A WEDDING IN NEW ORLEANS

“America has only three cities:  New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.  Everywhere else is Cleveland.” Tennessee Williams

Jackson Square in New Orleans

My only child was married in New Orleans on the eve of 2014.  As my husband and I walked out in the French Quarter that Saturday morning, rain splashing on the cobblestones and dripping on our heads from the wrought-iron balconies, I was glad of the opportunity to make the journey on foot, like a pilgrim.  So many colorful epochs converge in the streetscapes of the Vieux Carre and call to you across the centuries, that you can’t help but be drawn back into memory as you make your way down St. Anne to Chartres, past the cathedral and up St. Peters Street beyond Preservation Hall.  You peer into courtyards where a light glows in a window, where a busboy leans to take a smoke.  You glance into shops where the smell of chocolate and hot caramel rolls up from a marble slab.

French Quarter courtyard

In these streets there is the same sea-reflected light that shines upon the steep Pacific city of your youth.  There is the same sense of risks taken, of lives uprooted and re-imagined, of people pushing themselves to the bare-knuckled edge of possibility.  You can’t help but think of your own wedding, so long ago but always so immediate.  Fear and joy are snarled in your throat.  Someone is pinning freesias in your hair and the scent makes you dizzy.  People you trust express doubts, his family sends their regrets.  The risk seems immense -- it yawns like a cavern without a bridge.  But then your lover’s face in the doorway settles everything, and there is a floor beneath your feet.  It isn’t until much later that you comprehend the significance of what you've learned: that life is all about the leaps.

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A mule waits beside the Mississippi

Thirty-one years later we are walking to our daughter’s wedding.  My husband wears the linen cap he bought at a shop on Royal Street the night before. It suits his tan suit surprisingly well, his lavender shirt and pocket square.  I tell him he looks ready to walk onstage in a production of My Fair Lady playing Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, the Cockney dustman who sings “Get Me to the Church on Time.”  A hawker at a Bourbon Street strip club confirms me in this when he calls out as we pass, “You well turned out, man!  You got Nawlins style!”

Noisette rose in Jackson Square

Bourbon Street

Then we are shaking our umbrellas outside the two-hundred year old building on Bienville, the one with the plaque that made me shriek when I read it the night before, although no one but me seemed to care that in their time Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde had bellied up to the absinthe bar, that in the corner room upstairs the French pirate Jean Lafitte had plotted with Andrew Jackson to beat the British at the Battle of New Orleans.  
Now a friend whisks me up the cramped stairs to a room lit by a dazzling chandelier.  Girls’ laughter echoes off the walls; the windows are open to the balcony and I hear the swish of tires in the rain.

St. Louis Cathedral

A woman stands with her back to me, the ivory lace and long train appearing to be natural extensions of her, as if they are the plumage of a slim and luminous bird.  It’s not until I see her face reflected in the pier glass on the opposite wall that I recognize my child.  I think of that phrase, ‘gilding the lily.’ And then there’s music sounding in the stairwell.  We are all rushing.  There is so much happiness.  There are cupcakes.

 Life is all about the leaps.

TIME TRAVELERS: A WINTER RESPITE IN OLD SALEM

Winter greenery in Old Salem

With the semester ended I contemplated a weekend free of work for the first time in four months, and made plans to unwind in Hendersonville at a Christmas fair.  My husband, however, still faced two more weeks of classes and final exams, so I deferred to his need to spend a restorative day in the eighteenth century.  We headed northeast to Old Salem.

Old Salem in North Carolina should not be confused with Salem, Massachusetts, the New England village where nineteen people were tried and hanged as witches in 1692-93.  The Carolina settlement was founded nearly one hundred years later by Moravians, a protestant sect of industrious Germans who relocated to the southern wilderness from Pennsylvania.  Like the Shakers, these Moravians were people of strong faith who practiced a form of communal living and were extremely talented builders and craftsmen.  

