It’s better to look west / to the Blue Ridge — / toward the sun setting / behind Table Rock and Hawksbill —
TIMBERLEY PAINTED this ‘Bird’s Eye View’ (1997) for an old friend, an attorney, who left Morganton after high school for a lifelong legal career in Raleigh.
Than to look straight down / upon the bloody ground / of the old courthouse square / in my first and last hometown.
Rising sun or high noon, / death still looks the same; / its hideous grimace should sicken / even the strongest of men.
As for the gray soldier / standing watch for invaders, / or the horde of witnesses exalting / the commodore’s daring deed,
Seeing the fisheyed stare / of a dead man or boy — / whether on a cross or a board — / should be no source of pride or joy.
Like bones in the desert, / shells of all shapes and sizes — / lightning whelks, moon snails and sand dollars — / litter the beach strand after stormy weather.
‘SHELLS’ (ca. 1995), watercolor on paper, by T. G. Adams
They are easy pickings / after any storm off the Brunswick coast, / but especially following hurricanes / like Hazel in ’52, Hugo in ’89, Fran in ’96, Floyd in ’99.
I was there for Hugo / and years later for Fran as well, / needing a long ladder after them both / to hop down from the top of the dunes to the hard sand below.
Seashells were everywhere — / layers of them lying with their kind, / as if Zeus and Hera had decided / to run a rummage sale of Poseidon’s gifts from the sea.
If I had come across cockles / arranged to say “86 47” or the like, / I wouldn’t have been surprised; / I would have guessed that God’s own fool had just taken a hike.
MORGANTON, N.C. (April 30, 2026) — On Sunday morning when church bells were ringing in the Salem community, Timberley and I found ourselves smack dab in the middle of an intense kind of excitement for the first time. No, not a snake-handling revival meeting. A swarm of honey bees.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT, the swarm, our hilltop beeyard, and the swarm (circled) in the tree where it alighted
They were our own relatively gentle Carniolan bees, not vicious Africanized mutants, though that meant we also had a financial interest in how and, more precisely, where this buzzing whirlwind of Apis mellifera wound up. We were standing in our own beeyard near the little house on the hill, and we saw the swarm alight high in a tree at the edge of our property. But we didn’t know how long they’d stay there or where they’d go when they inevitably left.
That was the setup for the lesson in beekeeping — and in life — that we would learn over the next 30 hours, from the time we saw thousands of our bees boil out of their hive and fly in ever-widening and higher loops around us to their temporary resting place in that tree until we watched them suddenly break their cluster the following afternoon and noisily fly due west far, far away.
MORGANTON, N.C. (April 15, 2026) — Today is my best friend and favorite artist Timberley’s birthday. It’s also Tax Day, of course, but that isn’t how I remember it’s her big day.
April 15th has always been circled on my calendar. It was also my late younger brother’s birthday, and it was the day I was fired in 1987 from my one and only full-time radio job here in my one of many hometowns. I had been darn good at that kind of work — speaking into the can, as they say on O Brother, Where Are Thou? — but I got canned anyway, no matter how many awards I’d won and whose birthday it was that day. In the late ’80s, I was a man of constant sorrow. Now I’m just a soggy-bottom boy.
EVEN AT AGE 11, Timberley was a ‘princess’ at the local newspaper where her father was ad director.
Timberley, the queen of my heart for the past 45 years, also got fired without good cause from a Hickory radio station around the same time, not on her birthday, though. That wasn’t how we met — not in the unemployment line — as we were already married. Still, the twin experiences convinced us early on that media jobs, in general, and the small-town radio business, in particular, aren’t necessarily fair. It’s even worse now, competing with the internet and social media.
So, yes, Timberley has always had to compete for attention on her big day. But our taxes have been filed (I’ll write about that debacle some other time, hopefully not after I’ve learned we’re being audited), and I have no intention of ever again working for the goober who still owns the local radio station — or for anyone else in the local media. That’s a definite benefit of retiring from the rat race.
Now, I’ll try to keep this column short, because we do intend to celebrate the day at least by going out somewhere nice to eat, and we do have some errands to run, as well as some honey bees to tend in our growing apiary outside the little house on the hill. That leads me to my next queen to discuss here.
