Tag: Home Grown

Home Grown

You Break It, He Fixes It

A timeless garage offering everything without the gloss

By Cynthia Adams

There are a few dusty trucks parked outside Gum Springs Garage. Otherwise, there are no overt clues that this is a place of significance, one that has supported the livelihoods of this Pittsboro farming community since the 1950s.

Inside is a glimpse of a rare authenticity as endangered as the hand-written letter.

No money is wasted on appearances. Not even a doorknob on the sliding door to the garage, just a hasp and padlock. Even on a sweltering day, the door is open to the working man’s establishment on Silk Hope Gum Springs Road.

There is no sign stating, “We fix what you broke,” but that is what happens here. Auto repair is the primary focus. But rows of repaired and tagged chainsaws, leaf blowers, weed whackers and edgers await pickup. If, say, a tool or tractor is busted beyond repair and cannot be fixed, then proprietor Randy Kidd can order or help find a new one.

The garage itself, a former service station, is doggedly rustic, with a sphere of influence that blooms far beyond the oil-soaked floors. The place would make a fancy man’s garage — the kind manfluencers show off with vintage cars parked on gleaming surfaces clean enough to eat on — look foolish.

There is no angling for commercial appeal at Gum Springs Garage. Instead, energy and resources are devoted to the locals who work on their farms, land and gardens. Fluorescent lights illuminate shelves of engine oil, Motomix and batteries. Fanbelts, chains, filters and parts hang on rusty nails.

A grimy-faced clock advertising LeakPro piston rings is frozen at 5:05. What paint remains on the shiplap siding is barely winning the struggle to stay put.

The floor is hard dirt, compacted by the boots of generations of farmers who have come there. The rest is concrete or wood, changing as you work your way through the shop’s interior. Everything that Kidd ever repaired seems cemented into the genetic code of the place.

My own father owned a trucking company and farmed. The trucking company kept him afloat.

Although he could manage basic maintenance on Peterbilt trucks himself, he knew what he didn’t know, which turned out to be an important lesson for his five children. When it came to pulling a motor or transmission or replacing a timing chain, he deferred to and relied upon men like Kidd.

“Standing in a church doesn’t make you a Christian,” my old man would mutter, “any more than standing in a garage doesn’t make you a mechanic.”

My father was the youngest son, determined to hang onto his father’s farmland. He wore short-sleeved work shirts and an old pith helmet to protect himself from the relentless sun, astride a rusty, red International Harvester, planting long rows of soybeans, wheat or corn. By lunchtime, his shirt and the khaki-colored helmet were soaked with sweat.

We learned, too, that there were a thousand miseries inflicted upon farmers.

He endured every farming hardship: the cost of seeds, fertilizer, equipment, labor, blight and drought. The cost of ill-timed or too much rain. Of surpluses and ruined crops. Miscalculations. The endless, backbreaking cycle of defeat.

We children knew about the Farm Bureau and debt before we knew how to count the coins in our piggy banks. Farmers operated on razor-thin margins.

When a tractor broke down, farming halted. When a mower, harvester, baler or cultivator broke, it shredded profits. The Kidd family, farmers themselves, understood this.

Although Kidd is the third family member to run the garage, do not expect him to jabber away, thrilled to talk about himself, or to brag about his reviews. Online, effusive customers give his garage five stars — the top rating.

“I’m a redneck from nowhere,” he replies without a trace of irony, a ball cap over a full head of gray hair.

Untrue, it turns out. Customers praise that he is an authentic fix-it man, having worked in the garage since boyhood.

They file in, nodding in the younger Kidd’s direction, who, like his father, Roy, before him, fixes or makes work the tools of their trade. The things made whole here — a farmer’s lifeblood — are the reason many have endured.

A loyal customer posted online that he “supported even wannabe farmers” like himself.

Kidd has also served his community in other ways, as a firefighter and veteran.

He farms like Roy, who understood the urgency when a tractor stopped working. Asked if there is anything that his garage can’t fix, Roy paused a beat and replied, “Did a man make it?”

The garage is also a certified STIHL dealer. On a quiet Wednesday, Kidd figures up a bill for first-time customer Susan Harrell, there to pick up a new chainsaw.

“I’d like to buy an all-electric, but have to watch costs,” mentions Harrell, staring at one hungrily.

Kidd nods. He places the new saw on a worn counter in what is designated as the office, demarcated by an actual wooden floor, with a filing cabinet and aging swivel chairs.

Harrell steps into the office and picks up the saw, assessing its heft. She tells Kidd she learned manual skills helping her brother with home renovations.

Clad in jeans with a knife-edge crease and a jean jacket, she nods appreciatively as they chat and he answers her questions. The proprietor wears a loose-fitting blue work shirt with an embroidered name tag along with Wranglers.

Wire-rimmed specs are pushed up on the bridge of his nose as he calculates the tax on the invoice.

There is no AC in the summer, but a fan hangs over the separate customer lounge, which occupies the second bay of the garage. Cast-off chairs, two school desks and a rump-sprung navy Naugahyde seat salvaged from an old car are angled around a wood stove.

A Pepsi machine near the office, boxed in by racks of supplies, may or may not work.

“I do have a place for cold drinks,” Kidd points out, without looking up.

Perhaps the drink machine does work.

When he was younger, a boy, really, he sometimes left his father’s garage at closing time and headed home to bale hay. It is back-breaking labor that keeps high school boys flush with gas money in the summertime.

No longer young, Kidd still bales hay.

“Round or square bales?” another customer asks.

“Both,” Kidd answers, riffling through the filing cabinet. Too busy to glance.

