Tag: Home Grown

Home Grown

Thrillers and True Crime Saga

Fascinating, when they don’t involve you

By Cynthia Adams

The detective’s office wasted nothing on aesthetics. Beige blinds, desks stacked with folders. A diploma from somewhere on the wall. Stiff chairs faced his desk, where we perched awkwardly as the detective sank into a swivel chair.

Forget the trench coat. Who expected “dad” clothes — a short-sleeved shirt and shorts? He was folksy. Affable.

“Sara” sat wide-eyed beside me as the detective presented a stack of papers, part of a background investigation of a much younger woman involved with her ailing brother.

Like everyone with a streaming subscription, I’d watched scammer sagas. The detective thumbing through a fat file seemed scripted. Yet this was personal, lives laid bare. The work often done for lawyers, which is how Sara found hers.

Investigating deadbeat dads, cheating spouses. Insurance fraudsters. Grifters.

The detective began reading, pausing as Sara gasped.

“Sonya” — the focus of this investigation — maintained multiple identities in various states. Her date and place of birth was apparently fluid; Sonya was 34, 36, 37 or 38 and had six different email accounts.

A phone number was the sole consistency.

Her record included DUIs, open-carry charges, reckless driving, speeding. Drug possession. Fake IDs.

Many serious charges were dropped.

“Despite the fact that she uses fake driver’s licenses?” asked Sara.

The detective nodded. “And an expensive lawyer.”

Two hours later, we had a slippery grasp as to who Sonya actually was.

Since meeting in a bar, Sonya occasionally lived with Sara’s brother, “Ralph,” who was decades older. He claimed it was platonic.

Sara had spent the last two years helping her brother survive cancer treatments. Cleaning his home. Buying his food. Sonya was seldom seen. By happenstance, Sara learned he had recently changed his will, leaving Sonya everything.

She had come to me for solace and advice. “I believe he loves her,” she choked out.

Sonya was comparatively young; her brother, though frail, was stubbornly obsessed.

Deaths had decimated Sara’s prosperous family. Now there was only her and Ralph, her remaining brother. Sonya, too, had brothers.

The detective produced snapshots of Sonya’s siblings. One, with The Illustrated Man tattoos covering face and body, had a criminal record. The other, sometimes bearded and masculine, was also photographed cleanly shaved and dressed as a woman. Wait, was that actually Sonya? Was he a doppelganger?

Fabrications and aliases underscored their criminality.

“It could be very serious. When I see a background report like this, it often points to drugs. And the things that . . .” the detective paused . . . “go with that.”

Were Sonya or her brothers coercing Ralph?

They could be dangerous to challenge, the detective warned. Our eyes fell upon the thick file.

“And, you know, I tend to think your brother already knows who she is.”

Sara’s face crumpled.

The detective seemed downcast — apologetic for being the bearer of bad news. Everywhere around the world, similar stories unfolded. Sonya’s was an old story, the detective had said tiredly, closing the folder. In Netflix dramas, there’s some closure at the finale. In real life, seldom.

Outside the sun was beating down, but the humidity had dropped, suggesting summer’s grip was loosening. We slid into Ralph’s luxury sedan, which he had urged Sara to use.

“Keep it,” he had said.

“I’ll give it to Sonya,” Sara said now quietly, turning the ignition. “I think I’m going to stop the investigation. The detective is right.”

We drove through streets dappled with golden light. Sara dropped me off, her hand fluttering goodbye as we turned away in tandem.

A leaf blower, the main instrument in our urban soundtrack, moved towards a crescendo as a neighbor tidied up the detritus at their door. OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry magazine. Email her at inklyadams@aol.com.

Home Grown

Another Piece of Poundcake Please

No judgment here

By Cynthia Adams

The path wending through pine, oaks and scrubby cedars from my grandmother’s house to her neighbor Mildred’s was worn smooth by heavy usage. My grandmother — “Miz Pat” to others and Mama Patty to family — would wrap a freshly baked pound cake, cookies or pie in a fresh tea towel and set off for a visit.

The shortcut spared them the hazards of walking along a narrow asphalt road and creeping along the verge. In the warm months, farmers on combines and tractors dominated the former dirt road my grandmother had entreated Gov. Terry Sanford to pave in the 1960s. Once paved, she was overjoyed, convinced that her one-woman letter-writing campaign was successful.

