The Jan. 10 death of 15-month-old Aubrey Kina Marie Littlejohn was an unspeakable tragedy, one compounded by the questions surrounding both the cause of death and the potential cover-up by employees of the Swain County Department of Social Services.

At this time, two needs are paramount: a speedy and thorough investigation by the SBI and the Swain County Sheriff’s Office; and just as important, an unwavering commitment to seek the truth — however ugly that might ultimately be — among Swain and Cherokee leaders trying to sort through familial and personal allegiances during the investigation of what could be a very serious crime.

Aubrey’s short life was beset by problems from the beginning. Her single mother, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is in jail awaiting sentencing on a federal drug charge. The mom left her infant to live with a great aunt, Lady Bird Powell, when the baby was just months old. Both law enforcement and Department of Social Services had been called to Powell’s home several times prior to the winter night in January when Aubrey was brought to the Cherokee hospital cold and lifeless.

Swain law enforcement authorities investigating Aubrey’s death became suspicious not just of the cause of death but also of the activities of Swain DSS. It took DSS five weeks to turn over their case files on Aubrey to law enforcement. According to warrants, a DSS worker admitted falsifying reports in order to cover up the agency’s missteps in looking into Aubrey’s death. How high up the DSS chain of command the possible cover up goes is what the SBI and Swain law enforcement authorities are still looking into after seizing DSS files and computers.

There won’t be any winners as this case proceeds. Powell may be guilty of neglect or abuse in the child’s death, and DSS employees may also be guilty of crimes. Families and friends in Swain and Cherokee are lining up on opposing sides. County commissioners in Swain have asked for the resignation of DSS board members, and three of them have quit and done so while criticizing commissioners. The five DSS workers named in the criminal investigation have been banned by Cherokee from working on cases involving children on the Qualla Boundary.

Justice, when it comes, will be painful — but less so than the short life of young Aubrey. The one ray of hope, in the end, is that what will emerge from this unnecessary tragedy are lessons that might save the life of the next innocent child placed in a similar situation.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

There have been times in my life I could rightly have been described as competitive. When I was in music, and later, as a young reporter, I took myself very, very seriously. I wanted first chair or no chair when I was a musician; The New York Times, I was sure, would be my ultimate landing place as a news writer. It was simply a matter of time.

Well, I ended up with no chair when it comes to a black-and-white summing up of my musical career — I departed that path for writing years ago. As for The New York Times, it seems unlikely editors will come knocking on my door. And, if they did, I’d probably just laugh — I like what I’m doing fine: being a little fish in a little pond suits me well.

You see, as I’ve grown older, my competitive spirit has waned. These days I find myself sincerely wishing others in the news business well, even when they are technically “competitors.”

There’s a feeling of being in it together — or, perhaps, it’s a shared feeling of going down the tubes together as an industry. I am more bully on newspapers’ future than many, particularly my friend Giles Morris at tuckreader.com, who a few months ago boldly asserted print was dead. That came as surprising news to those of us still busy printing stories in traditional, hold-in-your-hands newspapers, you can be sure — “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” as my all-time favorite humorist Mark Twain said so famously after hearing the New York Journal had printed his obituary.

In general, I like reporters and editors and people who put together newspapers (or, these days, we must include news websites). They are usually smart, funny, passionate people. I don’t want to sound overly sentimental, so I hasten to add that those same people also are usually neurotic, annoying and often arrogant. Since I resemble many of those characteristics, not unnaturally I find even the most puffed-up news people rather endearing.

So — not to insinuate they are puffed-up because these two are not — I was delighted to see carolinapublicpress.com, in the hands of two former Asheville Citizen-Times colleagues, enter the fray.

Angie Newsome and Kathleen Davis launched the news website earlier this month. Carolinapublicpress.com promises to cover the state’s 17 westernmost counties with “in-depth, investigative and independent reporting.” I don’t doubt they are sincere about that last part, but the territory outlined seems ambitious.

And unlikely, given that even the Citizen-Times has retreated over the years to only an occasional venturing west of Asheville.

But I wish Angie and Kathleen the best of luck trying to cover 17 counties — the more reporters out here the merrier, I believe. There are a million-and-one stories to tell, and we’re lucky at The Smoky Mountain News and at the other news organizations in the west to catch even a small percentage of those meriting coverage.