For now, he will keep fixing things, selling things and satisfying his customers tomorrow and the next day, until his fingers can no longer do the work. And if another Kidd does not want to step in, he might one day slide that garage door closed for good.

And then, continue farming, growing things. Like our daddy did, until heart problems stopped him.

Some things even a guy like Randy cannot fix. OH

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

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

Riding Lessons

Complete with brakes and pads

By Cynthia Adams

There were two things I deeply envied as a child: having a bike of one’s own and being an adopted child.

The older boy next door had a bike that I mooched frequently. Marshall’s bike was too big for me. I could just manage by standing on the pedals.

Meantime, my best friend, Judy, was living the good life as an adopted, only child. She had a girl’s bike, her own room and more books than she could ever read. She was doted upon but not quite spoiled. On the other hand, I was one of five kiddos — at least four more than our mother had bargained on. Sleepovers with Judy made me envy the luxury of privacy. At my house, somebody would always barge into the bathroom when I was using it. I shared a bed with a sister until I left for college.

Judy’s calm, amazing life made mine look like life in a zoo: noisy, crowded and every secret on public display. She also had Helen, a mother who knew everything worth knowing. A librarian who drove the bookmobile in the summer!

A fantasy took root. Privately, I grew convinced I was switched at birth. All signs pointed to this: Mama was a girly girl. I was a tomboy. She had never been in a fight at school; she scolded me when I arrived home sweaty and bloody-kneed after an incident with the class bully. She adored dolls. I ignored them, though an indifferent Santa brought yet another doll every Christmas.

Mama didn’t like exploring in the woods. She wasn’t into horses. Nor chocolate milk. She didn’t even like Butterfingers!

My life made no sense — unless there had been a mix-up at Union Memorial Hospital.

I probed Mama about the circumstances of my birth constantly. As she had told me since my earliest memory, she labored hard and long before giving birth. “Did you get to know any of the other mothers?” I asked probingly.

Were there other baby girls born on April 9? Was she awake when they brought me to her the first time?

“You’re mine, alright,” she would say, setting her mouth in a line.

Mama, who had loved something called “dramatic recitation” when she was a schoolgirl, repeated the hard labor story so many times and with such dramatic flair that I believed when I was very young she meant I was born on the night of April . . . as if she had been in the throes of suffering every day and night until my stubborn appearance.

Marshall grudgingly lent me his bike one afternoon. Racing along a dirt path near our houses, I barely avoided a large rock by suddenly screeching to a stop, slamming down on the hard crossbar.

Once home, I realized I was bleeding. Rushing to my mother, I told her about how I’d hurt myself riding a boy’s bike and pleaded to be taken to the hospital. Mom rose up from reading True Romance magazine. She took me to her bathroom, presenting me with large bandages. “But I need to go to the hospital!” I protested.

“No, you don’t,” she replied. “You will be doing this every month from now on.” Then she returned to True Romance. Only weeks later would I realize how short-changed her answer had left me. But that was in the ’60s, when many mothers felt the less adolescents knew about reproduction, the better.

Was I a hemophiliac like the doomed Romanovs?

On the next sleepover at Judy’s house, I confided my puzzling illness.

The lower part of me, I told Judy, was permanently damaged. Prone to sudden bleeding. After my bike injury, Mama had warned me to always carry bandages.

Judy said this didn’t sound right. She wanted to seek answers from her mother.

She returned with Helen, whose face softened as I told her about the incident that had triggered my condition.

Helen took my hand. “It’s not an injury,” she reassured me. “It’s very natural.” She suggested Judy and I get a snack.

A smiling Helen was waiting with intriguing boxes labelled “The Invisible Woman” and “The Invisible Man.”

She pulled the anatomically correct dolls from their boxes and quietly explained reproduction. We both felt the importance of the moment, and she met our few questions with simple, clear answers. Helen used words like menses and did not pander.

I adored her with my whole heart.

However, none of this was especially heartening. The one truth Mama had shared was that my predicament was recurring.

When I returned home from the sleepover, I tested my knowledge with my 15-year-old sister, Sharon, who was six years older. She snorted. “Why are they telling you about the facts of life?” she demanded. “You’re just a snotty-nosed kid.”

I rolled my eyes at her ignorant self, and ran outside in search of Marshall’s bike. But the evening star had popped out over Marshall’s house, so too late to ride to the creek. I turned back; the smell of chicken frying in hot Crisco wafted through the screen door as I plopped unhappily onto the back porch to think.

The unsolved mystery of my birth family continued.

Inside, no question about it, Mama was already cooking dinner for me and my supposed siblings.

2026 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

Dial M for Miss You

A local wind phone welcomes users to call their lost loved ones

By Cynthia Adams

Dana White doesn’t know exactly what captivated her when she learned about wind phones on National Public Radio. Was it longing to reach out to a dearly departed relative?

Was it a call to connect?

White, a woman with healthy boundaries, isn’t saying.

Yet many also feel a mysterious attraction to wind phones, a concept originating in Otsuchi, Japan.

Since the first wind phone appeared 15 years ago on a windswept mountain, created by a grieving man, Smithsonian magazine estimates more than 200 wind phones have been installed in the U.S. alone. A wind phone — a disconnected phone perfect for expressing deeply held feelings of loss or grief — may seem outmoded in a digital age of instant connectivity.

Here, the wind alone bears the message.

The premise is basic. A vintage phone, often with a rotary dial, is typically placed in some remote, sometimes haunting location, though it’s not unheard of to find them in cities. Walkers on a nature trail may happen upon an old phone mounted to a tree.

According to a CBS News Sunday Morning segment, people hiked to such a phone within a California forest, there for the purpose of unburdening themselves.

