The Mauney House stood at 139 Catawba Avenue in Old Fort, NC, for 120-plus years. Its pine floors were wavy, and its roof was prone to leak. But having survived the Flood of 1916, it was a local landmark. About 1982, the state acquired the house for the Mountain Gateway Museum’s offices. For ten years, it held my office, where history books filled the bookshelves, past exhibit panels hung on the walls, and files full of “works in progress” lay stacked on my desk.
While driving to work this morning, I saw a dead possum lying on the roadside. At least, I think it was dead. You know how possums like to try to fool you.
From the time I could toddle, I was a Daddy’s Girl. Almost everywhere Daddy went, I went, too. He would lift me onto his shoulders, ride me in the wheelbarrow around the backyard, or drive with me standing on the car’s bench seat, snugged up beside him.As a child, I made regular Saturday morning trips with Daddy to Bob’s Barbershop. I enjoyed a Nehi orange soda and some nabs while he got a haircut and a shave. I attended Daddy’s Sunday School class, partly because the older men dotingly dispensed chewing gum and hard candy.
March is National Crafts Month and a good time to examine the history of handcrafts in Western North Carolina and the schools that still teach them. Long before Europeans arrived in the southern Appalachians, Indigenous people used the mountains’ rich natural resources to create objects they needed to survive. When English, Scots-Irish, and German immigrants began settling here in the mid-1700s, they, too, learned to transform nature’s raw materials into items essential for daily life.
I’ve been a library lover since my Aunt Ercelle introduced me to the Henderson County Public Library when I was 11 years old. My most prized possession is still a library card. And like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, I’ve been known to swoon over a stately room with book-filled shelves.
What makes millions worldwide watch a huge, lighted ball slide down a pole in New York City’s Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve? Call it tradition or pure craziness, but it’s been happening since 1907. It began in 1904 when New York Times owner Adolph Ochs decided to commemorate the opening of his newspaper’s new headquarters in Times Square with a blockbuster New Year’s Eve party.
Southern Balsam [Fraser fir] pulled from open. 18 when planted in April 1924. Ed Wilson, Park Warden, the in background.
Outside my office window, the black walnut trees are dropping their fruit. The round, green husks fill the yard, and while the lawn mower is no fan of these fallen fruits, the resident squirrels are in a foraging frenzy! About the size of a baseball and almost as hard, walnut husks can make a nasty knot on your noggin if you walk under one in mid-descent. But the tasty treat inside the walnut’s shell can (nearly) make you forget your headache. The walnut family (genus Juglans) includes more than 15 nuts native to Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