(I hope Angie and Kathleen will not do what, during my tenure at the Citizen-Times, we used to hear upper management dub “regionalizing.” This is daily newspaper-bullshit for publishing an article that’s really about Buncombe County, but with passing mentions of Swain or Jackson counties or other places outside of Asheville in order to “regionalize” it. Much cheaper and far easier on the bottom line, you see, than paying real reporters to work in actual bureaus covering real stories in the western counties.

Here I go, digressing into a rant again. You’d think I’d know how to stay on point better).

What’s most interesting about carolinapublicpress.com is that it’s set up as a nonprofit. Some newspaper experts believe nonprofit news organizations such as carolinapublicpress.com will prove the industry’s future. I hope not, because I’m inordinately fond of for-profit, real newspapers. I am interested in seeing, however, whether Angie and Kathleen can make carolinapublicpress.com and this new financial model work. And, I’ll be curious to note whether they really cover 17 counties as advertised.

A few coverage tips for my old friends, who best I remember never worked the far-western area: Cherokee, the Indian reservation, is not the same as Cherokee County, though confusingly for newcomers there are tribal lands in Cherokee County; oh, and people there do not like to hear funny references to Eric Robert Rudolph. He was actually from Florida and moved to WNC and they are very sensitive about that fact; the Skeener community in Franklin is pronounced that way but spelled Skeenah, and don’t even try to say Cartoogechaye until you’ve practiced a lot first. People in Cherokee know your grandmother was Cherokee, wasn’t everybody’s? That’s not a good warm-up line, in other words. Whichever spelling of Tuckasegee/Tuckaseigee you pick, someone (probably my friend Lynn Hotaling at The Sylva Herald, who wrote an entire column one time on this very subject) will claim it is wrong; “Smoky” isn’t spelled with an “e” unless you are the famous bear or the elementary school (officials have a long excuse for why they misspelled the school’s name, don’t ask).  

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Books are one of the greatest delights of my life. I don’t need many excuses to buy new ones, frankly, but when I do feel the situation is spinning out of control (my third trip in a week, say, to the Friends of the Library bookstore in Sylva), my book-buying ways are justified as “building a research library.”

While I openly admit to self-deception on this score, there is a strong argument to be made for owning a good selection of reference books. The Internet is a wonderful tool, but it doesn’t replace owning books — the information nicely supplements them.

Last week, while ostensibly on assignment interrogating Ryan Sherby of the Southwestern Development Commission for a couple of transportation-related news articles, our conversation soon wandered off into much more interesting territory: vegetable gardening.

Sherby, who lives in the Alarka community in Swain County, has turned the earth and prepared the soil for a Very Big Garden this year. I farmed for a time in Bryson City before moving to Sylva, so it seemed entirely natural to segue from road building (b-o-r-i-n-g) to discussions about much more vital issues, such as planting dates, vegetable varieties and so on (endlessly riveting). I’ve promised to unearth my seed-starting calendar and email it to him.

Ryan’s and my discussion led me into a consideration of the books I rely on as a vegetable gardener. These books are as well used as my favorite hoe, and as important to my growth as nitrogen is for the growth of plants.

That said, here’s a few of my favorites:

• Four-Season Harvest, Eliot Coleman: A Maine organic farmer who has led the charge for growing yearlong. His books — there’s others, all of them worth owning — form the basis of my approach to gardening, which I’d sum up with the truism, feed the soil and not the plant. Coleman’s other books are: The New Organic Grower and The Winter Harvest Handbook.

• The New Seed Starter’s Handbook, Nancy Bubel: Everything you need to know for growing your own transplants, and more. This is an excellent go-to reference that should be on every gardener’s bookshelf. I learned a lot from this book about the importance of soil temperature when it comes to germination rates. In fact, Bubel’s book inspired me to purchase a soil thermometer, which if I could locate said thermometer would, I’m sure, prove very useful and interesting.

• Root Cellaring, Mike and Nancy Bubel: As the title indicates, this book is about building and using a root cellar. That’s handy, but also tucked inside is a terrific little growing section on vegetables that keep particularly well in the root cellar.

