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.
BOONE, N.C. (April 9, 2026) — In the midst of this week’s madness — beginning, of course, with Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday tweet — I decided to wait until late Wednesday to write this column. I mean, if the world was going to end on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, why bother writing anything?
Since we’re still here — for the time being, anyway — I’ll go ahead and say my piece about how Timberley and I spent the hours that must have reminded folks older than us of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. I was three then, Timberley was two, and neither of us remembers it. Our knowledge of the world’s brush with nuclear war is secondhand, unlike what’s happening now.
Death and resurrection are funny words / to use when referring to honey bees — / how the hive declines in late autumn, / then comes back to life in early spring.
IN DAYS PAST, Easter bonnets were a big deal.
Workers live only six weeks in summer; / drones, two months if they don’t mate; / the solitary queen, two to five years, / because she’s the most important bee.
Or is she? Sure, she lays all the eggs, / but she had to tango with several guys / on her mating flight high up in the skies / in order to be the egg machine she is.
And the thousands of poor worker girls? / They do everything to keep the hive / clean and fed and safe and humming; / they literally work themselves to death.
So, the beehive stays alive all year; / it dies and resurrects itself over and over / in the expendable lives of its workers, / who — no doubt — are what the buzz is all about.
RUTHERWOOD, N.C. (April 1, 2026) — I’m embarrassed to admit that I nodded off Monday evening during the second hour of Henry David Thoreau, the Ken Burns- and Don Henley-produced documentary about my favorite philosopher.
MORE COFFEE in my mug made from Walden Pond clay might have kept me awake.
Then, last night during the conclusion of the long-awaited PBS presentation, I was so tired from helping wife Timberley plant four new bare-root roses yesterday afternoon that I needed to rest my eyes again midway through the hour-long show — or at least that’s what I claimed.
But Timberley is no fool — not even on April Fool’s Day — so she woke me up both evenings as soon as she saw that my eyelids were closed for more than a second. She knew how much I had been looking forward to the documentary and that I wanted to be awake for its over-the-air premiere.