Herbs and vegetables on West Street

The proof of that is in the ninety-one original buildings dating from 1766 to 1860 surviving in Old Salem to this day.  These include the circa 1769 Single Brothers House, a kind of dormitory/carpentry-shop where unmarried men lived while they learned a trade; the Salem Tavern, where visitors still dine on bratwurst and beer as George Washington did when he stayed there in 1791; and the tall-spired Home Moravian Church, where an active congregation has been worshipping in the same sanctuary since 1800. 

Home Moravian Church

The historic district of Old Salem occupies roughly twenty blocks in the heart of Winston-Salem, the rough-edged tobacco town that grew around it, with some restored residences privately owned and others open to the public.  Upon crossing the covered bridge into the village one steps into a world measured by the clip-clop of carriage horses on cobblestones and an occasional bell toll from the church.  It’s like a spa-day for your spirit.

We have been here numerous times over the last two decades: with my daughter when she was a schoolgirl and craved the cinnamon-scented sugar cake at Winkler’s Bakery; with visiting relatives who took in the exhibits at the Horton Museum, principally the treasures displayed in the period interiors at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA); and with gardening friends who delighted in the restored organic kitchen gardens, grape arbors and heirloom apple trees arrayed along Salt Street.  Now that we’re empty-nesters we prefer to visit this Colonial enclave in the quieter, less crowded seasons of autumn and winter.

Sugar Cakes for sale at the Winkler Bakery

On the first Saturday in December we were too late for the flaming gold display of the sugar maples, and the gardens had mostly been put to bed except for some plots of collards and cabbages.  But there are plenty of indoor attractions at Old Salem. 

The Tavern in Old Salem

While waiting for a table at The Tavern, we browsed at T. Bagge, the gardening store on Main Street.  They drew me in with mason bee-houses, South Carolina gardening guides and organizers for my potting shed.  I happily snagged the last bag of summer snowflake bulbs on discount, Leucojum aestivum. These starry perennials are Dixie’s answer to British snowdrops (Galanthus spp.), which fail to thrive in our clay soil.  Despite their common name, summer snowflakes bloom in early spring in Zone 7B, and naturalize so easily in our region that their white fairy-bell blossoms etched with green are often seen blooming in the gardens of derelict homes long after the gardeners have moved on. 

Summer snowflake bulbs

Musicians on the Square

Summoned for lunch at The Tavern, we dared not linger on Salem Square long enough to hear the musicians play more than two bars of “The Coventry Carol.”  Settled out of the wind in one of the cleanly proportioned rooms on the ground floor, we dined on meatloaf, pot roast and hot German potato salad washed down with Spaten lager on draft.  This is hardly typical fare for us, but for my husband, whose youth was spent stationed with the Army in Germany, the Tavern’s stick-to-your ribs menu represents the ultimate comfort food.

Eating at The Tavern: a hot meal on a cold day

Well-fueled, we were ready for a walk, popping first into the A. Butner Hat Shop to try on the hand-made period hats (note to reenactors: check out the ‘Colonel Mosby,’ a beautifully re-created felt slouch hat identical to the one worn by Confederate cavalry officer John Singleton Mosby, the “Gray Ghost”).   We continued climbing Academy Street to the church and circled Salem College, where the strains of the horn players’ music drifted up to us. Crossing Bank Street, we admired the cold-season row crops planted opposite Dr. Vierling’s house and the new beehives sited in a private garden adjacent to God’s Acre, Salem’s cemetery. 

One of the key factors in keeping Salem a viable community as opposed to a theme park is the mixture of public attractions and privately owned homes.  This ratio seems fairly fluid, with some homes we’ve visited in the past changing hands and becoming private, while others renovate and open for business, like the Augustus T. Zeveley Inn, a bed-and-breakfast on Walnut and Main Streets.

A. Butner Hat Shop

There are always one or two houses for sale in Old Salem, some of which are listed with the non-profit organization, Preservation North Carolina.  On this trip we noted two homes for sale in the heart of the old district which I looked up later on the PNC website.  The Timothy Vogler house is just about the right size for us, but all that history comes at a steep price.  Whenever FK and I fantasize about the prospect of living in such a place we end up consoling ourselves for its being unattainable by imagining the restrictive covenants that would go along with owning a property in the midst of an historic tourist attraction, as in ‘and we thought having an HOA was a headache!’...