The bereaved used the phone to leave messages borne away by the wind without a trace — hence the name.

But sometimes wind phones are installed in built structures or phone booths.

Simple or elaborate, the wind phone becomes the receiver of longing, for reconnection with a deeply missed someone or something.

In White’s case, however, her wind phone seems to have evolved like a highly personalized art project; one long mulled over. In her spare time, she likes making art in a home studio. So, when White spotted what she believed could become the raw materials for such a project, she set about creating one.

“In February 2022, I was hanging out with friends at Fishers Grille and saw a large crate next to a dumpster and thought, That could be a phone booth!”

Fishers Grille co-owner Doug Jones said the shipping container was free for the taking. White’s boyfriend, Steve Dabbs, collected the crate in his truck and thus began her new project.

“No telling what my friends, family and neighbors thought as they listened to me going on and on about it, but none of them discouraged me,” she says four years later.

Since White’s phone was created, wind phones began popping up throughout the state, more recently in Charlotte, Oak Island and Sunset Beach. Ian Dunn placed a wind phone at historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh. (At this writing, there is at least one other in Raleigh.)

Having now lost several family members without the opportunity to say goodbye, I instantly connected with the concept.

White fashioned the phone and booth from upcycled materials, just like the crate, painting the open booth barn red. After mounting an old rotary wall phone inside, she placed a “Phone” sign on the top.

“I finally set it out next to the sidewalk in May 2022 with a note explaining what it is, and pens and paper for people to leave notes.”

Well satisfied, White says, “It gets a lot of traffic and feels pretty private, considering the location.”

“While some [who use her phone] are aural, others are more visual and prefer to write/read,” she explains.

White also gets a kick out of watching adults explain the concept of the wind phone to children. From her perch on a kitchen stool, she notices some users come often. At times, she meets people who are deeply curious about the phone. White smiles. “When I’m asked, ‘Does it work?’ I always respond ‘Of course, it does.’” Disappointingly, the vintage phones occasionally disappear.

“As we’re now on our third phone, I welcome anyone’s old phone for which they no longer have a use,” she writes later — not a terrible average given it has been four years since the wind phone’s installation.

On a whim, I dial my childhood phone number: Tuxedo 8-2372. A throwback to when the prefixes were actually mnemonic devices, they related to the letters and numbers on a rotary dial. Naturally, the number is no longer in service. My voice, too, simply drifts away on the wind.

In the silence, I imagine my father’s singular way of answering: “Yell-o! This is Warren!” and my heart does a little twist. I have not heard his voice since his sudden death in 1990.

Since, I’ve discovered what’s called a “Goodbye Line,” which allows users to bid farewell to people, places and things. Once connected, a recording reflects that: “This payphone, like us, is here now but won’t be forever.”

2026 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

Changed Fur Good

The making of a vegetarian

By Cynthia Adams

Come wintertime, our perpetually cold Mama suddenly perked up, like a Lenten rose popping out of the permafrost.

Her appreciation for plunging temperatures was partly due to creature comforts: A roaring fire. The ancestral McClellan vegetable soup burbling on the stove (which, frankly, tasted like everybody else’s recipe). And a fruit cobbler in the oven, aromatically caramelizing.

Plus, Mama saw cold weather as an excuse to wear her furs.

Furs. Lynx. Mink. Rabbit. My father haunted auctions and estate sales scoring fur coats, finds that made Mama dance with delight.

To my horror, Mama would wear fur anywhere.

“How could you?” I’d entreat as she swathed herself in animal skins, making me despair for the once living, breathing, rightful owners, with Mama nearly disappearing within their oversized heft (but for her pursed Revlon-reddened lips).

“They’re already dead,” she would hiss back.

I turned on my heel and went to my room. Did they have no conscience? I journaled, heavily underlining “no.”

True, some of Mama’s affection for fur had to do with warmth. But her fur lust owed much to Liz Taylor, who exemplified Mama’s ideas about glamor.

She aspired to a very different life than the one she was consigned to in Hell’s Half Acre with her brood of five children.

Worse yet, I received cold comfort from any quarter. My sisters saw no problem with fur. My brothers, who hunted and fished, wondered what the problem was. I was the sole dissenter.

My moral compass pointed to faux fur and pleather.

In a moment of stubborn righteousness, I announced becoming a vegetarian. Both parents looked strangely pleased when I requested a frozen pizza. They happily complied, given the price of Totino’s versus rib eyes.

Daddy sighed, calibrating the rareness of a steak. “She won’t be able to hold out,” he predicted, eating charred fat trimmed from Mama’s steak as I nibbled freezer-burned pizza that tasted about the same as the disk of cardboard stuck to its bottom.

“Yes, I will,” I retorted sassily.

“Then you just don’t know what’s good to eat,” he flung back — an opinion I learned was shared by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.

Bourdain sniffed, “Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.”

Being a judgmental teen, I thought my parents were the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit!

Heedless of my feeble protest, Mama would don her fur at the first hint of wintry mornings. Yes, decked out in a fur coat, her kitten-heeled mules would slap along the oak floors on the way to the kitchen. She looked like a ball of fur putting the percolator onto the stove. Her lightweight robe would not be seen again till May.

As the percolator caffeinated the air, we kiddos emerged. We all drank black coffee upon reaching the mandated age of 12. Perhaps Mama believed insisting upon serving it black might discourage us from becoming coffee fiends. She was wrong.

Coffee underway, she would pull out her biscuit-making paraphernalia from the cabinet, slapping it on the yellow Formica counter. Out came the rolling pin, flour, Crisco and milk.

