

One of the Salatins’ sons, Joel, is the spokesman for Polyface Farm. Considered by his fans to be “the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson,” he is sometimes labeled a “charlatan” by his detractors.

Whatever Joel Salatin is, he’s inspirational. He’s written 12 books and delivers inspiring educational presentations around the country.

“Ches and I read Joel’s book, You Can Farm,” Laura says. “And it had a big impact on us. We started thinking even more seriously about how farming could earn us the living we wanted for ourselves and our children.”

So the couple moved to our part of North Carolina — for the climate and the close access to local urban markets.

“This is a great area to locate a small, sustainable family farm,” Laura says. In addition to climate and markets, there are excellent resources, like Laura’s former employer, the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, and the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA(RAFI), also headquartered in Pittsboro. RAFI’s mission is to cultivate markets, policies and communities that support thriving, socially just and environmentally sound family farms.

In the end, though, it all comes down to hard work and good dirt. And mushrooms are about as efficient at making good dirt as any living thing you can think of.

The vegetative part of a fungus is called the mycelium, a system of fine, branching filaments. Think of the mycelium as the “roots” of a mushroom, and the edible part as its “fruit.” Mycelium may form a colony too small to see with the naked eye, or one that can spread for thousands of acres.

Secreting enzymes that are remarkably effective at breaking down plant material, these colonies add essential organic material to the soil. They also enhance nutrient and water absorption by the roots of plants, increasing their resistance to disease. And the mycelium colonies release carbon dioxide into the environment.

And carbon dioxide is just what green plants need. By photosynthesis, they use carbon dioxide and water to produce sugar and oxygen, vital to sustaining their life and growth. Of course, the oxygen green plants manufacture is fairly important to us human beings, too.

“We’re surrounded by an amazing system of abundance,” as Laura likes to put it. She suggests we head outside so I can see how they grow fungus at Haw River Mushrooms.

As we walk toward the machine where the two men are working, Laura points out a raised bed in the garden by the house. She explains that it’s an example of what the Germans call Hugelkultur, a technique using compost materials to build beds where plants can be grown. Here the bed is underlaid with mushroom-inoculated logs covered with straw. Atop the bed grows a squash vine.

“We harvested more than 40 yellow squash,” Laura says. “And there are healthy mycelium developing on the logs under the straw.”

She stops by an enormous oak tree near the garden. There’s a mulched bed surrounding the tree. Laura reaches into the mulch, carefully exposing the white tendrils of mushroom mycelium with her fingers.

“In the wild, mushrooms often grow at wood’s edge, so we thought we’d give this a try,” Laura says. She tells me she and Ches have farmer friends who are trying to grow mushrooms between rows of sweet corn. She calls all these growing experiments — the squash bed, the mulched bed around the oak, the corn row mushrooms — “citizen science.”

Now we’ve reached the machine in front of the shed. It’s used to inject substrate — the material in which the mushrooms will grow — into clear bags. After the substrate, a splash of water is injected. The tops of the bags are folded over. Then they’re placed into a galvanized livestock watering trough that has been outfitted with propane burners on the bottom.

“The substrate is a mix of mulch, soybean hulls, straw and oak sawdust,” Laura says. “There’s a sawmill in Liberty where we especially like to get our sawdust,” she adds.

Once the trough is filled with bags, a lid is put over the top and the burners ignited. Since they are so rich in organic materials, the bags have to be sterilized.

“Otherwise, any sort of bacteria or fungus could start growing inside,” Laura says. Once they’re sterilized, the bags are transferred to racks in the cooled shed behind us. There they’ll be inoculated with the spores of the various types of mushrooms that are the farm’s specialties.

We walk across the drive to one of the semitrailers, or “grow houses.” Laura closes the door behind us. Inside the space is dimly lit.

Laura explains the growing houses could be lit with blue light only, since that’s the range of the spectrum the mushrooms respond to.

“We thought one Halloween we might hang blue lights when we do tours, just for effect,” she says.

It’s cool and damp. The only sound is the whirring of air-moving equipment. Clear bags now removed, blocks of substrate with mushrooms emerging at various states of development rest on racks running the length of the trailer.

As I’m making notes, I look up, befuddled to see I’m suddenly shrouded in fog. Laura smiles.

“The misters come on every six minutes,” she says.

Outside I blink in the sunlight. Laura points out the new growing house with the metal superstructure.