More curious, still, given such activism had taken root in her. For Mama Patty never once drove on a public road.

My father mopped tears of laughter from his eyes, telling us kids how she once rammed my grandfather’s lumbering, black Plymouth straight through the sturdy wall of the barn as he watched helplessly on, snuffing out all desire to become licensed. She swiftly sold the Plymouth to her preacher.

Alternating their visits, Mama Patty and Mildred would wait until Mildred’s young daughters had caught the school bus before trekking through the woods for a cup of coffee and chat.

Mildred and Mama Patty shared their bounty. They also shared the happinesses and pains of their many neighbors.

Typically, they were first to prepare meals for the bereaved. The first to help when there was hardship in Goose Creek, a farming community and namesake of the nearby creek, which threaded past fields of soybeans, tall corn, cotton, wheat and alfalfa.

Spring and summers, with planting, gathering and harvesting, presented little idle time. In the colder months, the fallow fields that lay outside their houses grew brown, as stalks crumpled along the rows. Even then, the resilient pair of women seldom rested, helping each other preserve something with every passing season. Come autumn, there would be vegetables and fruit to can, sauerkraut to prepare in a stone churn as the cabbage came in, and hominy made from corn in the same washhouse with a heat-fired basin where my grandmother had long ago made lye soap.

Baking was never-ending. Mama Patty’s kitchen was heavily imbued with the honeyed perfume of butter, vanilla and sugar. The white-enamel GE oven barely cooled before she began peeling knotty Granny Smith apples picked from the orchard and rolling out another pastry.

She was a substantially sized woman who preferred simple housedresses and aprons, along with navy slip-on Keds. Mama Patty kept her short, tightly curled hair dyed blackish-blue by her hairdresser daughter at Franklin’s Beauty Shop in Monroe. Her glasses would be Warby Parker-hip today, but they were owlish at the time, magnifying lively, black eyes. She never left home without a fresh hankie and a pearl-handled pocketknife in an apron pocket alongside a tube of Revlon — her sole concession to vanity.

Mildred, at least 20 years younger than my grandmother, preferred capris and blouses, favoring white Keds that were kept spotless. She, too, wore her brown hair cropped short and little makeup on her tanned face. While not a conventional beauty, Mildred had an expressive, open face with deep dimples. Indigo-blue eyes, crinkled by her constant smile and quick laughter, made her deeply attractive.

She was too young to have weathered the hardships Mama Patty had survived — the loss of a child, the premature death of a spouse, the ravages of cancer and the pangs of a cozy nest emptying. She was inclined towards a sunny, empathetic nature.

Mildred’s modesty, like her baking, even rivaled my grandmother’s.

They had instantly adored one another, although Mama Patty was more serious in nature.

Both women were Baptists, albeit one was a Primitive Baptist and the other, a Missionary Baptist. I loved it best when the two argued religion. I’d sit in the child’s rocking chair in the kitchen, near my grandmother’s Kennedy Rocker, and eavesdrop.

They discussed predestination and the particulars of the afterlife. Primitive Baptists, a Calvinistic tradition, grew out of the many Scots-Irish who settled in the South. Theologically, they accepted predestination, unlike Missionary Baptists, who emphasized free will and evangelism.

“Miss Pat, if I believed as you do, I don’t know what I’d do,” Mildred, a Missionary Baptist, would murmur, a smile curling her lip. “I probably would never sleep another wink.”

Mama Patty would gently counter as they argued the “doctrines of grace.” Their voices would always be even as they graciously disagreed. And so, it would go: pondering, parrying.

The two would proceed in this way, hearing each other out. It was a powerful life lesson in what neighborly love actually meant.

Eventually, one or the other, usually my grandmother, would announce, “Let’s have some poundcake!” and the give-and-take would end.

Mildred would pour strong coffee from the well-worn percolator on the stove as my grandmother served.

It was years before I understood that, ideologically and politically, these women were poles apart. My grandparents were FDR standard bearers; educated and bonded over a love of stringed instruments. My grandfather became an educator and community leader.

Mildred and her husband, Hughlan, were none of those things. Yet nothing but goodwill had passed between them all.

