North Carolina the Beautiful

Those of us living in North Carolina, at least those in our county, have noticed a lot of debris lining the sides of roads. I mean A LOT. What a mess! What an embarrassment! Somebody do something!

A lot of somebodies have! 

I belong to a Ruritan Club in the community where I live, and I suggested to them that we start a petition to show people's concern, which we did. Environment Committee Chair John Clark, along with our club president, Cynthia Hicks, appeared with me before the Gamewell Town Council at its regular March meeting to present the petition calling for action. Cynthia and I then appeared before the Caldwell County Commissioners to present the same petition.

Action has begun, I'm pleased to announce. First, I received an email from the Stormwater Department of the Western Piedmont Council of Government inviting us to join a trash pickup crew. In a "Put your money where your mouth is" kind of way, I gladly went along.

Yes, that's me on the side of the road. And this is me, too. 

You should have seen the before picture!

Somewhere along the way, trashing our beautiful world has become acceptable. Many people blame uncovered trash haulers on their way to the landfill, allowing all kinds of industrial and household litter to fly out the top. Some people blame trailer owners who fail to secure loose papers and cans strewn on the floor. Some people blame fast food restaurants with the modern drive-thru dining style. Some people...and on and on, according to whichever group is easy prey for blaming.

Blaming doesn't solve anything. Action goes beyond that and does something about it, although I must say it's totally NOT FAIR for concerned citizens to pick up the trash left behind by uncaring others. Training the public to care seems like a hopeless case. And yet we must try before we are knee deep in McDonald's bags.

Whatever happened to the anti-litter campaigns I remember from years ago? First up, "Don't Be a Litterbug." Next "Keep North Carolina Clean and Green." Or was it green and clean? Elementary students from the past heard these mottos over and over and over, so the theme should have been ingrained in their minds. They've grown up now. Some of them (hopefully not all that many, but enough to ruin it for others) are the very ones driving their cars, rolling down the windows, and tossing out trash. Hopeless, indeed. And yet we must do something before the sides of our roads become even worse.

I am encouraged by the response. The NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, because of statewide concerns, established the newest campaign, in connection with America 250, "North Carolina the Beautiful." Caldwell County developed a committee composed of members representing different interests: educational, business, civic clubs and government officials. I attended their organizational meeting and plan to go back. This is an action-minded group that has already implemented steps to take. The director of the waste management facility reported on his efforts. Sad statistics here, the Adopt a Highway program in 2025 collected 4.6 tons of trash along the roadsides. In case you missed it, that was TONS. Even sadder, the paid contracted businesses along the major highway arteries in the same year collected 47.6 TONS. I wish I could capitalize numbers to emphasize that ridiculously high number.

 Venting here: we should not have to pay people to pick up after the slobs of this world. We need to get the word out. We are a free people, but freedom comes with responsibilities. Sure we could be free to toss that empty can out the window, but really, folks? Really? This is the United States, a country that works for the common good, as stated in our Constitution.  

Our world is too good to be covered in debris. Join the effort!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Easter Visual

If you keep up with me on Facebook, you already know I enjoy visiting the local North Carolina wineries. Through the years, I have become familiar with those who work the vineyards. I've even gone into the rows of luscious grapes and blueberries to pick the end-of-season leftovers. But I've never been into one in the depths of the off-season, when all is drab and hopeless looking.

I was at one last week walking through the desolate rows of vines, and I want to tell you about my experience. The owner pointed to a vine in the distance and assured me it was indeed healthy, as were the others behind it. Then he said, "Watch this."

He spoke nothing more. He didn't have to. With his head bowed low, and I mean down low, discouraged low, shoulders hunched low, he walked a straight line from where we were standing to the vine. Without explanation, he got as close as he could to the root and turned around, extending his arms to grab the thick branches on each side. He nearly had to stand on tip-toes to keep his balance. He held his legs together, slightly crossing them at his ankles.

No words. Only silence as he stood there, head still bowed down, arms splayed to each side, legs together. Oh my goodness. I got cold chills.  

Jesus knew about vineyards. He wanted his disciples to get a visual of who he was, so he told them, "I am the true vine and My Father is the gardener." (John 15:1) 

His disciples had been around vineyards, so they knew about this strong, main vine that had branches coming from it. They had seen what I saw last week in the waning days of winter. They got it. 