• The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, Edward C. Smith: the subtitle is “Discover Ed’s High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening Regions,” which has a breathless irritating quality that is repeated in places throughout the book. But if you can overlook the over-hyping of his method — which is simply using wide rows, organic techniques and so on, sound gardening methods but not exactly revolutionary — this is a fine guide. Like so many of the good vegetable gardening books, this is geared for the northern part of the nation, so you have to tweak information for the Southeast. I loaned my copy out and haven’t seen it since, a reminder to me not to make loans, only gifts.

• The Essential Earthman, and anything else written by Henry Mitchell. This book is adopted from Mitchell’s “Earthman” column in the Washington Post. He died in 1993, but not before penning some of the most delightful, witty words every written in America on gardening. Many of his columns are on flowers and not vegetables, but that’s a petty point. Flowers are plants, too, are they not? And some flowers are even edible. Anyhow, buy and read Mitchell. You won’t be sorry.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

In this country, the people own the government. It’s ours. End of debate.

That’s something we can all be thankful for. A bill in the North Carolina General Assembly is attempting to enshrine this simple fact in the state constitution. We would encourage readers to write, call or email your lawmakers asking them to support it (Sen. Ralph Hise, who represents part of Haywood County, is a co-sponsor of the Senate bill).

The legislation – House Bill 87 and Senate Bill 67 – would put an amendment to the state constitution on the 2012 ballot for voter approval. The wording is yet to be finalized, but in essence it would make access to government records and meetings a right under the North Carolina Constitution.

The need for the amendment is something those of us in the press probably appreciate more than most. Every few days we get stonewalled by some public official when requesting documents that are a matter of public record. Sometimes there is a legitimate question of what is a public record and what isn’t, but other times it’s just a petty display of power by someone who holds access to the information.

Worse, every year new bills are introduced in the General Assembly that, taken en masse, would seriously compromise the ideal of open government that is a cornerstone of our republic.

“Every year we see it, whether it’s another attempt to erode access to 911 tapes, or to protect conversation between public sector lawyers and their clients about stuff that neither should be able to hide,” said John Bussian, the chief lobbyist for the North Carolina Press Association.

The Republican leadership in the General Assembly is supporting the constitutional amendment. Rep. Stephen LaRoque, a Kinston representative, is a co-sponsor of the House bill.

“We need to do this so that open government truly is a right rather than a privilege,” LaRoque told The Raleigh News and Observer.

The primary opponents of the bill are lobbyists for local governments, school boards and sheriff departments. They oppose a provision that would require a two-thirds majority for any exceptions to the open records and meetings law. However, we believe that any necessary national security or other important exception would easily garner enough support to garner a super majority. And in fact, we think it’s critical that any exception that blocks access to open records be able to win the support of two-thirds of members of the General Assembly.

The timing of this debate couldn’t be better. This week, March 13-19, is Sunshine Week. A coalition of groups from around the country is encouraging government at all levels to maintain openness. This amendment would add a new gravitas to the sanctity of open government in North Carolina, and we hope it shows up on the ballot for a vote of the people.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

We spend winter anticipating spring. But, when warmer weather arrives, we often rob ourselves of enjoyment in the rush to complete tasks. We think of what needs to be done but hasn’t been. We see what’s undone instead of contemplating how much has been accomplished.

Most of us, particularly those who farm or homestead or who simply love to garden and be outside, have long lists of things we want to do. We compiled these tasks in our heads, or perhaps even on paper, during the winter. We watched the snowfall outside and yearned inside for warmer weather to arrive, begging mentally for the cold to pass so that we could work in the sunshine again.

Spring is the season of doing. Tilling. Seed starting. Transplanting. Mulching. Dividing and moving perennials. Building pens to safely contain newborn lambs and kids, preparing brood boxes for the chicks that will soon arrive by mail, culling old hens and young roosters. Planting new flowerbeds, reviving older ones. Building beds in the garden. Buying and planting seed potatoes and onion sets.

Now that spring is really here and I’m checking off one-by-one these listed tasks, I’m warning myself: don’t waste this. Don’t waste the beauty, or pass unseeing through this brief, precious span of life. Slow down and enjoy what spring brings — beginnings, of course, such as the arrival of Nickolai, the lamb, and Dandelion, the new kid. More babies are on the way, more joy to come.