A garden of cabbage, collards and broccoli.  Vierling House, 1802, in background.

The gray western horizon is tinged with pink as we finish our rambling.  We duck back into the garden shop long enough to select a cedar wreath for our door and make our way to the covered bridge that carries visitors over Liberty Street to the Visitor’s Center.  On the other side lies the 21^st century. 

            A young family is taking pictures on the bridge, and as we approach, the grandfather calls to them to finish up.  FK shakes his head.  Take your time, he tells them.  We’re in no hurry to cross over.

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Old Salem is located at 600 S. Main Street in Winston Salem, NC.  Hours of operation are Tues-Saturday, 9-5, and Sunday, 12:30-5.  There is no fee to eat at the restaurants (in addition to The Tavern, there is a sandwich shop located above Winkler’s Bakery) or to enter the shops, but you will need to purchase an admission ticket at the Visitor’s Center in order to enter the historic buildings in the village where demonstrations and tours take place.  For more information, call 336-721-7300. 

Reservations are strongly recommended for lunch at The Tavern – call ahead at 336-722-1227.  To see a menu, follow the links on the website for old Salem.

www.oldsalem.org

Preservation North Carolina is an historic preservation organization whose mission is to protect and promote buildings, landscapes and sites important to the diverse heritage of North Carolina.  Visit their website to see what historic properties are for sale statewide.

www.presnc.org

THE TENANT HOUSE

            A new family has moved into the faded white house at the top of Kent Street,* the one we have come to call the Tenant House.  Miss R.,* who lives on our side of the street, owns this house, but as she is in her eighties it is her family who rents it out.  Despite the fact that her memory has grown porous, she remembers the distant past quite well, and has imparted the details of her sister’s occupancy there in the 1960s, as well as the span of years when the police chief resided there and Kent was the safest street in town.

        I was invited in to see the house during a period of vacancy that followed the tenancy of a large family who had lived there barely a year.  They moved in during a cool spring, suffered through a torrid summer without air conditioning by mostly living on the porch – all ten of them -- and decamped early the next year when the rigors of raising children in an unheated house proved too formidable.  Miss R. was hoping to sell the century-old cottage and was hoping her neighbors might know someone willing to live there, so she gave me the tour. 

           The house is well-built, with a step-down porch in front and a deep backyard.  On one side of the yard is a collapsed shed where I surprised a tomcat sleeping in a bathtub.  Indoors, the previous tenants left thick sheets of plastic hanging from the windows in a failed attempt to keep the house habitable through the winter.  There was only one ancient electric heater in the hallway; the fireplaces in the front parlor and dining room had long been closed off. 

In the service porch off the kitchen there was a wide hole in the floor, and Miss R. alarmed me by maneuvering nimbly around the hole in order to see what the tenants had left scattered on the shelves. I wasn't sure which prospect shocked me more: that my neighbor would be willing to rent this house in its current condition, or that anyone would be willing to pay money to live there.  Even more shocking, I suppose, is the fact that no law in Traveler's Joy prevents such a transaction.

That was several years ago.  What we have come to understand in the years since is that there are people living in conditions of such appalling squalor in this community that a house like Miss R.’s presents itself as a palace to some.  It offers an opportunity for families splintered by joblessness or divorce or incarceration to unite under one roof at last, be it ever so humble.  Such people are willing to overlook modern amenities for a chance at being whole again.  Unfortunately, those forces that interfered with happiness and stability in bygone days are not banished by a family’s occupying a house that lacks twentieth-century wiring and stable flooring.  Discomforts such as these may even precipitate domestic crises.  That appears to be what happened to the set of tenants who covered the windows in plastic sheeting.

