A week or so ago, I got two books in the mail that I wanted to share with you: The North Carolina Birding Trail Coastal Plain and Piedmont trail guides. I wrote a story for NC State University’s College of Natural Resource’s CNR magazine about the North Carolina Birding Trails, and I was so inspired by the effort to link communities together through this series of still-evolving trails that I ordered the first two guides. The western North Carolina version is scheduled to be released sometime this year.

I think I expected some run-of-the-mill guides, with standard maps and descriptions, but these felt so different to me. They don’t explain too much — after all a guide is just that, not a handholding expedition into the forrest — but they are filled with some unique details, I think. They include maps and photos and amenity details (ranging from camping and handicap access points to viewing platforms and hiking trail information). But they also include nearby attractions, such as museums and botanical gardens, along with bird species you might find.

This year, I’d like to explore some of these areas, and the guides include spots I’ve been really curious about, including the Dismal Swamp Canal in Camden County (just south of the Virginia/North Carolina border) and the Rachel Carson National Estuarine Research Reserve in Carteret County (which you can only get to by boat) and , in the Piedmont, the Sandhills Game Land in Richmond and Moore counties (one of the largest intact longleaf pine ecosystems left in North Carolina) and Eagle Point Nature Preserve in Rowan County (where Bald Eagle and Osprey are common sights). I’m going to put them on my list of places to visit as I’m traveling about the state, which I seem to be doing pretty regularly. And now with our overseas travel budget put on hold, some in-state exploring is an exciting prospect.

If you’d like to get your own, visit the N.C. Wild Store, where the two guides are currently on sale for $10 each. That is a total deal, I think, for helping inspire some new roaming and roving across North Carolina.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

When I was in high school, my dad, sister and I spent a lot of time volunteering. We worked at a camp for the developmentally disabled, taking groups of teenagers and adults on summertime field trips like horseback riding and swimming. (I even got a black eye in the pool one day when another volunteer tossed a kid onto my head. Ouch!) One of the reasons I chose to go to Warren Wilson College was because of its emphasis on community service, and as a junior and senior, I worked in the college’s Service Learning Office designing and editing a national journal about why and how colleges and students should incorporate community service into their academic programs.

After a hiatus of sorts — family and work responsibilities can overwhelm at times — I find myself compelled, again, to be more involved. President Obama’s call to service was and is such a moving message to me that it’s inspiring me, again, to find more ways to contribute to my own community.

One of the best places I’ve volunteered with so far has been at the Asheville-based MANNA Food Bank. While I’m a deep believer in organizing for real, systematic change in the community, I also believe in meeting people’s needs now, particularly for basic needs such as housing and food. Consider this:

• There are more than 35 million people who are hungry in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of these people are children, and 10 percent are elderly.
• The numbers of people living in poverty in the 18 western counties range from nearly 10 percent to 20 percent of the population.
• The numbers of hungry people in Western North Carolina are twice the national rate, which is one in 12. That means one in every six people living in Western North Carolinian is hungry. I know there are people in my neighborhood who use local organizations to get help. There are probably some in your neighborhood, too.

Last week, Pat and I volunteered at MANNA to sort apples and make packages of food for elementary school kids to take home over the weekends. These tiny, back-pack sized packages of canned vegetables and spaghetti and meatballs go home with children who receive free or low-cost lunches at school — nationally, 30.5 million children received these lunches every day in 2007.

While we volunteered, we learned, as has been reported locally, that even though food donations have remained steady at the food bank, demand has really spiked across the region, leaving MANNA’s food resources stretched. It’s worth noting here that Charity Navigator, an organization that serves as a consumer watchdog on charities, gives MANNA only two of four possible stars (four being the best), mainly — from what I can tell — because growth in both revenues and expenses have decreased and their working capital ratio is also very, very small.

There are many root causes for hunger — low wages, unemployment, poverty. These need long-term — and sometimes political — solutions. In the meantime, I want to help make sure my neighbors have enough food to eat and that kids have enough food to eat over the weekends, when they aren’t at school and can’t get lunch there. If you want to help, too, there are lots of volunteer opportunities directly through MANNA, or you can sign on with Hands On Asheville-Buncombe, which offers volunteer opportunities in a wide variety of areas — from working on hunger to the environment. Statewide, the North Carolina Hunger Forum is working to cut hunger in half by 2015. There’s also a Raleigh-based group, Stop Hunger Now, dedicated to stopping hunger internationally, and Feeding America can give you some places to start helping other locations.