“We’re going to plant blackberries,” she says. “The native soil is poor, so we’ll compost. When the blackberries are growing, we’ll pipe in carbon dioxide from the mushroom growing houses.”

An amazing system of abundance, indeed.

Haw River Mushrooms now has six full-time employees, counting the Stewarts, and several part-timers. They organically grow lions mane, oyster mushrooms, shiitake, cinnamon caps and reishi, supplying mushrooms to several restaurants in the Triangle and Triad.

Haw River also sells mushrooms at the Eno River Farmers Market in Hillsborough, the Chapel Hill Farmers’ Market, the Durham Farmers’ Market, and the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market. They ship mushroom vegan jerky to customers throughout the country.

The farm offers classes on mushroom cultivation and tincture-making.

“Mushrooms have amazing medicinal powers we are just beginning to understand,” Laura says. While they’ve long been studied for their curative and culinary value, there’s a great deal that remains unknown. With more than 600,000 known varieties on Earth, only about 44,000 have actually been studied.

“The lions mane we grow here at the farm is a North Carolina native,” Laura says. “It’s recently been studied to see if it might have value in treating dementia.”

Or consider the cordyceps mushroom, a species native to the North Carolina mountains. Like its nearly 400 cousin species around the world, our native cordyceps is an endoparasitoid, meaning that it’s parasitic, feeding primarily on insects.

But it gets way weirder. Once cordyceps invades the body of a host insect, its mycelium begins to grow, replacing the bug’s innards. In the process, the cordyceps somehow gains control of its host’s brain, so that the insect climbs to the highest point of whatever bush or tree it might be inhabiting. There, it dies.

Since Laura has told me about maybe using the blue lights in the growing houses for Halloween, I ask her if she’s pulling my leg.

“Oh, no,” Laura assures me, “You can Google it.”

In fact, cordyceps reproductive strategy is very effective. There are a plenty of insects on which it can hitch a ride, and when its fruit appears, it’s perfectly perched for its spores to achieve their widest geographical distribution.

Maybe this one can be researched for its psychedelic powers?

A perennially popular class at Haw River Mushrooms is “log inoculation,” offered in fall, winter and spring. Hardwood logs three to six inches in diameter that have been harvested by local farmers — typically in annual field brush-clearing, since sustainability is so important to the Stewarts — are cut into roughly four-foot lengths.

“After leaf fall, the logs have a high concentration of sugar,” Laura says. The concentration of sugar lengthens the amount of time that the logs will sustain mushroom growth.

Students then drill holes in individual logs, inoculate them with mushroom spawn, then take their logs home to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that, which is why you’ll enjoy taking one of the classes.

For those of you who’d like to forage for wild mushrooms and avoid poisoning yourself in the process, the farm also offers field trips. Laura is a certified mushroom forager for North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

There are also programs on mushroom growing for kids, using mushrooms in raising other crops and soil building in the garden. Laura, Ches and staff regularly welcome groups to the farm for tours.

With all the interest, the Stewarts are looking for a larger farm nearby.

“Long-term, we’d love to be able to convert everything to solar power,” Laura says.

I’d say mushrooms are finally getting the respect they deserve. Cue Aretha Franklin..  OH

If you have a garden or landscape topic you’d like Ross Howell Jr. to write about, email ross.howell1@gmail.com (don’t miss the number 1 in the address).

For more information on Haw River Mushrooms programs or products, visit its website, hawrivermushrooms.com, or follow on Facebook and Instagram at the handle @hawrivermushrooms, or check out the farm’s Pinterest page.

By Ash Alder

Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable, the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street or road by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese. Both are warnings of chill days ahead, fireside and topcoat weather. — Hal Borland

November is cold mornings and cashmere.

Before the earliest skein of geese break the silence of the day, you unearth your winter wardrobe, rediscovering the ageless sweater that, despite its annual reappearance, always feels brand-new.

When the geese trumpet across the sky, you are cradling your coffee by the kitchen window, watching the backyard squirrels zigzag like pinballs as they unearth their own buried treasures.

November is time to take stock.

On the back porch, there is kindling to split. And back in the kitchen, one dozen Bartlett pears resemble a Claude Monet still-life.

What will you bring to the table this month?

One dozen Bartlett pears now peeled, cored, and chopped, simmer on the stovetop with three pounds of cranberries, two cups of dried cherries, one cup of sugar.

November is equal parts sweet and bitter.