 

            At first, there were parties on the porch.  At Halloween, young women knocked on our door dressed in feathers and fancy hats, toting their babies and their costumed dog.  But we sometimes heard fearful yelling coming out of there, directed at a hyperactive boy who swung from the tree in front and hurled himself down the hill face-down on a skateboard like an Olympic luge competitor, with far less control. With the summer recess, this boy was often sent outside with a bag of empty soda cans.  Exiled from the house, he spent hours jumping off the porch on to the cans in the yard below, smashing them flat.  I grew so accustomed to the noise of imploding aluminum on long weekend afternoons, to the mother’s screams of frustration and the one-ended cellphone chatter of the enormous youth who paced Kent Street and Lime at all hours, passing under our windows while carrying on the intimate conversations he could not conduct when confined with his family in the too-small cottage, that one morning when the familiar din was replaced with silence I paid attention to what was taking place up at the house.  The tenants were moving out.

           I take responsibility for the next family who moved in; I was on my own porch taking a call when a red-haired woman pulled her car over in front of my house and got out, asking me if there was a house for rent in the neighborhood.  Without thinking, I told her to go knock on Miss R.’s door, which is just what she did.  She and her family moved in soon after.  

The husband drove a truck and she waittressed; he was gone for long periods of time and when he returned there were sometimes loud quarrels.  The woman dressed the porch in strings of Christmas lights and adopted a tiny black kitten; she seemed to be making a stand.  But the barking of dogs confined in the backyard began to sound desperate, going on for longer periods of time.  One day the two mutts got loose and came across the street to frolic at our place.  After knocking uselessly on the tenants’ door, I fed the dogs and led them to the pen in the backyard.  It dismayed me to see how filthy it was, and despite the fact that it had been raining for days, there was no roof on the pen or shelter for the animals. Eventually, it became clear that the family was living elsewhere, and that the red-haired woman was returning alone at night to put kibble in the pen and leave something for the kitten, who roamed the neighborhood looking for better options. 

I was finally able to catch the tenant at dusk one night and ask her about the situation with the pets.  She was wearing her work uniform and seemed stressed, tired.  She explained that the family had broken up and she was temporarily living with a relative, along with her children.  She promised that the dogs would be leaving too, once she had lined up a more permanent situation. 

            That word ‘permanent’ impressed me because of how she spoke the word, giving it very particular value.  I realized what an undervalued concept it is for most of us.

            The family that moved in last week is very similar to the ones that preceded it.  They appear to be poor; one of their vehicles clatters so loudly going up the hill it sounds as if the engine is dragging on the ground.  The children playing outside don’t seem dressed well enough for the cold, and when I recently looked out my kitchen window and spied the pre-schooler walking on the porch roof, I realized that they are not well supervised.  A nervous dog is tied to the tree in back. 

            Most of the residents of this neighborhood own their homes and lead fairly stable lives, so there is unhappy talk about the tenant house.  Some are displeased with the flow of people through the place and some share my view that the town is shameless for allowing human beings to live in such deplorable housing.   In any case, there are houses (or trailers) just like it all over Traveler’s Joy, so putting a stop to the practice on our street wouldn’t make much of a dent in the problem.  These are the places with dangling shutters and leaning foundations, the ones I pass on my walks when they’re swarming with children and neglected animals, radios blaring from the cars pulled up on the grass and tobacco smoke wafting from doorways.   When I pass them a few months later the houses are silent and dark, looking like they’ve shed a layer of paint since the last occupancy.  Bags of trash are piled at the curb for the Claw and an abandoned cat or two slinks under the porch at my approach. 

            The common thread running through this sequence of rootlessness and chaos is poverty, a condition we specialize in down here.  I have known many young people whose dreams have been deferred by the insidious, complex tentacles of generational poverty, a phenomenon that is not well understood in more prosperous regions of the country.  As many recent studies have shown, the bad luck of being born poor can doom children to repeat their parents’ and grandparents’ struggles with little hope of breaking free of the cycle. 

            Everyone tells them that education is the key; this is the message they hear even from figures at the highest levels on our national stage.  This simplistic formula for success overlooks a difficult reality.  A student who misses her college classes repeatedly because her entire family has only one functioning vehicle between them, or who fails to get a paper in on time because his mother was arrested for driving drunk (again) and who has to be in court for her hearing, has little chance of passing rigorous courses.  It’s the same for the student who simply doesn’t do the work required or who works such long hours at low-paying jobs or caring for an infant that he or she doesn’t study adequately or doesn’t have the first clue how to study.  Lacking a generation of college graduates in the family to counsel the novice student about the expectations that need to be met, help the girl defer motherhood, or protect the boy from having to work at Bo-Jangles in order to pay the family’s rent, these would-be college graduates are almost certain to fail. When they do, financial aid is curtailed and eventually cancelled, cutting off the opportunity of higher education for virtually all of them.  This is why Tomahawk County Community College has a completion/graduation rate of less than 12%.  Really . 12%.