But spring brings sorrow, too. And I tell myself to allow for grief. Because time should be given to mourning the losses, which come as inevitably as new life arrives. Death is simply part and parcel of the great rebirth that takes place in spring; an amazing cycling that is truly cosmic and wondrous.

So I grieve for three kids who died. They were born prematurely. The kids’ mother, bereft and not understanding her loss, cried aloud for them day after day in the barnyard. Feel that, I urge myself. Spring is about joy, but it’s about sorrow, too.

Difficult choices loom with each kid born. Which should be kept, which not. An important part of good husbandry, I must continually remind myself, is to keep only the number of animals that the land can support. Overcrowding brings disease and general ill health. In trying to keep every animal we fall in love with, we can be very cruel in the name of this love. There are limits. I continue to learn my limits, and the limits of land that I work.

Spring, too, is time for examining the honeybee hives. This is when beekeepers learn the fate of their charges, when the tops come off the bee boxes and assessments of the overall health of beeyards take place. As a beekeeper you hope, each time a colony is examined, for evidence of a strong queen. This means eggs being laid and new bees born. Sometimes, however, a colony has died. Sometimes, all your colonies of honeybees have died. Then one must decide — start over, or give up?

I know a beekeeper who lost 30 or 40 colonies of bees some years ago, when mites first made their way into this region. He lost his entire beeyard, which had been built not only by him, but also by his father, and perhaps even his father’s father. Years and years of work, gone. Heartbroken, the man swore off beekeeping.

That, however, apparently wasn’t his decision to make. Sometime later, on a late spring day, a swarm of bees took up residence in an abandoned hive on his property. He was hooked in again, and today tends as many bee colonies as ever. This time around, though, the beekeeper is older and wiser to the ways of the world. He understands life and death go hand-in-hand. This beekeeper isn’t cynical, because a cynical man would never keep bees — it’s too dicey a proposition, and the odds are simply too great for cynics. Only optimists can survive beekeeping.

This beekeeper, however, knows that one fine spring day he could raise the hive lids and find all his honeybees have died again. He’s evolved into an optimistic realist, you see, like all good farmers and gardeners do if they farm and garden long enough. And if they slow down, feel deeply what happens and really consider what they see.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Growing up, I knew America was the country of grand ideas carried out from the moral high ground. We could put a man on the moon, we could end institutionalized racism, fight a war on poverty and try to wipe out air and water pollution. It was part of our national identity.

Those days are gone. Those sweeping programs and ideas that galvanized almost the entire country just aren’t around today. Banality and boorishness rule in the current state of politics, and problems fester for decades.

This realization hit me after I received an email from Brent Martin. Brent is the Southern Appalachian Program Director for the Wilderness Society, and he’s based in Sylva. We published an article in last week’s edition by Martin that called attention to the Weeks Act, federal legislation approved 100 years ago on March 1 that authorized the creation of the our national forests (www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/3359-nantahala-pisgah-national-forest-turns-100).

Here’s an excerpt from that article: “... But drive or walk anywhere in the Western North Carolina region and you will likely see beautiful forested mountains. I think we will have these for years to come, and this is due to the vision of many who came before us over one hundred years ago. This gives me hope.”

Virgin forests from Maine to Alabama had been cut over by 1911, leaving a swath of environmental and cultural destruction unknown in America to that point. The purchase of these devastated lands from timber companies was a sort of first step in land development regulations, a way to make use of the country’s resources while adding a new layer of federal protection through ownership.

I haven’t done the research, but can only assume the Weeks Act did not pass without some squabbling about the government takeover of private property rights (amazing how some things never change).

Can we ever do something like the Weeks Act again, find the political will to do something so big and so good?

I had this same kind of sinking feeling about our national spirit a little while after attending space camp with my son when he was in the fifth grade. We spent two days in Huntsville, Ala., learning all about U.S. space exploration from the Mercury missions up through the shuttle. And we heard talk about a manned Mars mission NASA was planning, and we left intrigued and inspired, and I saw the wonder of a 10-year-old thinking about space and planetary travel.

Over the ensuing years, though, we read how the idea was scrapped and how there just wasn’t enough money. A big, sweeping idea finds itself on the scrap heap.