Your bones seem to know that winter is near, yet your skin sings in cashmere.

Even as the autumn leaves descend, the Earth continues to give, give, give.

Pastel sunrises.

Winter squash and rainbow chard.

Murmurations of starlings.

And camellia blossoms which, despite their annual reappearance, always feel like tiny miracles.

What Will You Create?

Thanksgiving is celebrated on Thursday, Nov. 28. As you craft your Thanksgiving plate with the zest of a landscape architect, consider what you are creating on a larger scale. Are you building a life that is savory? Bitter? Sweet? Or does it offer a little bit of everything — bursting at the seams with color and flavor, yet with enough space for gratitude and magic?

Looking Up

According to National Geographic, three of the top sky-watching events of 2019 happen this month, beginning with the Transit of Mercury on Nov. 11. Of course, you won’t be able to witness what will look like a tiny pinhole traveling across the sun with the naked eye, nor should you attempt this without safety precautions (eclipse glasses, solar binoculars, solar filters, etc.). According to the article, “This will be the last transit of Mercury available to North Americans until May 7, 2049.”

On Sunday, Nov. 24, don’t miss brilliant luminaries Venus and Jupiter close as ever in the southwest horizon — just 1.4 degrees apart. And on Thanksgiving Day, 45 minutes after sundown, take another look low in the southwestern sky and see what National Geographic calls the “celestial summit meeting” of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and a hairline crescent moon.

The Power of Gratitude

The correlation between gratitude and happiness was common sense long before it was research material. And yet, time and again, psychologists’ findings support what poets and sages of the ages have long been conveying: Gratitude is good for you.

Moreover, it can radically change your life.

A recent article by Harvard Medical School’s Harvard Health Publishing offers six simple practices for cultivating gratitude:

1. Write a thank-you note.

2. Thank someone mentally.

3. Keep a gratitude journal.

4. Count your blessings.

5. Pray.

6. Meditate.

And while we’re on the subject, here are three powerful quotes on gratitude that suggest its utter potency:

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” — Eckhart Tolle

“We need to learn to want what we have, not to have what we want, in order to get stable and steady happiness.” — Dalai Lama

“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.” — Oprah Winfrey

Happy Thanksgiving!  OH

To the 25th anniversary production of CTG’s The Wizard Of Oz

By Quinn Dalton

Justice Reeves-Burke, a sophomore at Weaver Academy and one of two Dorothys cast in Community Theatre of Greensboro’s production of The Wizard of Oz, knows what it’s like to grow up in the theater. At 15, and now in her seventh year in the production, she’s been acting for literally half a lifetime.

She credits her mother, Adriane Reeves-Burke, for her start. “My mom had been the stage manager in Oz the year before,” Reeves says. Her first role? A munchkin. “I was in the Lullaby League, and I was also a crow,” Reeves recalls. That was the first three years. The second three she spent in the Women’s Chorus — they are on stage when Dorothy makes her first entrance running down the aisle. She auditioned for the Dorothy role at age 12, 13 and 14 before being offered the role this year. “I finally got it,” she says. The excitement is clear in her voice. So is the confidence. She has followed her passion and she’s kept coming back year after year — for the joy of it, mainly — and she’s ready to make her own run down that aisle.

Reeves-Burke’s story echoes the story of so many actors, stage crew members, volunteers and family members who, over 70 seasons, have formed the family that is the Community Theatre of Greensboro.

CTG executive director Roz Fulton came to Greensboro as a student at N.C. A&T, graduating in 2000 with a B.S. in family and consumer science education. CTG was the only place she applied to, hired as an administrative assistant. When she joined, the annual Wizard of Oz production was only in its fourth year, and it was also the only CTG production that provided an abundance of roles for children.

Over the next few years, she saw so many talented young people play their hearts out as a munchkin, poppy or crow. But there weren’t many opportunities for kids in other CTG productions. “I wanted to see all the kids shine.”

In 2005 the education director role came available and she asked the CTG board to consider her. “I always had a creative side to me,” she says. “They gave me the chance.”

Their first youth production kicked off in 2008 with High School Musical. Many other famous musical productions adapted for younger audiences have found their way onto the stage through Music Theatre International’s Broadway Junior series.