Standing at the kitchen counter in her fur and mules, cocktail rings adorning her fingers, Mama did what she did every morning. She worked a knob of Crisco shortening into a floury lump, rolled out the dough, dusted it with flour, and finally cut rows of biscuits with an ancient biscuit cutter. The pillowy dough was in the oven before Daddy had finished his first cup of Maxwell House.

“No bacon,” Daddy reminded me at the table as Mama plunked rashers into a cast iron pan, a carton of eggs at the ready. I am certain she must have singed a furry sleeve at some point, but would have never admitted it.

“No homemade sage-rich sausage.” He added gleefully, “and no gravy made with pan drippings.”

I claimed a biscuit, buttering it liberally, making clear I’d breakfast henceforth on grits or oatmeal and biscuits, glaring over my coffee mug.

“Suit yourself, old girl,” Daddy mused. “You’re the vegetarian.”

It was hard staking the moral high ground, my stomach groused. At school lunch, I faced limited choices: namely, pizza or fries. I resolved to bring a peanut butter sandwich the next day, eating several servings of Jell-O to fill myself up, having never guessed how jolly old gelatin is made.

My life became a series of concessions. I kept eating Jell-O even after learning its revolting origin story. I ate enough carbs and fats to set myself up for a future of cardiac problems, loading up on butter, cheeses, ice cream and shakes.

My parents remained oblivious to my moral rectitude. If anything, they seemed to flaunt their carnage, making every meal a tribute to meat. Pork chops. Pork roasts. Beef stew. Fried chicken. Chicken fried steak. Fried chicken livers. Burgers. Barbecue. Spaghetti Bolognese. Sausage. Bologna. Ham. Country ham. Steaks every Friday night.

Sinking to a new low, Daddy brought home liver mush, reading the ingredients as he shoveled it into his mouth: “pig liver, pig head, pig lips, pig snout and pig ears . . .”

It was easy for me to decline when he offered me a fur-trimmed suede coat. “No thanks,” I said, suggesting he offer it to my sister. She happily accepted.

Sellout, I thought sourly, glaring at her prancing around. She pulled a face and danced away.

Years later, when tasked with clearing out my mother’s possessions, it was glaringly obvious that much of her glamazon style had persisted to age 93. She’d never parted with some of her favorite, sparkly heels (despite painful bunions), sequined handbags and, even, so help me, a boa. I couldn’t resist saving a pair of faux-fur trimmed denim jeans and bedazzled denim jacket as proof of Mama’s dramatic flair.

I paused, passing a hand across fur coats that grew ever larger on her as she shrank, long since relegated to the guest room closet. I emailed the family. No takers. Then my sister-in-law reevaluated. “I’ll take one,” she wrote.

“Happy for you to have it!” I emailed back while spooning in a bite of lime Jell-O.

And I meant it.

2026 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

Kissing Fashion Crimes Goodbye

Confessing to questionable dressing

By Cynthia Adams

A few friends met at a wine bar where our topics flowed as freely as the wine. We’re a book club, yet we discuss (in no particular order) books, travel, headlines and get-ups we deeply regretted having ever worn outside the house.

It took getting wine-d up to confess regrettables we not only had worn but that we still had hanging in our closets. Bohemian garb the late Diane Keaton might have managed to swan around in, but not us mere mortals.

Somehow, crimes of the heart figured into our respective fashion offense confessionals.

I will not name names, but, among other things, one friend confesses to wearing Boogie Nights-like neon running shorts with pantyhose, topped by a yellow scoop-neck shirt (sporting a frog graphic). This was her “kiss outfit,” so-named not after Kiss the band, but because it was worn to sneak with her sixth-grade boyfriend to the attic for a long-planned smooching session.

She lost her nerve and bolted before kiss consummation, a shame because the boyfriend moved away and became an actor in Friends.

“He was much more complex than the character he played,” she insists as we mopped tears of laughter from our eyes.

Another friend, who formerly owned a vintage clothing store, thought nothing of wearing a head-to-toe tie-dyed ensemble. “I thought I looked great,” she says, laughing and choking on a sip.

Tie-dye, overalls, suede jackets with long fringe were all cherished fashion staples. She especially enjoyed sporting a beloved polka-dotted tent dress.

A favorite admission following a pinot noir: “If the hemline of my skirt was longer than my fingertips, then it was too long.” We envision our friend twirling away in her polka-dotted dress and laugh even harder.

My own confession centers around a big yellow school bus and Johnny Teeter, my first big crush, who drove No. 15 to Bethel Elementary.

Love for Johnny drove me to commit a most regrettable fashion misfire.

As Mom tamed my hair into a ponytail most mornings, Johnny honked the horn and waited. My skinny knees knocked together as I ran down the gravel drive, kicking up a cloud of dust. I was breathless by the time the bus door swung open; not due to exertion but the thundering of my heart as Johnny flashed his beautiful pearly whites. He had many assets, but I thought he had the most amazing smile I’d ever seen.

If I got into a scuffle with Buddy the bus bully, Johnny would stop the bus and intervene, pulling me safely to a seat.

Johnny was the perfect guy.

Regrettably, he thought I was too young, which increased my ardor to prove a 12-year difference between a 6- and 18-year-old meant nothing.

But how?

One fine morning, I slipped out of the house wearing my mother’s purloined girdle (pinned up) and sexy stockings. It was my version of a kiss outfit, hoping to strike Johnny with just how mature I had grown in recent weeks. As I crossed the road with shoulders high, hoping to catch his eye, the thing fell down, puddled around my brown penny loafers.

I had certainly caught his eye.

Johnny jumped out, bundling the girdle and hose into my book bag. Red faced, I took a seat on the bus as Buddy bellowed with laughter.