Just like I got it when this vineyard owner appeared to be hanging before me with an Easter visual I will never forget. I hope you get it too, this crucifixion visual on the vine.

Don't let Easter egg hunts and soft cuddly bunnies be your Easter visual. Think of this picture and visualize what I saw. 

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Art Took the Runway

When I was a first-time author, I didn't realize what being a "published author" would have in store for me. Sure it meant I wrote a book, and since then, I'm up to twenty. It also meant I was now into the retail side of life - Selling! 

Sitting in front of my computer day after day does not get my work into the hands of people who love reading. That takes effort. So does fitting into an outfit that I wore only a couple times before I gained weight. But I did it!

And here I am in front of my display table

I joined with a group of writers who went from festival to festival, hawking our wares. That was fun and a great training ground for me as we navigated through rainstorms and wind and excessive heat. Now I've limited myself to only two or three outdoor events since I became a member of the Western North Carolina Society of Artisans. I offer my books for sale in our Red Awning Gallery located at the HUB in Hudson, NC. What a creative group of artisans I have chosen to be associated with. 

Each first Friday of the month we have an event. Through the years, I have launched three different books at a First Friday. For the month of March, we decided to go big. I mean BIG! How about renting the large auditorium at the HUB? How about having seating around a carpet? A Red Carpet??? How about showcasing our art on a runway, using models from the nearby community college? The idea grew and grew and grew and finally, the first Friday in March arrived and we had a blast!

 Here's the before picture. 

Note a sketch of me by Rhonda Walker in the lower right-hand of the screen.

During the planning stage I had to rethink book development and train my mind to the concept of book covers as art. I chose three books to feature, one as yet unpublished. I removed the wording and looked at what was left. Art! I went to the local Pack and Ship and had them print enlarged versions of the front covers. I turned in a short script that was to be read as the model walked the runway carrying our art so that our guests could enjoy. 

We kept our art shrouded so that their moment on the runway would be a treat. 

When the time came for music and mulling around, (Oh, did I mention we had live music by the dynamic duo, Paddyak? And three tables loaded with food?) we visited with everyone, enjoying the moment. 

The lights dimmed...

And he was off. My first work was the one I did with Wongalee Thomas. It featured a photograph I took at the beach one year with a sketch in the center by the "Rembrandt of the Caribbean,"  Erwin de Vries, a friend of the subject of our book, Wongalee's father, Humphrey Tja-A-Ling. 

I'm not really ready to reveal to the world this art that walked the runway, so I'm keeping it a little blurry. 

It's my newest book, as yet unpublished, about a 1964 Ford Mercury Comet Caliente. I enlarged the back of the book, without its blurb, but with the car in the center of a collage of snapshots showing individual elements that make it up. You'll have to buy the book to see what I'm talking about.

I was so thrilled to see my third entry almost float down the red carpet. It was my finale! 

It featured a duo biography I wrote about two outstanding members of our community, The Physician and the Forester - Marjorie and Bill Strawn: A Story of Devotion, Service and Faith. In the center of the cover is this duo, taken at a wedding in their time of happiness. Behind that is "Linn Cove," a watercolor done by their son, Matt, a member of our society of artisans. 

Our event, "Art Takes the Runway," was a resounding success. We're already making plans for next year. Keep it in mind. You won't want to miss it!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

My Dear Jasper

Last fall, I talked my fellow author Jasper Reese into reading from his works at the Mitford Museum's poetry night. I knew he was also a poet because we chose several of his poems to include in the book The Way It Was in the Backwoods that we wrote together. 

I knew the audience would appreciate what he had to offer. And they did. 

He read a bawdy poem, "The Old French Broad," about what you might think at first, an old "broad" but with a double entendre, comparing it to the fairly wide French Broad River in western North Carolina. It was fun hearing a ninety-five-year-old man drawing chuckles from the much younger, poet-filled audience. They appreciated him as much as he appreciated them. 

He was so excited about the whole experience that he already knew what he would read for the next poet reading session. Except he didn't have a chance. He passed away last week. If he told me the title, I don't remember, but I'm determined to make a good guess and read it in his honor at the next Mitford Poetry night. 