With all of this developing talent, Fulton launched CTG’s Centerstage Youth Performing Group and began adapting those performances to compete in the Junior Theater Festival, a national competition held in Atlanta in which youth theater programs perform 15-minute versions of full-length performances. To be clear, these short versions are not simply a selection of scenes. They are in fact a 15-minute version of a full-length production. The youth actors help with selection, and Fulton scripts each one. The actors practice under a tight schedule to prepare. In 2020, Fulton and her talented troupe will also attend Junior Theater Festival West in Sacramento for the first time. “It’s the most exciting thing we do,” she says.

Passing the Wand

This year, 19 years after newly graduated Fulton decided CTG was the only place she wanted to apply, she became CTG’s executive director, stepping smoothly into the role formerly held by Mitchel Sommers, who still directs Oz as he has every year since the first production in 1995. Which means Fulton and Sommers have been taking us down the yellow brick road for longer than many of the cast members have been alive. And this is a big year — it’s CTG’s 70th season and the 25th production of The Wizard of Oz.

“It’s the longest continuously running Wizard of Oz production in the world,” Sommers says, and he’s put in the time to know. He is always looking for other longer-running productions as he’s worked year after year to keep this classic production fresh.

This involves frequent changes to sets, choreography, costumes and even adding to the cast. Last year for example, the newly minted Emerald City Ensemble added dance and comic sparkle, and this year some major set design updates will wow audiences.

The scale of CTG’s Oz is in and of itself dazzling. Because of its popularity, it’s the one show staged at the historic Carolina Theatre. The roughly 100-
person cast is only a sliver of the picture. Backstage, two sets of 25 volunteers work in different teams, one on each production weekend, assisting with props, set and costume changes, with lighting and sound crews hired in.

Then there are the parents, bless them, who get their munchkin or flying monkey to practice every afternoon and on weekends as the show dates near, and may volunteer as well. Often, it’s truly a family effort. In Roz Fulton’s case, daughter Morgan did a munchkin/poppy turn while husband Jevon was one of the Fly Guys — the volunteers who run the rigging that puts the air under the Wicked Witch’s broom.

All told, between cast, crew, professional technicians, volunteers and of course CTG staff, each production directly involves around 220 people. That’s, of course, not including the thousands of audience members — multiplied by 25 years. That’s a lot of people coming together to share the wonder of one of the most famous stories in the world, one that happens to be not just about going home, but knowing where your home really is.

There’s no Place like Home

Mitchel Sommers has seen first-hand how thousands of young and adult actors have found their home in theater. “Many people who perform with CTG, and not just with The Wizard of Oz, their lives may not be ideal,” Sommers says. “This lifts them up to a better place. Sometimes it’s just a matter of learning basic life skills — how to dress themselves or how to read or how to just have a conversation.” Often, he says, it’s as simple as walking into a world they wouldn’t know otherwise. “Some of our actors come to practice from a shelter and they live for being part of this production. When they come here they’re on the same stage and singing the same songs as people who have grown up in a mansion and had every advantage.”

And the stories. Too many to count. Too many to mention. The grandmother who’s brought her granddaughter to every production for 20 years. The mother who, as a little girl, was in the cast of Annie, the first production Mitchel directed, and years later performed in Oz with her daughters. The friendships and even families that found their start on that stage. The people he runs into everywhere he goes, locally and in far-flung places, who tell him about their own experience in the show, or about their child’s, or how it was the first play they ever saw, made possible by CTG’s free school performance during the week before opening night.

Mitchel found his home too — in CTG, in Oz, and the theater, always the theater. Every story is another reason he stays with it. “This is how we share what it’s like to be human,” he says. “We are all transformed on the stage.”

Justice Reeves-Burke, who shares the role of Dorothy this year with High Point’s Penn-Griffin School for the Arts’ junior Mackenzie Mullins, agrees. The two Dorothys split their performances over the two weekends — partly so there is an understudy in case of sickness, and partly to allow more opportunity for actors to shine. She says she might never have found her passion if both of her moms hadn’t suggested she try it. So she wants to pay that favor forward to anyone wondering if there might be a place on stage for them. “Try it,” she says. “It’s taught me so much. And when it comes together it’s the best feeling in the world.”  OH

Quinn Dalton is the author of two story collections and two novels, most recently Midnight Bowling. She also co-authored The Infinity Of You & Me under the pen name JQ Coyle with fellow UNCG M.F.A. grad Julianna Baggott.