Was it love that was driving me and my friends to assorted, well-intended, fashion mortifications?

Like toting my awkward leather prison purse — the one my father tooled during his unfortunate incarceration at Maxwell Air Force Base.

Dad, you see, was a free spirit — so free he stopped paying his income tax until the actual Men in Black from the IRS came to our door and served notice that his life was about to change.

Say what you will about minimum-security prisons: The godawful fact was that Dad just so happened to be incarcerated with White House counsel Charles Colson. My father protested to the warden that being sent to the same prison as a Nixon defender was cruel and unusual punishment.

He and Colson peeled potatoes while dissecting the finer points of Watergate. They made prison purses and string art. Despite a wary truce, Dad never trusted Colson’s “jailhouse religion.”

When Dad returned, he presented the leather bag to a daughter who had missed him so with pride. After all, he had spent much of his three months at Maxwell making it. The purse accessorized my permed hair, maxi dresses, pink corduroy hip huggers. It could have been worse.

But I never wore a girdle and hose again, not even in the name of love.

2026 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

Sugar Baby

Jonesing for a fun-sized fix

By Cynthia Adams

A fantastical shot of ice cream, jawbreakers and pastries make me drool like one of Ivan Pavlov’s dogs.

This sugar-charged chassis of mine has an internal engine that purrs at the sight of gooey sweets — then splutters and stops. Demanding a refill.

A saner person, someone free from sugar addiction, may ask how it took root. Some claim they are salty people. Or savory people. Actually, I like those food groups too.

As it happens, we were born this way.

A taste for sugar is hard-wired into human anatomy.

“The brain is dependent on sugar as its main fuel,” says Vera Novak, associate professor of medicine. “It cannot be without it.” Scientists have found half of all sugar energy in the body is used by — get this — the brain.

In my case, too, there was a sugar pusher. Enter my father, Warren, the alpha of sugar addiction.

A dedicated sweets guy, our dad was known to make evening forays into Charlotte to Krispy Kreme, 50 miles roundtrip, returning with two dozen raspberry- filled pastries. Was he really responsible? Obviously, he had a very large brain, one practically demanding he stoke it with sugar.

Consider this: Krispy Kreme makes 5 million doughnuts daily. Statistically, that’s a lot of sugar-munching/brain-feeding, so Warren was hardly alone.

He never met Winston-Salem founder Vernon Rudolph, but, if he had, dad would have definitely shaken his hand and invited him home for supper. (After licking the icing from his own.)

Warren would also have shaken the hand of Forrest Mars, creator of M&M’s candies. Fun-sized fact: Initially, the hard-shelled candies were sold exclusively to the U.S. Army during WWII.

Dad loved those multicolored, sugar-shell-covered bits of chocolate, and so did I. When I was a child, he would sometimes take me on work trips, iconic brown packets of M&M’s marching across the molded dashboard.

“If I start nodding off or acting sleepy, shake me and keep talking to me,” he ordered, knowing the sugar high would keep me chatty.

The neighborhood “juke joint” was where my sugar fixation became, well, fixed by the age of 5. The store possessed two marvels: a juke box and a multitude of candies. My quarters were stretched between playing favorite tunes and buying sweets.

Munching on a Butterfinger or a Baby Ruth, I’d dance, joyously spinning like a Sufi.

I didn’t snack on Snickers (originally Marathon, renamed for the Mars family’s favorite horse), but rectified that mistake later. The Snickers rebrand elevated it to the top-selling candy globally.

During my childhood, adults weren’t that worried about sugar. Mornings called for sugary cereals like Alpha-Bits. I arranged the crystalline letters with my spoon to spell SWEET, one of my favorite words, sneaking in extra spoonfuls of sugar and just enough milk to keep five letters afloat.

The only milk I actually liked was the sugar-jazzed chocolate variety.

Grape juice, more syrup than juice, kept my child-sized lips perpetually encircled with a blurry smear of purple. After school, I craved ice cream or cookies.

Ironically, children in my household weren’t allowed sweet tea until age 12, but were permitted Tang (thank you, NASA!), Orange Crush or Nehi grape.

Grocery shopping now as a grown woman, I don’t stick to the store perimeter, as nutritionists advise. Even if I start out in the produce or fresh fruit sections, my cart pulls itself straight to the aisle of Forbidden Fruits. Namely, fruit-flavored gummies and candies. Goodies practically throw themselves into the shopping cart, my resolve melting faster than a Dairy Queen Blizzard on a sunny July day. In go jolly-looking jars of marshmallow fluff, sweet jams and bags of chocolates.

When in need of a fast fix, I binge on Nutella (spooned straight from the jar) or, recently, handcrafted Kilwins’ fudge (a gift to my husband) — or once, an entire bag of Dr. Atkins sugar-free candies.

Resolve is a strange animal. My hand reaches for crunchy peanut butter — natural, of course — when I’m feeling resolute. When it fades, anything can happen. After resisting the priciest chocolates still in their gilded gift box, I turn instead to a beguiling tin of Marks & Spencer’s Christmas cookies (called, quaintly, “biscuits”). Next, I hit hard candies, my emergency sweets stash, crunching away like a badger.

The night before my physical, despite being fearful of bad lab results, I polished off most of a “sharable”-sized bag of plain old chocolate M&M’s after a “healthy” dinner. Then I wolfed down more M&S biscuits.

(My glucose results were not great.)

My dopamine-hooked brain once put my sugar fixation to good use — when weaning myself from smoking. Swapping one oral fixation for another, I kept a large bag of M&M’s in my desk drawer, finally leaving cigarettes behind.

But, sadly, not sugar.

