Ocracoke Fig Festival

 This past weekend we have enjoyed the Annual Ocracoke Fig Festival here on the island.

The first event of the Festival which Trish and I attended was a Porch Talk at the Ocracoke Preservation Society Museum given by Chester Lynn.  Chester’s family has been on the island for more than ten generations and two of his ancestors were on Blackbeard’s crew.  He knows more about the island figs, how to grow them, what’s wrong with them, and their unique history than anyone on or off the island.  Each year Chester propagates about 750 fig plants to be sold and planted.  He is a library of fig history and knowledge.

We then spent Saturday morning time at the Berkeley Center where there were booths for artisans with fig related products.  There was also the fig cake contest featuring both traditional and contemporary recipes, the fig preserve contest, and fig cake tasting all around.  There was a special fig recipe dinner with James Beard Award Chef Ricky Moore of the Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham.

We do have lots of festivals on the island and the Fig Festival is one of our favorites.

Books To Be Red

 When Leslie Lanier was growing up, her dream was to own a bookstore.  For more than two decades those of us who live on Ocracoke Island have been glad that her dream came true.

It is our privilege to get to shop at Books To Be Red located at the corner of Irvin Garrish Highway and Schoolhouse Road. The name came from Leslie’s long RED hair!

A visitor to the store, who happened to be a book reviewer from a Midwest once stated that he had never seen such a wide selection of books in such a small space.  Once you visit there, you will learn that this is certainly true.

One side of the store is Deepwater Pottery, filled with island themed gifts and memorabilia.  But, there are appropriate book titles located even there.

The rest of the store is a wonderland for dedicated readers of all ages.

These is even a large children’s section in the back hallway.

If you are in the island, don’t miss a stop at our treasured independent book store.

Fig Season

 When the first English explorers came to Ocracoke in the 18th century, they found fig bushes in abundance everywhere.  Down to this very day figs grow happily all over the island.  We have four fig trees in our yard and they are just coming into the beginning of their long season of ripeness.

There are about a half-dozen varieties of figs that grow on the island.  All of ours are Brown Turkey figs and they grow into huge and abundant trees.

Trish and I pick them about every other day.  We are getting about a peck with each picking but this amount will rapidly increase over the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday was fig preserve day.  Trish made 14 jars of preserves as well as boiling down some fig syrup for eating on everything from ice cream to French toast.  They will be delicious in times to come. And this is just the first batch!

This coming weekend is the Ocracoke Fig Festival.  There will be fig preserve contests and fig cake contests along with other recipes and lots of music and dancing.  If you like figs, this is the place to be!

Island Trucking

 Here on the island there are many things for which we must take individual responsibility.  One of those things is hauling our own trash and recycling to the dump along with whatever limbs we trim and miscellaneous other things that need to be discarded.  Then, from the dump, all of our trash is hauled off the island.  (That is why, when we sweep up sand, we put it on the ground rather than in the trash.  Otherwise we will gradually haul the island away!)

In order to accomplish these tasks, we must have a vehicle for hauling rough and dirty things.  To save our cars, we have a Japanese Suzuki mini-truck named TRUKBABY.

TRUKBABY is a 1991 Suzuki Carry, but, even at 31 years old, it only has 27,000 miles in it.  We fill the gas tank about two times each year.  Yes, the steering wheel is in the right and the five-speed gearshift is in the left. It is about ten feet long and four wheel drive.

Our regular route each afternoon is to go to the dump, then to the Post Office, then to the Variety Store, and then home. That entire trip is less than a mile. The blue container in the back is what we carry groceries in so they stay clean.  In a year we will drive TRUKBABY about 700 miles including all our riding around.

It is part of our island lives.

At the Farmer’s Market

 On our way home we always try to work in enough time to stop at the big NC State Farmer’s Market in Raleigh.  On this trip we made the stop and loaded the car since we will be home for a few weeks and can enjoy fresh produce for a while.

We happened to be driving two cars in this trip and so we had plenty of room to carry things.  We got blueberries, peaches, tomatoes, corn, cantaloupes okra, and flowers.

The tomatoes are in their glory right now and we got many varieties for our favorite caprese salads at home. Our prize purchases, however, were cantaloupes that weighed almost ten pounds each.  They were two for ten dollars.

If you are ever near Raleigh, check out the Farmer’s Market off Lake Wheeler Drive from I-40.  They also have a great restaurant, especially for breakfast.

LaGrange, Georgia

 Last week Trish and I were in LaGrange where I conducted the seventh week-long storytelling workshop to be held there in the historic Hills and Dales (Callaway) Estate.

On Saturday we had a field trip to the southwest side of town to visit the Mulberry Street Cemeteries.

The original part of the cemeteries is the Stonewall Jackson Confederate Cemetery, shown with markers behind the iron fence.  In 1863 LaGrange was chosen as a cemetery town by the Confederate military.  For two years those veterans who died in the local military hospitals were buried here.

Just beyond the west end of the fence, enslaved orderlies who worked in these hospitals were also buried. As time passed the large grassy lawn continued to be used as an African-American cemetery into the 1930’s.  Ground radar studies have located more than five hundred graves in this area, most of them not marked.

In this cemetery are buried Horace King and his son, Marshal Ney.  King was a skilled and well-known wooden bridge builder whose bridges were all over west Georgia and Alabama.  One of his surviving bridges is being restored to this site, adjacent to the Horace King Memorial markers, and will be incorporated into the Thread, LaGrange’s thirty-mile-long greenway in development.

After our visit to the cemeteries, we walked up town to visit the Troup County Archives Museum’s historic Georgia auto exhibit.

Hurricane Dorian’s Last Stand!

 It has been nearly three years since Hurricane Dorian devistated the island and flooded our house.  Everything looks back to normal here but there are still invisible lingering results.  We had just put on new storm doors before the storm, and they seemed not to be damaged. But, two years later they began to swell and finally the internal salt water damage came to light.  This past month another invisible result made its way to the surface.

We were just finishing our second Storytelling Week with a cookout at our house on Saturday night.  People were departing when, all of a sudden, the front porch of the house collapsed!  Standing on the porch I at first thought I was fainting and then that there was an earthquake as the floor dropped beneath my feet.  Luckily no one was hurt.

When our construction worker, Armando, got things torn apart, he discovered that salty flood water had invisibly forced its way into the structure and remained trapped there softening and rotting the wood and rusting away at the nails.

Everything had to be torn out and replaced.  Once Armando and Woody finished the repair, they had done it so well that it will never do this again.  The porch may now be the strongest part of the house!

This showed us once again how very insidious hurricane damage is.  It goes beyond the surface and lasts long after things look repaired.  We hope that we do not have do deal with such a storm again.

All fixed!  Ready for me to paint.