I think of their ongoing kitchen table diplomacy as remarkable in a world where people seldom seek to bridge differences. Such neighborliness, such kind and generous acts of spirit, rarely make headlines or inspire television programs (except for Steve Hartman’s Kindness 101).

And yet, Miz Pat and Mildred forged a lifetime of pleasures while discussing life’s mysteries. The two remained devoted neighbors until their respective ends.

As my grandmother lay dying, Mildred’s warm hand sought hers, and they clasped.

Now, I, too, seek such a path through a dense wood, in search of such connection. Especially when we believe in divergent things.

And I imagine a Ted Talk, featuring Miz Pat and Mildred, two masters of communication, explaining how such wondrous things can commence with the simplest of gestures.

They can begin with a poundcake. OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry magazine. Email her at inklyadams@aol.com.

2026 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

Sea-Monkey Business

From soup to what?

By Cynthia Adams

Illustration by Miranda Glyder

As soon as I could read, I stripped the Campbell’s soup labels off to send in for prizes, such as membership in the Lassie fan club. Becoming a Lassie fan clubber in good standing — one who adored the TV dog along with countless others — was irresistible.

So what if my poor mother never knew what soup she was opening? Off went the requisite labels, a dollar and my carefully printed order form.

From the moment it arrived, I kept my cherished Lassie’s picture in my special Lassie fan club wallet. And pined for such a pet one day. Alas, Mama did not think house pets were hygienic.

Briefly, we had Pete, a family parakeet. Although a chipper little bird, he was short lived. Unlike Lassie, Peter never solved a crime or conundrum.

Lassie, the rough collie, died in June 1958 in his Hollywood home at age 18. His son replaced him on the show.

Still, I held a solemn funeral for Pete when he went claws up.

Then, on a Bazooka bubble gum wrapper, I discovered Sea-Monkeys.

Sea-Monkeys, also advertised on the rear cover of comic books, captivated me. The ad made them look like merrily cavorting miniature sea horses, which I could own myself!

“Just add live sea-monkey eggs . . . and grow the most ADORABLE AND ENTERTAINING PETS.”

Dollars never idled an instant in my Lassie wallet. Packaging up the requisite bubble-gum wrappers with the order form and cash, I proudly ordered my very own Sea-Monkeys without a word to my mother. She might object to my keeping real pet monkeys in my room, I reasoned, but Sea-Monkeys were probably quiet and unobtrusive. They would be a bother to no one, confined to a small tank I would have to procure somehow.

Surely, once Mama saw them frolicking as the ad depicted, she would fall in love.

My tiny fingers trembled with excitement as I carefully opened the much-anticipated package. But soon, that was replaced by concern. The Sea-Monkeys, as received, were minute, worrisome and mystifying, looking nothing like any monkey I’d ever seen. More like dried herbs in a cellophane packet. Skimming the scant information, I read these were eggs, not actual Sea-Monkeys.

Dutifully following instructions, I placed them with tap water in a large, clean mayonnaise jar. Wait and watch them grow, the ads said.

I waited. I watched.

And waited some more. Whatever it was I was supposed to be watching for didn’t seem to be happening.

Meanwhile, I told my friends about my pet Sea-Monkeys growing at home. But in actuality the doubts sown the moment I opened the cellophane packet were the only things actually growing.

What children have in direct proportion to imagination is a lack of patience. It seemed I waited weeks — perhaps it was only days. But the water grew murkier. No tiny Sea-Monkey faces appeared, pressed against the jar, twee features I knew I’d adore upon sight.

What the desiccated Sea-Monkeys actually are, dear readers, are brine shrimp.

Pouring the smelly water down the bathroom drain, I suppose the Sea-Monkeys got a burial at sea, minus fanfare.

Sea-Monkey sales continue today, a big ruse netting big dollars for the company that markets them.

The Sea-Monkey scam made me more devoted to the honest Campbell’s soup folks and Lassie. I lapped up bowls upon bowls of alphabet soup.

Bazooka, hawkers of Sea-Monkeys, mostly lost my approval. Though I still ruefully bought it on occasion. For as savvy marketers know, little children, even those with long memories, make for poor cynics. OH

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

2026 Department Home Grown

Home Grown

Buffy, the Unrepentant

A terrier on a tear

By Cynthia Adams

Illustration by Cambpell Pringle

The flapdoodle in our household began when my friend asked about our potentially rescuing Buffy, whose elderly owner had died.