One of my good friends, a bright guy who always thinks out of the box, says our country’s great opportunity in this century is with energy. Spend every penny on cutting our dependence on oil, figuring out the most efficient renewable sources while making energy reduction — mass transit, better cars, better light bulbs, etc. — the number one national priority.

If we could turn that corner on energy, we could save those same forests Martin wrote about while also leading the way through this century that is certainly going to create unimaginable challenges for industrialized countries.

Anyone think we will be the country to lead the way? Can we get going before Brazil and China leave us in the dust? Right now we’re taking baby steps while letting crazy despots ruling oil-rich Arabian kingdoms determine the fate of our economy.

I’m an optimist at heart, always will be. Can’t help it. So maybe the reality is that every generation doesn’t get the opportunity to think big. Maybe that post-World War II generation or two learned lessons that helped them change society. Maybe we haven’t learned those lessons, or perhaps we’re just bogged down in the fast-changing, overwhelming information age that leaves too much to comprehend.

Our challenge? Perhaps it’s the more mundane task of picking our way through a minefield of seemingly trivial stuff, setting the stage for a big show for our kids. We have to figure out how to keep our government from going bankrupt (Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare). We have re-draw the lines defining the proper reach of government (taxes, regulations, unions) in a free and democratic society. We have to determine how much influence the largest corporations the world has ever known will have over governments and personal lives.

Perhaps working through these issues will re-shape a new identity that will define America in the coming century. The optimist in me is hoping that is indeed the case.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

A few weeks ago, as part of a magazine assignment, I visited Sow True Seed in Asheville.

Carol Koury and Peter Wakiewicz, cofounders of the two-year-old company, took time from their busy schedule — and I do mean busy, this is the time of year that makes or breaks a seed company — to give me a tour of the business and chat for a while.

Sow True Seed is located in a small, undistinguished building on Church Street near downtown Asheville. The company specializes in untreated, non-hybrid, open-pollinated seed.

In plain language, this is what that means: you, too, can save seed after growing plants using Koury and Wakiewicz’s seed. Hybrid seed, in contrast to open-pollinated, does not grow true: the next generation of plants grown from hybrid seed might be wonderful, it might be terrible. There is only one certainty when you save seed from plants that were grown from hybrid seed — variability.

Why? Because the parents of hybrid varieties are from distinct lines that have been combined for very specific reasons. Perhaps plant breeders have discovered this particular combination, say type A and type B, produces progeny with three favorable characteristics. We’ll designate this hybrid result as being type C. Type C is resistant to disease, it’s productive and it tastes reasonably good.

Here’s the problem. If you buy a pack of type C, grow the plants out, and then save the seed, you will not get type C when you grow them out the ensuing year — type C only occurs as the first generation result of crossing type A and type B.

Instead, you’ll get something we’ll call type X. There is no predicting what qualities type X will exhibit. As emphasized a few paragraphs ago, type X might be the best-tasting vegetable you’ve ever had the pleasure of sinking your pearly whites into. Or, more likely, type X tastes terrible, or perhaps it is prone to certain diseases and produces poorly.

Hybrid seed isn’t inherently evil; open-pollinated seed isn’t inherently good. They both serve certain purposes. Hybrids can give farmers an edge when it comes to productivity, or shipping (some are bred to be tougher in transport). Open-pollinated varieties do have a reputation for tasting better than hybrids. But, in reality, any loss of taste is simply a variable and is not, by definition, what makes a hybrid — breeders emphasized the selection of certain other traits, perhaps, over that of good taste.

Super sweet corn, for instance, is a classic example of selective breeding. Many people prefer the taste of really sweet corn. Not me, but this is America and people should be able to eat sugary, icky corn-candy if they want to, shouldn’t they? Give thanks to hybrids, then.

Genetically modified seed, which people sometimes confuse with hybrid seed, is an entirely different matter. I won’t go so far as to assert GMOs are actually evil, but the verdict is still out in my opinion — and on the companies producing them. GMOs are varieties that scientists have genetically tinkered with. My personal opinion is there are entirely too many unknowns regarding GMOs, our health and the overall wellbeing of our world. That, however, is a subject for another day.