 For information on showdates: November 16 – 24. https://www.facebook.com/pg/communitytheatreofgreensboro/events/?ref=page_internal

A poetic meditation

By Jaki Shelton Green

I’m never cooking alone, even at my most solitary moments. I am surrounded by generations of cooks, their wisdom, laughter, and their flawed and perfect recipes lifting my hands and heart savoring each ingredient as I realize that each ingredient represents all the joys, sorrows, healing and restoration of my life’s journey. These unseen hands hold me in passionate surrender to generosity as family and friends gather at my table reminding me that food creates community, holds my sense of identity, and conjures sensory surprises over and over again. The ghosts of other tables, other kitchens remind me that we are all just ingredients, and what matters is the grace with which I cook the meal.

My food odyssey is a soundtrack re-mix like the texture of an autobiography offering a throw-back to prayer-song, dance, birth, death, sex and rock and roll. The backyard chicken coops, vegetable gardens and mini orchards are long gone like my elders and the neighborhood of my childhood. What remains is me . . . the brown woman-child writing down the sizzle of cast iron skillets, the bold of the beet, the hot of the pepper pot, the earthiness of walnuts, the bitter of arugula.

Food helps me to express my past and present. Food helps me to create communal ties and honor my ancestral roots.

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God,

Born of his Spirit, washed in his blood” — Frances Crosby

My grandmother, Eva White Tate, hosted the Ora Shanklin African Methodist Episcopal Missionary meetings, which gathered monthly on first Monday evenings during the springs and summers of my youth. An agenda of devotions, song, prayer and Scripture segued into Old and New Business, projects to raise money for their many charitable activities, missionary dues, and a “love offering” for the sick. My grandmother, mother and aunts raced around all day preparing food and setting an elegant table for the elaborately coiffed church ladies in their flawless pristine summer linen, pastels, crepe de chine, patent leather and sexy slingbacks that made ticky-tacky squeals across the glistening, freshly waxed wood floor.

This monthly soiree featured milk glass vases holding peony globes and arrangements of snapdragons, Queen Anne’s lace and foxgloves strategically placed on the crisp white linen tablecloth adorning the antique oak dining table, monogrammed linen napkins, and the heirloom silverware that was left to my tiny hands to polish on a monthly basis. I was impressed that the deviled eggs required their own unique platter, designed especially for — deviled eggs. Mounds of homemade chicken salad garnished with apples, pecans and grapes, potato salad, pear walnut salad, canapés of cucumber-dill cream cheese, pimento cheese, stuffed olives, and perfectly browned chicken legs were presented on sparkling crystal and carnival glass serving platters.

The inlaid glass sideboard was majestic with a centerpiece of magnolia, camellia and gardenia blossoms fresh cut from my grandmother’s flower garden and hosting cut glass pedestals of scrumptious coconut cake, petit fours, homemade (pink, green, yellow) mints, fresh strawberries, chocolate-covered peanuts, and my grandmother’s famous secret recipe egg custard. Pitchers of brewed mint tea and punch bowls bearing icy rainbow sherbet flanked both sides of the dessert display waiting to be admired and devoured by the white-gloved missionaries.

This pageantry of memory continues to feed my upper-crust soul. This pageantry was the backdrop for all the whispered gossips and secrets of uppity church women in between “a piece of this and a little dab of that.”

“Summertime, and the livin’ is easy

Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high

Oh, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good looking

So hush little baby, don’t you cry.” — Dubose Heyward

The smell of coffee brewing, bacon frying and hot biscuits browning were the only summer alarm clocks in our house. The first few weeks following school vacation, my brother and I spent lazy days playing between our house and Aunt Alice’s house or hanging out at Uncle Ervin’s Service Station pretending to be proprietors behind the counter taking money for gas, candy, milk, bread, but never the cigarettes. That fun would be interrupted when “the garden came in” with lima beans, snap beans, wax beans, okra, peas, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, cantaloupe, cabbage, lettuce, watermelon and corn. The litany from porch to porch throughout the neighborhood addressed to our bored little brown bodies was, “Shut up whining, your little bellies will be glad to get this food come wintertime. Don’t put those hulls in that bowl.” So we pouted in-between snapping, shucking, peeling and rinsing so the grown folks could can, freeze, stew and preserve.