Some years ago, Delancey Street Moving and Trucking (whose innovative work programs support those overcoming addiction) moved us from our Westerwood home to Latham Park. My husband was called away, so I hustled alongside the movers.

At day’s end, we all flopped down on the driveway, sweaty and famished. Ripping into a bag of Snickers, I offered them around. The guys shook their heads, each lighting up a cigarette.

One gave a piercing look.

“I used to use,” he said, explaining how heroin derailed his life as a pharmacist.

“What’s your addiction?”

With a jolt, I realized he’d spotted it.

“Sugar,” I confessed. Taking a deep drag, he nodded knowingly.

2026 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

Susie Baby and Teddy

Long gone but never forgotten

By Cynthia Adams

My elegant friend, Dixie, a former model, once dressed for the office in Ferragamo heels and sleek skirts.

Heads swiveled whenever she glided past, a study in grace. But it was her kindness that drew us to her.

As a native Charlestonian, Dixie remains the closest thing I have known to gentility. Her historic apartment contains finely curated antiques, textiles and books, both inherited and found heirlooms. She calls it “the Nest.”

Now, a health issue keeps her mostly Nest-bound. Still, she spends her days staying current, reading poetry, clipping items from The New Yorker, which she sends to friends, and dispensing small gifts to the postman and neighbors.

Dixie asked me to bring chocolates, her favorite thing in all the world, to enjoy and share as COVID raged. Standing at a careful distance outside on the fire escape, I made the delivery as she shared news about a newborn great-grandaughter.

We were both introspective. Undone by the anxieties of a pandemic, we moved to parenting, especially in such a time, and how easily parents inflict injuries. Moldering injuries too easily retrieved.

Dixie quietly mentioned Susie Baby, her doll. In her child’s mind, Susie Baby was real, beloved.

When Dixie was a small child, her strict parents firmly enforced bedtime. Once tucked in, she was not allowed to get up. During a lashing storm, Dixie searched among the blankets to reassure Susie Baby.

Susie Baby was not there.

Dixie lay abed, remembering that she’d played with Susie Baby outside before dinner, bath and bedtime, before the violent storm struck. She could not go to Susie Baby’s rescue.

At daybreak, she flew outside and found Susie Baby.

“Her face was disfigured, and I think part of it was in fragments.” Dixie recalled, her voice tremulous.

She felt as shattered as her doll. As if it were a death.

A tear glimmered at the memory.

Perhaps a better, more restrained listener than I would have waited, letting Dixie’s story — and its obvious pain — settle there. But my mind had traveled back, too.

Despite myself, I began talking about Teddy, a bear I much preferred to dolls as a child. A bear who had grown smelly and tattered.

To me, though, Teddy was perfect, even more perfect than my shape-shifting, carefree, imaginary friend Pixie. After all, he was tactile, soft and worn.

Whereas Pixie rambled the world seeking adventure, Teddy was a constant. Never far from my side, Teddy was an anchoring source of comfort, especially at night when all manner of monsters lurked. Nor did Teddy judge whenever I had, as actress Catherine O’Hara called it, a nighttime “oopsie daisy.”

My germophobic mother decided the bear was dangerously unhygienic. While I was out playing with a friend, she tossed Teddy in the trash.

Like Dixie’s loss of Susie Baby, I traced the loss of Teddy.

Dixie quietly listened, allowing a second tremulous tear to fall without wiping it away.

Afterward, I waved goodbye to her where she waited on the fire escape, Dixie’s pale, elegant hand raised in farewell.

With the world roiling with the terror of a plague, we had summoned up our oldest friends, our first comforters. Susie Baby. Teddy.

Memoirist Alexandra Fuller writes, “sit still and observe what disturbs you.”

There is remembering, but then there is the harder thing, the only thing left.

Since I can’t summon forgetfulness, could I forgive?

2025 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

Dressed to Depress

A fit about ‘fits

By Cynthia Adams

I’m all for casual wear. Blue jeans outnumber all else in my closet.

My grandmothers would roll over in their graves — probably still in girdles in the afterlife — if they saw me wearing a T-shirt and jeans to a work meeting. Like their friends, they wore dresses daily, unless, say, gardening and sometimes even then. And beneath their simple frocks, torturous girdles held everything firmly in place.

Certainly, until my Mama starved herself to her goal, she wore a girdle anytime she gussied up. Which was almost all the time — because Mama, as she often made clear, had dreams. She dressed for the life she aspired to, a glamorous life like that of the film and soap opera stars she adored.

And she swore up and down they wore girdles.

“Shape wear” is what such undergarments are called now, rebranded as such by reality show celebrities. “Girdle” is an outmoded expression that might just puzzle younger folk. Defined by Merriam-Webster: a woman’s close-fitting undergarment often boned and usually elasticized that extends from the waist to below the hips. A girdle, I will stress, by any other name, be it the cutesy “Spanx” or “Skims,” is still an instrument of torture — and I never intend to wear one.

(Round is a perfect shape, by the way.)

Comfort, certainly among my Southern kin, had no place.

My grandmothers wore hats, too, when they dressed up, which meant no part of their body, not even their head, was comfortable. These were not boho bucket hats. They were as bizarrely shaped as the fascinators beloved by the Brits. Often, they were placed on a perilous angle requiring actual hat pins to hold in place. Getting a flu shot or a root canal might exempt them from hat wearing, but, even then they wore their Sunday best, strictly necessitating girdles, hose and heels.

Flats were for invalids and old age pensioners, I was taught. Suitable only for shuffling to and fro when reduced to shuffling only.

Of course, the world changed. Girdles (excepting Spanx, or on those recovering from back surgery or suffering from hernias) grew rare. Even fewer folk wore hats. Or dressed up for anything but an occasion, such as a wedding or funeral.