            It takes more than a village to raise a child.  It takes stable income.  It takes jobs that pay living wages and a culture that values education and achievement.  And yes, the village could play a positive and productive role in providing poor families with more stability, if the entrenched power-base in the village was willing to take responsibility for improving the quality of its residents’ lives.  This villager, while hopeful, knows better than to hold her breath.

The photographs included here depict properties in Tomahawk County that were available for occupancy within the last four years.

ONE MAN'S TREE IS ANOTHER MAN'S TREASURE

            Every day on my way to work I drive west down Magnolia Street* and every day on my return I drive up Magnolia to reach Kent Street*, and home.  Some days I barely notice what I’m passing, making the journey on automatic pilot in a way that deposits me in the campus parking lot or my driveway wondering how I got there.  At other times I seem to view everything through fresh eyes, an experience that sets me to questioning how strangers judge this beat-down little town when they regard the shattered windows and collapsing roofs of the old storefronts and houses, or view the mattresses and broken toys discarded in the ditches awaiting The Claw, the town’s giant removal truck.

Long-vacant house in Traveler's Joy

 

            Those landmarks of 19^th century architecture in Traveler’s Joy that persevere through neglect or well-meant ‘improvements’ manage to please the eye despite their depredations, but ironically the older and finer the property the more uneasily I regard it as I pass by, because I have learned that nothing earns protection in our town by reason of its age or provenance.  In fact, the opposite is often true.  I have stood by and watched while more than one one-hundred-year-old building was torn to the ground in a single day on the principle that a bare lot has more practical potential for the owner than a lot taken up by a derelict house, no matter if the foundation was laid in the same year that Ulysses S. Grant was elected for his second term as president.

            What gave my heart a shock last week as I headed out to class was the sight of several big trucks parked on the grass before the narrow Victorian on Magnolia.  As I slowed, I saw they were not there to take the house down, but were removing the giant white oak that has grown beside it since before General Grant ever thought of running for office.  Quercus alba is a monarch of a tree, growing strong and straight for twenty feet vertically before its massive branches radiate outwards, extending a canopy of lustrous leaves that cool with flickering shade through the long summers.  I should say was a monarch, because the tree was entirely gone by the time I returned that way in the late afternoon.  The crew was loading the last of its massive logs in a truck, leaving behind a stump large enough to seat ten for dinner – not that anyone would now choose to picnic in that scruffy yard.

You had to see this beautiful white oak to believe it.

            The house had changed hands over several years, mostly staying vacant.  Notices appeared on the door and then disappeared.  At one point someone sheathed it in lemon-yellow aluminum siding, attempting and failing to make the house more attractive to a local buyer.  Still, it was possible for some of us to see past the hard times this structure had endured and to appreciate its rustic beauty.  The magnificent tree that had aged beside the house made that possible.  The house must have sold again last month, or simply passed to new tenants (people down on their luck -- an assumption I base on experience, considering that they’re moving into Traveler’s Joy and not out of it).  One day in October we noticed a car with out-of-state license plates parked in front and some meager belongings heaped on the front porch.  Barely a week later, the chainsaws came out and the tree went down.

            Earlier this year I ran three blocks from our house to get a photograph of the large Arts & Crafts home being demolished on the corner of Nance* and Lime*.  I wanted to remember it before it was sawdust and slivers, but I was too late.  The excavator had already taken half the house down, leaving the other half opened to view like a layer cake, with the top floor fireplace mantel clinging to the wall of the back bedroom and the dining room’s coffered ceilings exposed beneath.