These were the summers when our “Up South” Northern kin folks took a notion to jump in a car or hop a bus or train and show up unannounced, usually with five or six children in tow. Our family had abundant land and food, so this uncouth behavior never daunted my mom, grandmother and aunts. They knew how to “hold their mouths right” and bring forth their best masks of civility so refined that no one ever read their furious annoyance hidden beneath the labor of love they laid out for two or three weeks presenting daily breakfast, lunch and supper smorgasbords of cured smoked ham and red-eye gravy, scrambled cheese eggs, grits, salmon croquettes, biscuits, bacon, sausage, homemade peach, strawberry, blackberry, pear jelly and preserves, stewed apples, potato cakes, cinnamon rolls and toast. The “guests” would feast and then retreat to the front porch, into the yard, watch television, or return to bed to sleep away their city blues.

With the guests “out of the way,” the women folks washed dishes, swept crumbs, cleared the table and talked in hushed ridicule and dismay about their hungry citified relatives. After they caught their breaths and a few of the leftover table scraps, they started the operation for lunch or “just a little something to tide them over,” which was usually homemade egg, tuna or chicken salad, the optional ham and cheese sandwich, tossed salad, chilled watermelon and cantaloupe, iced tea and fresh lemonade served outside on the porch.

Fried chicken, fried fish, turnip salad, chicken and dumplings, stewed tomatoes, potato salad, rice pudding, fried okra and squash, pound cake, apple pie and yeast rolls made the “Up South” folks remember where home really was. They never suspected by our good manners how their unannounced visits interrupted our summer explorations, building camps and forts in the woods, fishing, skinny-dipping, catching tadpoles, making June bug whistles, chasing lightning bugs and baking mud-pies all day in the sun.

“If you want to know

Where I’m going

Where I’m going, soon

If anybody ask you

Where I’m going

Where I’m going soon

I’m going up yonder

I’m going up yonder

To be with my Lord” — Tremaine Hawkins

Death often disrupts my family and community. We gather with food because food is the ultimate and final expression of how we love and the culture of our community. Feasting with the dead even now and in my past continues to provide me a way to reconnect and maintain connections with my ancestors and my daughter. My family and extended tribes have never needed a copy of “Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.” It’s in our blood . . . we know what we know about the power of fried gizzards, leftover meat loaf, turkey necks, fried croakers, okra gumbo and moonshine.

The laying out of the dead and the laying out of the food pulls me closer and closer to that vortex of all things familiar and comfortable. These are forever images imbedded in my mind’s rolling video screen of the deaths of my father, grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins and my daughter.

When my precious daughter Imani died, people came with their stories of her life neatly folded in the corners of picnic baskets. They delivered their stories of her whimsy, her sass and her bravado rolled inside a fresh loaf of sourdough bread, slithering across roasted vegetables laced with slow-drizzling balsamic, baked inside a piping hot strawberry rhubarb pie. The stories were alive inside the food. Imani loved food. Imani loved to feed people, so her stories became the food itself … roasted with superfluous green garlic, cilantro, cumin, basil, a rack of lamb Imani threatened to throw at her brother one Easter, the duck medallions I cooked for the last Christmas meal of her life with us, or the wild salmon steaks she’d hide in the freezer.

What I know that I know is food heals. Food covers the wounded heart. Food holds the raging storm and invites Spirit to the table.

“I will love you anyway

Even if you cannot stay

I think you are the one for me

Here is where you ought to be

I just want to satisfy you

Though you’re not mine

I can’t deny you

Don’t you hear me talking baby?

Love me now or I’ll go crazy” — Chaka Khan

Appearance. Taste. Texture. Symbolism. Succulence. The Interaction of Colors. The Dance Behind Oven Doors. Edible Metaphors. Velvety. Heavy Cream. Spice Jars. Simmer. Pan Fry. Cold Wash. Knead. Roll. Curl. Caramelize. Braise. Soak. Stir. Roast. Open Fire. Hot Oil. Blend. Fold. Mortar and Pestle. Pine Nuts. Raspberries. Almonds. Champagne Grapes. Mango Preserves. Muscadines. Tomatoes. Expresso. Le coq au vin. Charred Romaine. Mousse. Rose Water. Artichokes. Truffles. Butter. Candied Ginger. Chocolate. Dirty Rice. Brie. Cherries. Figs. Saffron Threads. Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Chutney. Parfait. Hazelnuts. Orange Peel. Lime Zest. Gar-licky Collards, Ambrosia, Chow Chow. Red Rice. Rosemary Sea Salt.