Even a funeral isn’t a sure thing when it comes to graveside mourners kitted out in veils, hose and heels, looking like prime suspects in a British whodunnit.

It’s disappointing, frankly, that funerals don’t merit sartorial suffering anymore.

As far as root canals or any other medical procedure goes, patients no longer put as much effort — if any — into their appearance as my grandmothers once did. I learned this on morning walks, winding through a medical park, where multitudes arrive for medical appointments.

The scrubs-clad staff arrive dressed for business.

But the patients? They check in wearing jeans, shorts, T-shirts, flip-flops or sneakers — basically, whatever they might wear to wash the dog.

Or less.

One morning, a young woman exiting a suite of eye specialists stepped into view, wearing what appeared to be a skimpy two-piece swimsuit. As in an actual bikini.

What an eye test!

I gawped. Speaking of dogs, when did Southerners decide to just let themselves go?

Mama never went to a doctor’s appointment, the DMV or the A&P without hair and makeup done. Her outfit — heels, purse and, always, clip-on “ear bobs” — carefully chosen. None of it was chosen for comfort. The heels made her bunions throb, and the clip-ons made her ear lobes pulse with pain. But, like Clairee in Steel Magnolias, Mama firmly believed “the only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.”

As I tugged a garbage can to the street Sunday afternoon, a woman and her daughter walked past with a Collie. The middle-aged mother wore a skimpy nylon sports bra and even skimpier shorts. No top.

The dog was the most modestly dressed of the three.

Mama wouldn’t have gone to her own back porch wearing her underwear with a pair of shorts. Not even if the only creatures in sight were raccoons.

My mind screamed. “God’s nightgown! That woman’s walking down the street in a bra!”

Comfort is a peculiar thing. I get comfort, especially when it comes to shoes, I truly do. And, dear readers, I get body positivity. That mother is comfortable with herself in a way I can never be.

Having never understood Madonna’s embrace of underwear as outwear, bralettes as tops or lacy, colorful bra straps deliberately revealed, it seems I have officially entered the Age of Concealment.

I personally prefer to have all my bits fully covered as my age accelerates past all legal speed limits.

That makes me comfortable.

But to the consternation of my elders, I, too, once rebelled against being trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in underwire bras and infuriating pantyhose.

“But, Honey,” my Daddy would say as he frowned at my low-slung bell bottoms. “Look at your Mama. Dress like you own the bank, not like you need a loan.”

He groaned as I strutted away on Pee-wee Herman-style platforms: “What on God’s Earth have we come to?”

2025 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

You Are What You Wear

Like it or not

By Cynthia Adams

My father never had to be asked twice to go shopping, especially for groceries. What he didn’t like was being hurried. Choosing the best rib eye might require a solid 10 minutes.

“Marbling,” he’d murmur, scrutinizing the fat flecks of a steak with surgical interest as the butcher waited.

Clothes shopping was no different. He often joined my mother, egging her on to try dress after dress, evaluating each frock. Was it too short? Too frumpy? Did it overpower her small frame? Mama, an impulsive shopper, had little patience for long deliberations.

She liked flash and bling as much as Dad liked fat-streaked T-bones. Whether a pork chop or a pant suit, he analyzed purchases with a strange dedication.

Dad earnestly believed he could save Mama from fashion crimes. He steered her towards classics, well-tailored and simple, long before the quiet luxury trend. But Mama leaned into flamboyant femininity — heels, furs and cocktail wear in the daytime. Liz Taylor and Joan Collins were lifestyle icons.

Mama wore a cocktail ring and negligee while rolling out biscuit dough at breakfast. Come evening, she never missed a Dallas or Dynasty episode. Afterward, she took long baths, emerging dewy-skinned in something diaphanous, trailing cologne de nuit.

She reminisced about starring in Fairview High School’s play, imagining a career on stage. If not for the traditional life she chose, including five children and an annoyingly opinionated husband, she might have lived the life of Liz.

At the very least, she planned to look the part.

Their shopping forays were certainly like watching Liz and Burton spar.

In answer to “What do you think Warren?” as she pivoted, he would artlessly offer his first reaction: “Shug, that dress is wearing you.”

Mama would purse her lips, burnished red with Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, and shoot him a withering look.

Nonetheless, Dad wanted his opinions sought when it came to dressing what he considered “his” women. When I needed a prom dress, he volunteered to take me shopping. Inwardly, I dreaded the inevitable critique before we drew up outside the Belk store in Monroe.

He zeroed in on the most chaste dress in the junior department — a ballerina-pink dress prettily embroidered with rosebuds. I emerged from the dressing room looking like a cupcake. This was not what I was aiming for, but he practically cheered with approval.

My father adored a dress that made me look like a Nutcracker extra.

When I tried on a less modest number more like what my friends were wearing, he dropped a truth bomb.

“Honey, you don’t have the bustline to pull that off,” he observed. My face flamed with heat.

This was the kind of feedback Mama loathed.

Dad thrust the rosebud dress into the clerk’s hands, despite my fallen face. Come prom night, the virginal dress paired with my slumped posture read more Patty Duke than the sultry Daisy Duke I’d hoped for.

Cheerleaders and majorettes swanned past me in spaghetti straps and push-up bras as I spent the night loitering by the punch bowl with a completely tongue-tied date. My main activity was ruing my reflection during nervous restroom treks.

Mama would never have worn that dress. She’d have fought him on that. After all, she fought him all the way to divorce court.

Afterwards, she went full-tilt glam without Dad there to inhibit her impulses. Mama’s hairdo grew so high no one but her hairdresser could say where her scalp ended and hair began. She wore the highest heels even when her bunions screamed.