Another old house comes down

            Four years ago one of the town’s policemen lived there with his family.  Gene McCoy* was a cheerful, voluble man who maintained the Traveler’s Joy P.D. website in his spare time and had once been written up in the newspaper for giving chase to a speeding lawbreaker all the way to Earl, but like most rural Southern policemen he struggled to feed his family on what he earned as a sworn officer.  He moonlighted as an electrician’s apprentice, working alongside my husband replacing the wiring system in our house when FK spent a month renovating the place.  When I took walks in the evenings that first year, getting to know the town on foot, I used to be comforted by the sight of Officer McCoy through the bay window, working on his computer in the dining room of the old house.  I should have realized that the sagging porch and cracked windows hinted at financial obligations too large for a country lawman.  One day, the bay window revealed an empty room; the family had moved out.  Early in 2013, while preparing to take a shift patrolling the highway outside town, Sergeant McCoy suffered a heart attack and died.  He was only fifty years old.

            It doesn’t seem right to me that the corner where the house stood, the house Gene McCoy worked so hard to keep, has been cleared of rubble and planted with a fresh lawn until it looks as if there’s never been anything on that property.  The memory bank which the old house constituted has been deleted, as have the heirloom jonquils that used to bloom beside the steps, and the three feral cats who sunned themselves on the porch after the McCoys moved out.
 

The house had fallen on hard times, but the daffodils still bloomed

            I’m worried that the same fate awaits the House with the Two Verandahs, the one I wrote about in an earlier posting (3/11/13; "Whitey the Killer Cat").*  This home, left untenanted by the deaths of its elderly former owners, has been emptied of all their remaining possessions.  These were served up on the front walk for The Claw in tattered drifts of upholstery and particle board, followed shortly by a “For Sale” sign.  The white oak that grows in front of that house is twice again as large as the one that was cut down on Magnolia, and even more resplendent in full leaf.  God knows how old it is… I’m afraid to find out.  

In towns like ours there are times when you have to avert your eyes or you’ll wear yourself out agonizing about things you can’t change.  It’s not just old lamps that get left at the curb.  You can ask the abandoned animals who have become part of our household about that – the one-eyed cat or the traumatized dog who goes rigid with terror if anyone brings a rope or a cord within sight of her. One Thanksgiving my daughter took a walk and came back to report that a severed deer’s head was lying on a pile of junk up the street, his sightless eyes trained on the sidewalk.  According to her boyfriend, it was a seven-point buck.  I’m waiting to find a child set atop the stained mattresses, a note pinned to her shirt: “Free to a good home. (But may fight the tie-out.)”  

            In Traveler’s Joy, meanwhile, there’s a beautiful tree for sale, with a late 19^th century central-gable Southern vernacular two-story home and spacious garden attached.  The house needs some work; the tree, however, has thrived upon neglect.  Leave a comment on this post and I’ll provide the realtor’s information, although you'll need some luck getting him to call you back.  It's no easy task to cheat the chainsaw and the wrecking ball.

  

House for sale -- features extremely mature landscaping

* 12-17-13 -- Note on this property:  a friend tells me the seller is asking $37,000 for the house, which is approx. 3,000 sq. ft.  It will need central air, air conditioning, and other modern improvements.  The agent in charge is Chris Parker, 864-491-2963 of Chris Patterson Realty.

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

            

Old maple

            Nothing gold can stay.  Robert Frost was right.  Whether it’s romance, youth, or the sight of an old maple tree lit up by the last rays of an autumn sun, we treasure our golden joys all the more, knowing how impermanent they are.  Knowing how impermanent we are.

Aster

Nature toys with us in these final halcyon days of an Indian summer.  October frost has blasted the beanstalks and turned the showy annuals to ash, but the garden and the woods beyond abandon all subtlety as they dress for their annual curtain call. Gold may be Eden’s 'hardest hue to hold' but she is spending it freely before she 'sinks to grief.' 

And in the leaden days of winter the memory of such riches will keep us warm. 

Jack O.

Native dogwood, Cornus florida

Fragrant Camellia sasanqua 'Hana Jiman'

Beautyberry, Callicarpa americana

Dahlia 'Class Elise', before the frost

The hardest hue to hold