As his owner grew weak and debilitated, Buffy was relegated to the horse barn. He had already lost most of his “inside” manners and was nearly feral when we picked him up.

If Buffy was compatible with our senior dogs, we would keep him ourselves. Either way, we would at least help place a Yorkie who seemed to know he possessed star power. This Buffy was no vampire slayer — just a tiny, prickly terrier, I cooed when we met.

Looks, dear readers, can be deceptive.

The pup was small enough to fit in my workbag. That is, if I could have wrestled the toffee-colored charmer, as strong and feisty as a Tasmanian devil, into it. He seemed determined to remain with the horses, which was not an option. I coaxed him into my arms, and we returned to Greensboro to introduce him to our pack.

Of course, this all happened just as we were leaving for a long-planned vacation. Our dogsitter agreed to tend to a third dog — along with our deaf and blind senior mutt and aging mini-Schnauzer.

We swiftly learned Buffy had no desire to adapt to our older, cranky territorial dogs. On return from our weeklong trip, most of the first floor and furniture had been marked by an ambitiously assertive Buffy. Several wooden floors were damaged. Worse, Buffy was not just a terrier, but a terror.

The dogsitter was exasperated. Buffy, she reported, was incorrigible. She suspected, as we did, that Buffy had never been socialized, accustomed to being the one and only alpha dog.

Weeks later, chaos continued.

We reluctantly decided to find a loving home where Buffy, the cutest possible anarchist, could happily dominate.

Working with a pet daycare, we distributed flyers with a picture of photogenic Buffy explaining his history. We stressed what seemed best, an older owner with no other dogs. Unless we found such a home, Buffy would remain with us. With the help of the doggie daycare staff, we began fielding eager interviews.

One day, the daycare called to tell us that a retired lady had come in seeking to adopt, having lost a previous Yorkie who “looked exactly like Buffy.”

She was a cutie herself; the perfect match! Buffy seemed to agree, practically jumping into the woman’s arms at first meeting. My heart soared. After subsequent meetings and checking references, we packed up Buffy’s new bed, bowls and toys. The duo left all smiles — even the tiny terror seemed to grin.

Periodically, I checked on Buffy. They were happily ensconced in Raleigh, her new owner reported. But trouble in paradise ensued.

“I’m concerned about Buffy,” the woman announced over the phone one night without preamble.

Uh-oh. Here it comes, I thought. Was it his old habit of peeing on furniture?

Was he unwell? Nope, Buffy’s health was excellent. She nervously cleared her throat. He has issues, she said.

“I took him to Bible study with me, just like I used to take my Alfie. But, Buffy acted horribly.”

What had happened? I gulped.

“I don’t want to say, it’s so vulgar,” she answered. Vulgar? A Yorkie?

Finally, she spoke. “Buffy humped his toy! Right there at Bible study. Everybody saw it.”

I joked. “Maybe Buffy isn’t a Baptist?”

The woman was unamused.

We agreed to talk in a few days, and I suggested Buffy not accompany her to the meetings. Wouldn’t that resolve it?

The next time we talked, Buffy’s owner remained upset, despite admitting that otherwise, his behavior was mostly good.

“He has a sex problem,” she reluctantly reported. “Buffy likes to sleep on the chaise in my bedroom, right where Alfie slept.”

I took a deep breath, completely uncertain where this was going.

“He looks straight at me and humps his toy. Like he’s goading me. It’s indecent!” she cried.

My heart broke for the miscreant Yorkie. I told her I would come for him.

“No,” she replied slowly. “He’s testing me. But I’ll keep praying on it.”

Eventually a détente was reached. I wasn’t sure I had to know exactly how.

Still . . . I wondered. Was Buffy back in Bible study? Was he swaddled like Alfie on the chaise, peeking innocently at his devout owner?

I considered the many reasons she relented: Buffy’s button nose? His bright little eyes? That perky swagger!

Or did Buffy leverage the power of the unrepentant? For, as my God-fearing Baptist grandmother said, “The good Lord sure does love a sinner.” OH

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

2026 Department 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.

2026 Department Home Grown

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