On a trip to Florida, she bought a door-knocker of a cocktail ring with a purported connection to the Super Bowl. The governor was off the accelerator and Mama swiftly blew through her divorce settlement.

Nearly broke, she took a job at a new consignment shop.

Wealthy women with nearby lake homes consigned their finery there and Mama got first dibs. While she had seldom dressed better, she loathed wearing “second-hand” fashion, even while enjoying more wardrobe changes than Cher.

None of that mattered.

When I praised a chic Chanel dupe she wore to a family dinner, she hissed at me, annoyed, “It isn’t real!”

As soon as she left that job, she resumed her preferred buying habit of new only.

I turned out to be quite the opposite, thrilled whenever I score a good knockoff, vintage find or a designer hand-me-down.

Nonetheless, while Mama may not have inspired thrift, she modeled individuality, conformity be damned.

Recently, a young friend met me for a drink sporting turquoise-colored hair. How could I not comment? I complimented her, privately thinking I have never been so free, nor so brave. She replied, “You can be ruled by all of the things that everyone else wants from you, or you can just have fun with your life.”

And just like that, I imagined Mama, radiating approval.

2025 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

If Life is a Highway, Where’s the Off Ramp?

Tales of peril on the open road

By Cynthia Adams

Recent legislature forbidding distracted driving briefly flickered in the news. Its marketing featured a driver speeding along with a shaggy dog, its head hanging out the window.

Plenty of us recall a time when children or pets could pretty much ride anywhere they would fit inside a vehicle. Heck, even plopped on open-air truck beds. Which is actually still legal for farmers going to and from market.

The 1950s and ’60s ushered in a new era for family travels, and plenty of us couldn’t wait to hit the road. My imaginary friend, Pixie, and I had no trouble squeezing into the family sedan or Dad’s old pickup at any opportunity — I loved riding standing up beside my father with my left arm looped around his neck. There was always room for Pixie beside me, of course.

A nation newly traversed by interstates, thanks to initiatives by President Eisenhower, made a journey a heckuva lot easier. (My Great Uncle Miles regaled us with stories about him and his brother John navigating a trek westward in a “Tin Lizzie,” an atlas their only guide. Upon reaching the Rockies, Uncle Miles said the Model T ended their crossing by rolling backwards down the mountain, having insufficient engine power.

But now the road was open and calling, and rural folk were catching the travel bug.

A friend recalled squeezing above the back seat into the rear window niche of a two-toned, yellow-and-white ’56 Chevy destined for the nation’s capital. (He, too, grew up in a time before children’s safety car seats, seatbelts or any safety constraints.)

“You’d be arrested now,” he chuckled, recalling napping in that window nook as the family vehicle set off. His grandmother, along with his mother, and great uncle and aunt “piled into one car and drove seven hours.”

He woke as they rolled to a stop when they neared D.C., his aunt seeking directions to the closest dime store. He was ordered to remain in the car with his uncle, forestalling the inevitable begging for a toy.

His Aunt Nettie huffed back after leaving the dime store, “We’re going home!”

His crestfallen mother entreated, “But why?”

“You can tell all you need to know about a town by the quality of their dime store,” she answered scornfully. “We haven’t lost anything here.”

His Uncle Elmer turned the Chevy around, driving straight back to Burlington.

Whatever happened in the dime store was not discussed. Did they fail to stock her favorite snuff? “Aunt Nettie was a closet snuff dipper. Beehive [brand].”

I remembered a misadventure of my own in my aunt’s drab-green, ungainly Plymouth she’d named Zesta.

One summer’s morning, my aunt and my mother packed the car for a husband-free trip to Cherry Grove, a family beach, suitcases strapped to the roof.

There was ample room for 5-year-old me to stand on the Naugahyde rear seat and watch the road retreating behind us as morning dissolved into afternoon. Pixie, my compact friend who looked exactly like Speedy in the Alka-Seltzer ads, was not along for the adventure.

Suddenly, the green Samsonite cases the two sisters had lashed to the roof broke free and I delightedly watched them bounce along the highway in our wake. Out spilled pajamas, clothing, toiletries and unmentionables. I giggled as motorists did their best to avoid them, veering wildly behind us.

My mother swiveled around. “What is so funny?”

I pointed to the scene behind us. “Our clothes! In the highway!”

My mother screamed.

My aunt screeched to the side of the road, Zesta’s white-wall tires kicking up a dust cyclone.

“What in the world?” my mother shouted at me. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

Our aunt was a striking woman, leggy, tanned and outdoorsy. More than one driver slowed just to get a better look at the blonde wearing beige Bermuda shorts, a halter top and white Keds. I myself couldn’t take my eyes off my aunt as she gathered up our belongings as best she could, darting in and out of traffic. Passing cars tooted.

My mother, the prissy one, shouted at her older sister to be careful as she stood cautiously by in a sundress, her hair and makeup just so.

My aunt rescued some pieces from the ditches and roadside, all of it soiled. We continued on our way, the sisters sobered and quiet. “I had a brand-new bottle of Tweed cologne,” my aunt sighed.

“Did ya’ll get new clothes,” asked my friend as we laughed about our road trips gone sideways.

“Of course not,” I answered.

Once at Cherry Grove, we would sit in the sand and eat grape popsicles, plus I rode the surf in an inflatable float.

I still had my blue bathing suit, which I called my “bathing soup.” And my Teddy, too, which I was wise enough to know could not have survived being stuffed into the airless suitcase.

Pixie was away on an Alaskan adventure, which was just as well, I decided. There would be much to tell him when we both returned.

2025 Department Home Grown