I love the way these words, sounds and ancient cooking rhythms sing inside my mouth . . . and honey chile’ don’t forget the Honey.

“If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with him. The people who give you their food give you their heart.” — Cesar Chavez

I remember the first meal I ever prepared for my husband. Lots of talking and long glances over a table full of lush sensuality. Mango gazpacho. Grilled salmon with a black bean-ginger-garlic glaze. Roasted asparagus. Brussels sprouts, beets, feta and walnuts drizzled with fig balsamic vinaigrette. Basmati rice. Yeast rolls. Arugula salad. Sparkling pear cider. Mixed berries dusted with coriander.

Once upon a time, I prepared a “last supper” for a lover I was kicking to the curb. It seemed best to leave a taste of me on his lips. Filet of beef in puff pastry and Madeira cream sauce. Caramelized shallots, carrots and mushrooms. Roasted lemon-garlic artichokes. Grand Marnier cheesecake.

My first memory of a romantic meal was sharing a tomato sandwich made with tomatoes I’d grown in a small bucket as a child with a little boy visiting my grandmother with his grandparents. I was mesmerized by his seersucker plaid shorts and matching bowtie. Crisp white shirt. White crew socks. White bucks. Magic happened between us when the juicy tomato dripped down his long elegant hands and he slowly licked the essence of my first harvest.

My husband and I love to cook. Our food landscape is forever changing, moving, reinventing itself, but what remains always is “sauce” so rich and soulful that it requires the licking of fingers, eyelids, noses, jelly-roll laughs, and oceans of soft fluttery kisses. Our food adventures continue to awaken our passion . . .

“Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. ‘I said, ‘I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.’ May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine, the fragrances of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine. May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. I belong to my lover, and his desire is for me.” — Song of Songs 7:7-10

We stroll into each other’s perfumed gardens gathering wild honeycomb. Whether dining by candlelight in our intimate dining room or sitting at a makeshift table in the woods with dandelions my love has picked on the way, we savor the bread between us. The anticipation of a romantic meal is oftentimes aphrodisiac enough. We can’t stop smiling and casting knowing glances at each other the whole time we are preparing the meal. Late at night I flow through celestial whipped dreamy clouds trailing the scents of rose and lavender as I fold gently into the crevices of pillows stuffed with crushed rosemary*.

*According to ancient scribes, rosemary was a love potion for engaged or married couples, symbolizing remembrance and fidelity.  OH

Poet and teacher Jaki Shelton Green is North Carolina’s ninth poet laureate and is the recipient of a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.

This piece was previously published in The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food (2016); Eno Publishers.

Ravaged by fire and flood, High Point’s formerly “lost”Dalton-Bell-Cameron House is reborn as a resplendent designers’ showhouse

By Nancy Oakley   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

For Margaret Bell Lewis, it is a symbol of an idyllic childhood; for Benjamin Briggs, a “miracle” of historic preservation; for Ray Wheatley, a challenge that had to be met. For High Point at large, the Dalton-Bell-Cameron House is a crucial link to the past — and a rallying point for the community.

The Craftsman structure, says Wheatley, co-owner, along with his brother, Steve of Spruce Builders, is a house that “everybody knows.” Situated on 1013 Johnson Street just back of the iconic J.H. Adams Inn, it is, as Preservation Greensboro’s Briggs confirms, the earliest example of the Craftsman style in High Point. “It has Mount Airy granite foundations with grapevine mortar, indicative of the Craftsman style — and of craftsmanship,” he says.
It is a cleaner style — a reaction to the fussiness of earlier Victorian confections  — that favored hand-wrought details and furnishings over those that were mass-produced. Briggs points out other architectural details such as the Asian-inspired, wide overhanging eaves and sawn rake boards and “an amazing” living room mantel flanked by two pilasters that were fashioned with a technique called stop fluting, which infills the cavity of the flute. “The top,” he adds, “is decorated with an egg and dart motif.” Even rarer: the absence of a mantel shelf around the firebox.

Such details were revolutionary in 1913, the year that a young attorney and rising politician, Carter Dalton, began construction on the house, but over the ensuing two decades, the Craftsman bungalow would influence residential building throughout the city.

It would also become a fulcrum for the neighborhood. “Johnson Street,” Briggs observes, “reads like a sentence. This is the middle of the sentence.”  The Prairie-style, Burnett-McCain House across the street, and the aesthetic of the Dalton-Bell-Cameron Craftsman create what he calls an “a nice conversation between these two houses.”