There are hundreds of hunger-fighting organizations across the country, so if you’re thinking of donating donate money to these or any other organization, take a little time to do your homework first. Look at nonprofit researchers GuideStar or Charity Navigator and check with a consumer protection agency (like the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance) to make sure you’re informed about what your money will do. Ask around and see what works for you, what your neighbors or colleagues recommend. 

Either way, now is the time to help. Part of my goals for the year include volunteering at least 40 hours. I’ll let you know where and how that works out. But, I’d like to know about you, too. Did Obama’s call to service move you to action? What are you doing and/or planning to do to make your community a better place for everyone?

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

Yesterday we went to the tree lot tucked behind the Farmer’s Market. I’ve decided that I love the Farmer’s Market, despite its tendency to be more of a wholesaler market than a true farmer’s market. It’s my type of place, which is, essentially, one filled with old people and hoop cheese. What can I say? I’m from rural North Carolina, after all.

We pulled up, parked, and … bought the first tree we saw. Yep, for all the tree love I have coursing through my veins, it never fails that we pull up to a stall, walk about five feet and find the perfect Frasier fir. We bought it from a man with the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, who lives in Little Canada, a tiny community off the Tuckasegee River in Jackson County. Across North Carolina, there are an estimated 50 million of these trees on over 25,000 acres, and he and his wife have 14 acres of land filled with these trees. A couple of years ago the two put out 1,200 baby trees by hand. It took them three days. 

I imagine that they go to sleep and night and dream about trees. They have to watch for red spiders, which crawl in the little bitty buds at the tips of the limbs and make them explode. They have to use big, long machete-ish knives to sheer the trees into the perfect cones. They have to worry about drought and frosts. And that’s just until they get them to the market, where he’ll be until Christmas Eve, watching over the trees he’s selling there and trying, I imagine, to make a small profit. Years of work go into this season. The 12-foot trees (which we did not buy, by the way, because that would just be silly) take eight to nine years to grow. He said the drought we’ve had has slowed down their growth a bit, making them a little bit fatter rather than a little bit taller. Sometimes they think about going out and setting them all on fire, he laughed.

I understand this, the love-hate of the work you’ve chosen. It’s a fine, fine line, even for Christmas trees and even if, in the end, what you grow brings someone like me who stands talking in your forest of swinging trees, pulling at the leaves and smelling the piney scent on her hands and dreaming of lights.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

Pat and I took a drive through Oak Island this afternoon. It was sunny out and if it had been June or July, the roads would have been busy. Kids holding boogie boards and pink inflatable rafts would have been waiting at the side of the road to cross and go through a public access parking lot to the soft, soft sand next to the calm Atlantic. But it was cold outside. Not snow cold, but stick-in-your ear cold. We drove through and found a spot here, in the parking lot at the marina. We were the only ones walking around, even though all the slips were filled with empty boats, noses pointed out to the open water, but tethered and bobbing like anxious hunting dogs at a tree.

There’s a reason I love traveling in the off season. While I love the crowds and the fact that the local coffee shop stays open past 3 p.m. during the summer, I also love walking about, looking at things up close. There’s an anonymity to the solitude, the implied permission to look at things and wander aimlessly. I love this, though, I admit, because I love being alone most times. Today, this empty parking lot reminded me, again, that sometimes solitude is enough.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s how it goes:

He or she looks me up and down and asks, “Where are you from?” Occasionally, I get this question’s more accusatory cousin, the very sweet, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

That’s when I start racking brain for what I just said. Did I mention chittlins or fatback? How about Dukes of Hazzard or Andy Griffith? 

I usually stammer about trying to find the right answers. I grew up in Farmington, a tiny unincorporated community in northern Davie County, a tiny county just west of Forsyth County and Winston-Salem. And while I wasn’t born in Western North Carolina, generations and generations of my mother’s family lived in and around Mitchell County (a couple of them were involved in the effort to succeed from the Union and create the State of Franklin), and my father’s family — unknown to him and to me — is from either Stokes or Surry counties. The jury is still out on that one.