Another thing he was determined to do was learn to play the fiddle. I'm talking when he was ninety plus years old! He was proficient in guitar and maybe a bit of banjo, but the fiddle was a challenge to him. He screeched through the basics until, at one of my visits, he conned me into playing a duet with him - he on the fiddle and me on the piano. I went home that day, dusted off the ivories, and started practicing until I finally felt comfortable enough to play the song he had selected, "How Beautiful Heaven Must Be." I'm listening to it (and tearing up at the oh so appropriate words) now as I type. It's the version by the Gaither Vocal Band. Click on it and listen to the words as you imagine Jasper finding out how beautiful and wonderful heaven really is. I got a taste of it when I sat at the piano in his living room last summer and fulfilled my promise to him to play this long-overdue duet. We both made all kinds of errors. He sounded a bit like Jack Benny giving the screeching version of music on his violin. Perhaps the two of them are playing music together in heaven! But that day, we certainly weren't up to heaven's standard playing this duet. In my heart, however, (and I think in his), we were making heavenly music as we sang at the top of our voices to drown out all our mistakes. What fun! What a man! I'm so glad he was in my life.

When I am ninety-five, I pray I will be as vibrant and excited about life as Jasper. That's my takeaway, and I hope yours as well. 

Be like Jasper.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

The Number Game

So the word of the year turns out to be a number: 67. What's an author to think? Surely dictionary.com could find more substantial words available to signify the best 2025 had to offer! This site purports to be the "Dictionary for the Real World," in other words, modern, with its nose to the grindstone of creative thinkers who coin words or repurpose them.  

But wait. I can see the logic, even if I'm of a different generation than the one where this number craze originated. It's a meaningless phrase and perfect for now. I'll let the kids delight in it and enjoy the limelight.

What set me off thinking about numbers was a bit of research I did recently, where I came upon a South Carolina town named Ninety Six. Using a number for a place shouldn't have surprised me because in my most recent release, I wrote about a town in Pennsylvania named Eighty Four. It's not all that far from Donora, the setting of my memoir of sorts, The Great Donora Fog and Other Family Stories.

I mention in the book that my husband and I drove through Eighty Four looking for a highway numbered 84 following my uncle's directions. Actually he told us to turn left when we got to Eighty Four, and we assumed he said left on 84. We learned the importance of prepositions the hard way when we ended up nearer to Pittsburgh than we planned! 

A quick Wikipedia search gave me hints for the origin of the name. It was a mere crossroads, founded in 1884. The best explanation, and I quote, "it was named by a postmaster who 'didn't have a whole lot of imagination.'" 

All this came back to me when I dug into a rabbit hole this week looking for information about a Revolutionary War incident that happened at the same location of my newest WIP (Work in Progress). An author friend of mine, Lane Dyer, devoted two chapters of his book, The Tory Oak, to this incident. 

There's an ambush. There's kidnapping and intrigue. There's a quick trial and a hanging, several hangings, on the tree outside the courthouse. It's all true, and it gives a glimpse into the unfortunate tensions and violence of war. I read the two chapters that held what I was looking for, then started back at the beginning just because I wanted to. In my manuscript, I wrote only what I needed to give the reader an idea of why this location was important to the family history I was recording. It amounted to a paragraph, but what a paragraph that is! I will probably leave out the town called Ninety Six since it wasn't significant to my WIP. A family loyal to the crown had plans to flee to Ninety Six from their camp at the Wolf Den in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. Colonel Cleveland made sure this didn't happen.

The fun of being an author is connecting to the small discoveries along the way. Angels can be in the details as much as devils can.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Inhumanity

Some books are hard to read, not because of the difficulty of sentence structure or word choice, but because of the theme or because of actions depicted. Such is the case of a few books I want to share, two I read recently. One I helped get published years ago. All three of these, in their own ways, incorporated man's inhumanity to man into the theme.

Its title alone should have prepared me - I was a War Child, a memoir by an author I met at lunch one day last May. This elegant lady, Helene Gaillet de Neergaard, at ninety years, was delightful and self-assured, almost dripping aristocracy. I had a hard time picturing the few events she told me about her childhood years. The subtitle, World War II Memoir of a Little French Girl, held more of a clue to the book than the delightful person sitting beside me. I added her book to my TBR stack, but kept selecting other books ahead of it because I just never seemed to be in the mood to read about man's inhumanity to child. Between Christmas and New Year's this year, I had some downtime and looked through the stack. There it was, and maybe I was ready, I decided. I gulped, opened to page one, and dove in. I was immediately sucked into a life I could never imagine, nor hope to imagine for any child now in 2026. 