Margaret Bell Lewis, whose family lived in the house during the postwar years, knows a thing or two about the interplay of neighborhood residents. “Johnson Street was full of young families,” she says of her childhood during the late 1950s and early ’60s. “We all played together and had a great time,” she recalls. “We all had big backyards. We could run across the street, because people didn’t tear up and down like they do now.” She remembers the Craftsman’s large rooms, including a playroom upstairs and a laundry room that her parents added to the original structure. “When they did that, they paved the concrete walkway,” she says, recalling how she and her siblings, Irene and Ted, “put our hands in the cement.”

She would relay this detail to Ray Wheatley, who was initially skeptical that the children’s imprints would be buried beneath a heap of burnt and rotting timbers when, a year and a half ago, he was enlisted to restore the house that he deemed “a lump of coal.”

For not once, but twice, the Dalton-Bell-Cameron house fell victim to fire. In the mid-1990s, shortly after it avoided demolition to accommodate a proposed parking lot, a group of vagrants lit a fire in the middle of a side room. The damage from the fire was relatively contained, as Briggs affirms, and another savior of the property appeared in the form of Mary Powell Young DeLille, a rising young Realtor, who bought and restored the house. “I was single when I bought it, got married and had two kids,” she recalls of the 10 years she lived there. Under subsequent ownership in 2013, a second fire occurred. It could have easily spelled total destruction of the Craftsman jewel. Speculating that the conflagration started in the master bedroom, Wheatley says the flames spread between the deck and the kitchen “and took about half the roof of the house.” Preservationists appealed to representatives of the house’s owner, but a full-scale restoration was out of reach. The roofless structure exposed the interior to the elements. “For six years it was open to rain,” Wheatley recalls. “It basically rotted.”

Many, including city officials, considered the house a lost cause — except for Margaret Lewis and her husband, Rick. “People think I’m crazy, but I don’t think I am,” she says, pausing. “I didn’t want to see it torn down. It was a very important street for me growing up, my siblings and my friends.” The Lewises bought the house from the High Point Preservation Society, which had raised money over a five-day period to purchase it, a “fun, but nerve-racking,” endeavor as Briggs recalls, but a testament to High Point’s “can-do spirit.” The couple then appealed to the Junior League of High Point, for which Margaret had once served as president, to stage a designers’ showhouse, along with Aspire Design and Home magazine. But first, they engaged the Wheatleys’ Spruce Builders to tackle the structural damage.

“I was honored they asked me to,” says Ray Wheatley. “I said, ‘I can fix it . . . I don’t know how much it will cost, but I can fix it.’” Framing was the biggest challenge. The years of water damage had taken a toll such that Weeks Hardwood Flooring had to replace almost all of the flooring systems (only the originals in the dining room were intact). “The staircase was sinking, plaster was falling off the walls,” Wheatley recalls. Most of the house — molding, doors, for example — couldn’t be salvaged. But the foundation of Mount Airy granite held. And once the charred debris was cleared away, a surviving slab beneath the deck of the house revealed three signatures: “Margaret,” “Irene” and “Ted.” The names of the Bell children, written in wet concrete years ago remained.

Wheatley and his subcontractors worked on the house for about a year until it was ready to be gussied up last month by 21 designers, many of them familiar local names — Allen and James, Leslie Moore of L.Moore Designs, Nicole Culler, Libby Langdon — while others, such as David Santiago and Courtney McLeod brought a New York flair to the interiors. Surveying the final preparations just prior to the opening of the fall High Point Market, Briggs expressed his delight with the house’s transformation, standing on its second floor, looking out at the rebuilt raking eaves at the surrounding cityscape. “I can see the four-pointed steeple of the First Presbyterian Church. It’s a great layering of history.” He recallsbeing in the house some 20-odd years ago, as a young preservationist taking its measurements. “I’m from High Point,” he reflects. “This one is special.” Ray Wheatley concurs: “I hope it stands for another hundred years,” he says of the house that he literally raised from the ashes. Both men give credit to its new life to Margaret and Rick Lewis, and she, to the community that initially doubted her mission. “I’m thrilled that so many people have said, ‘I’m so glad you did this,’” she says. “I just wish Mom and Dad were alive to see it, but . . . they may just be up in heaven, watching us.”  OH

For more information: jlhp.org/showhouse2019/ or highpointishome.com