But those aren’t the real answers, are they? Because pretty soon I realize the problem was that not only did I not mention those things, but that the real question here is, “Why don’t you sound like a Southerner?”

I don’t have the mouthy, slippery, slow, soft, boisterous, rich, jumbled version of the Southern accent that people hear on TV shows and big budget movies. They’re used to portray, in equal measure, ignorance, romance and exoticism. They can be an accent and a language unto itself. They are hard to mimic with success. (HBO’s True Blood? What is happening there, please?)

But what I want to say here is that we don’t all sound the same. I love this American English dialect map that shows the isolated dialects — like New Orleans — that rest like a lily in a pond among those who sound different. (Here’s a joke rooted in Southern Christianity: How do you know the Three Kings were firemen? They came from a-far.) And with Sarah Palin around, hearing someone who doesn’t sound like a NPR broadcaster gets attention.

Still, some of us don’t sound “like we’re from the South.” We pronounce our g’s sometimes. I feel silly even writing this because it seems so obvious, but since I get this question a lot — I mean, at least once a week it seems — maybe it isn’t obvious.

The idea is, of course, that there are things that make you Southern. Top of the list, besides the fact that you live in the region, is that you sound different. And that you can make a half-way decent pecan pie. To illustrate the pecan’s import: My mother made mini pecan tarts for my wedding that outshone the cake, that’s for sure. She would have been proud of me this week because I made my first one! I can’t fry chicken or make biscuits, but pie I can do! Just like I can pull out a y’all and you’ns with the best of them, when I try to make a point.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

The neighbors next to her haven’t said anything to either Pat or me. We haven’t talked to them, either, but we see them every once in a while. They have about eight cars — Jeeps and Broncos and the sort — in their driveway most of the time. On the weekends, they’ll throw open their front door and if you look, sometimes you can see out the back of their house to the woods and the ravine behind them. They keep their yard immaculate. The grass is cut every weekend. The porch is swept. They wave and smile when they pass me and Sammy on the road as we take our walks, up past the neighbors who throw all kinds of trash out in their yard, things like old shoes and broken mirrors and, today, two TVs, facing each other on the grass. These neighbors speak Spanish; Pat and I don’t. Sometimes a wave and a smile are the best things to say, anyway.

In the ravine, up the way some, there’s a guy who drives a tractor trailer for a living who lives in his van in the woods. He’s got piles of wood stacked up on his land, which he keeps clean as a well-kept city park, except for all the broken-down vans and a shed or two. Every once in a while, the rig is parked down there — minus the trailer, of course. I’ve never seen him, but I’ve heard about him from our neighbor, Ginger, who is like the Neighborhood Ambassador.

I work with Ginger, who hosts semi-regular women-only poker games at her house. She has two dogs. One is as old as the hills and can’t see or hear anymore. She has a patch of herbs next to her house and knows everyone. She asks me all the time if anyone is giving us any trouble or if we heard some fight across the street, in the duplex where some guy who just got out of prison comes in the middle of the night and yells at the woman who lives there with a couple of kids. Pat and I don’t hear them. Ginger’s bedroom faces their house, so she does.

Down the street lives a couple we went to Warren Wilson with. They have two kids. Baby Sam loves Pat’s truck, always wants to crawl around in it and push the buttons as he grins. His sister sometimes runs around like crazy and shouts and laughs. Sometimes she won’t say anything.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

I have a little bit of time to kill before meeting a friend, so I drive down the main street, looking around. Ahead of me, I spot a lot of white hair and T-shirts. I keep driving, getting closer. What’s going on? A parade? An accident? One by one, about six faces turn toward me, our eyes catching. I drive by, looking at the group of about six men sitting on a stone wall. They’re in the shade of some large trees and overgrown hedges. What’s going on? I’m what’s going on. Me, in my car, driving down the street. They smile. I smile. We all wave.

Oh, to live in a town where the excitement at 2 p.m. is watching traffic.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.