What happens to children when they hear bombs all night or have to leave their homes because of war? She tells. Give it a read!

Her nonfiction about France during the war years dredged up memories of my reading Kristin Hannah's historical fiction, The Nighengale. This was one of those books I wanted to slam shut the cover and scream, but couldn't bear to stop reading long enough to do it. Two views of war-torn France, often too graphic, yet too necessary not to be. As was the other book by Kristin Hannah, The Women. It too sat on my TBR stack for the same reason as the others - my reluctance to surround myself with stories of war and death and the inhumanity of it all. I read this one in December of this year, when all around me were lights and cheer and gaiety. Instead, I wreathed (what an appropriate word for this time of year) myself in the life of nurses in Viet Nam. It wasn't pleasant. It was hard to take. But if we ignore the inhumanity and skip books such as these, then the act remains hidden and easier to repeat.

The settings of those books were continents away, not here in the United States, where freedom rings. We brag about freedoms. We teach our children that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects free speech and freedom of religion. And yet...

Tell that to the characters featured in Debbra Beecher Nance's book The Picking Bag. Ten years ago (has it really been ten years?), an author friend and I agreed to help Debbra self-publish this middle grade novel. She sent the manuscript and I read it. The theme of inhumanity struck me deeply. Here in America, Mormons were persecuted because of their faith. The novel follows a young boy as his family is forced to move away from the only home he'd ever known. It was not merely a pack-up-and-move story. It was one of death and destruction...and inhumanity.

In my books I have only touched on man's humanity to man once, and it's in my latest release, only a paragraph or two. I wrote a memoir, well, a memoir of sorts, I call it. It delves into my family history and I couldn't leave out the story of my sixth great-grandparents.

While The Great Donora Fog and Other Family Stories concerns a town in Pennsylvania, I included stories about my family that I had heard told over and over. These sixth great-grandparents were killed when their house was burned as punishment for believing as they did, for being Huguenots. Only my fifth great-grandfather escaped, as I write it, "with the family Bible and my genes." That was on another continent, but there was my third great-grandfather who, on US military duty in 1812, was burned at the stake by native Americans who were defending their right to exist. The past should haunt us!

In all these books, without exception, the take-away for me, was survival. Despite what was done to them, people came out the other end stronger, wiser, and with a surprising amount of compassion for others, considering what they had endured.

Books like these are a must-read for us to develop this compassion as well. Civilization depends on revealing the past so we can do better when it's our turn.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Away With the Manger

 Quick, before you pack it up, go check your manger scene. Is the Baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes like the one on the back cover of my children's book, When Christmas Feels Like Home?

Or is Baby Jesus lying in a manger with His arms splayed outward and legs crossed at the ankles, like in this one I found at the chapel of our church?

There's a reason for both. The first comes from scripture, the second chapter of Luke in the seventh verse, "...she wrapped him in swaddling clothes..." That's how I pictured a manger. I never looked deeper into the nearest nativity scene or creche to pay attention. That is, until I became a docent at author Jan Karon's Mitford Museum. We (I use the pronoun "we" because everyone involved with the museum feels like it is a part of them) walk visitors through the galleries, offering details about the items on display. 

My favorite of all is the gigantic nativity scene under a Christmas tree adorned with ornaments fans gave Jan. But on the floor beneath the tree is the real show stopper - a beautiful creche, hand painted and restored from the decrepit condition Jan found it in when she first laid eyes on it in the window of an antique store in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. She located a person to research the origins of creches and the significance of the colors of each character's clothing, someone who would restore it to its original magnificence. And there it lays, year-round for all to enjoy.

It's the baby that I point out. (I snipped this photo from the Mitford facebook site.)

Notice anything different from the swaddling clothes? 

There this Holy Baby is, his arms splayed, his ankles crossed. There's a deep intentional purpose here. This figure shows not only the birth of the Christ Child, but also the death. He is in the crucifix position. There in the manger is the child/man, fully God, fully man, foreshadowing what we know is to come for him. We can't celebrate the manger without remembering the real reason for the season.

So, now, go check the creche in your home. Look at the Christmas cards you received. Let me know if you discover anything special. 

Do away with the manger and think of the cross.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen