Today I am remembering a warm sunny morning early last spring, when my friend Mary Katherine and I went looking for the children’s graves down by Oyster Creek. She told me that there were nine of them. Nine children all from one family. Nine who died of diphtheria during the Civil War, when Death’s hunger seemed to have no end.
The Beauty of Things
The Best Meal Ever (for Mother’s Day)
"We always ate on the front porch, her in the swing, me in a rocker, a little table between us, and we watched the cars go by on 101 while she told me stories about growing up in that house."
The Land of the Longleaf Pine
My friend Tom Earnhardt recently sent me an extraordinary array of photographs from The Nature Conservancy's Green Swamp Preserve, a magical place famous for its longleaf pine savannas, its wild orchids and its carnivorous plants.
On the Great Coharie River
When Dr. Linwood Watson and I visited last winter, he also told me about an extraordinary project that the Coharie Tribe in eastern North Carolina has undertaken to deepen their ancestral ties to the river and the land that has been their home for centuries.
The NC Native Ethnobotany Project
One of the great pleasures I had last winter was a visit from Dr. Linwood Watson, a Haliwa-Saponi family physician who has a passion both for growing native plants and for understanding more deeply how they were traditionally used for sustenance and healing in eastern North Carolina’s Indian communities.
The Light of the Body
I never grow weary of looking at these old portraits at the New Hanover County Public Library. They date from the 1850s to the present day, and they're available to us all even in these times of Covid-19.
The Light in the Fields
We always said that we’d go to Chinquapin together. He was going to show me where he grew up. We were going to visit his aunt, the one who raised him, and we were going to sit on her front porch and drink sweet tea and tell stories.
My Grandmother’s Fruitcake
I came to making fruitcakes late in life. One fall morning, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I woke up craving a slice of my grandmother Vera’s fruitcake. My grandmother, Vera Sabiston Bell, lived in an old farmhouse in a little community called Harlowe in Carteret County, N.C.
The Beauty of Old Fishing Nets
Far more than I usually do, I am noticing the beauty in even the smallest, most everyday parts of my world.
A is for Abraham Galloway
I was delighted to open Michelle Lanier’s beautiful new children’s book My N.C. from A to Z and discover Abraham Galloway on the very first page! I helped bring Galloway’s story to light in my book The Fire of Freedom only a few years ago and now he’s starring in one of the most wonderful … Continue reading A is for Abraham Galloway
David Cecelski 