Be all this as it may, seed saving is fun. And, if you are even the slightest bit interested in sustainability and self-reliance, it’s a must-have skill. Which brings me back to Sow True Seed, and the potential importance of this company to gardeners and farmers here in the Southeast.

First, plants adapt to conditions over time. Garlic is famous for this — you start with a variety that thrives (I’m personally having good success with Russian Red), and after a few years of saving and replanting cloves, your garlic actually adapts to the specific conditions of your garden. It improves in size and quality. Other vegetables aren’t as obvious, but adaptability still occurs over time, just much more subtly. Sow True Seed is selecting from plants that do well here. If the company does this season after season, eventually it will create and own a bank of seed specifically geared to perform well in this region. That has not happened before — many of us order from companies located in Maine, California or other far-flung places. The seed we get might be great, but it isn’t specifically adapted to our growing conditions.

Second, Sow True Seed is working on preserving older varieties. The company doesn’t have a lot of these yet, but flipping through the catalogue reveals greasy beans, sorghum, creasy greens and some older tomato varieties. Here’s hoping local gardeners and farmers provide the company additional tried-and-true favorites — the more people who cultivate these garden treasures, the better chance they stand of surviving.

Third, Sow True Seed is local. To the best of my knowledge, there is no other seed company of this size anywhere in the region (meaning WNC and the piedmont, north Georgia, east Tennessee, upstate South Carolina). I’m a little hesitant to over-hype buying local, because it has turned into such a buzzword and my tendency (probably a genetic trait specifically adapted to the conditions I was grown in) is contrarian. But I happen to truly believe that buying from small, local companies is critical to this region’s sustainability.

(Quintin Ellison is a Smoky Mountain News staff writer and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

It was not my best day. I had just got home with the kids, who seemed a little grumpy because they forgot mom had to work tonight and probably because this meant Hamburger Helper or chicken with mushroom soup over rice for dinner, neither among their favorite meals. I elbowed open the front door, my arms filled with a stack of papers and my laptop, somehow managing to get the key in the lock to nudge open the door. The kids burst through in a dash for the video game bonanza downstairs, still pretty new from Christmas.

“Let the dog in!” I yelled after them.

I had no sooner walked 12 steps to turn on the coffee — blessed coffee! — maker than our dog, a miniature dachshund came bounding up the stairs, tearing around the corner like a car sliding sideways in a movie chase scene. He had on that ridiculous burnt orange and brown autumn sweater that Tammy bought for him at one of these boutique pet stores, and he was yelping as if he hadn’t seen a human being in two years.

Before I could get the coffee on and the dog settled down, the kids suddenly materialized in the kitchen as if teleported from downstairs.

“Daddy, I’m hungry,” said Kid One.

“Daddy, come downstairs and play Wii basketball with me,” said Kid Two, more or less simultaneously.

Before I could answer either kid, before I could calm the dog (who would continue yelping until petted, regardless if it took 10 seconds or 10 hours to do it), before I could press “start” to get my hazelwood coffee brewing, someone knocked on the door. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. The dog was absolutely nuts now, projecting his eight-pound body at the front door like a furry dart, scratching over and over to get at whatever lurked outside.

The kids whined. ‘Hungry!’ ‘Won’t somebody play with me!!’

Another knock.

“Go downstairs for a minute,” I said, barely able to be heard above the chaos. “I’ll get you a snack in a minute, and then I’ll come play Wii basketball.”

I scooped up the yapping dog in one arm, and opened the door with the other. I can only imagine what a picture of pure frustration I must have been. It was Donna, the next-door neighbor. She and her husband, John, need to use our driveway on snowy days, because the only other way out of their driveway is down a very steep slope. We had sorted all this out last year when we moved here, when they explained the situation and asked us very kindly if we would be willing to share our driveway with them in bad weather. Of course we would, we had said.

While it wasn’t snowing on that particular day in January, it certainly had been in days previous, and their driveway was still completely covered in snow and ice. In my haste to get home and get dinner on, I had simply forgotten about the driveway and left my car parked right in the middle, blocking access. Donna needed to go somewhere, and couldn’t get around. Would I mind moving it, she asked.

I am not sure exactly what I said, but I know it was something along the lines of, “Just a minute. Give me a minute.” I walked back to our bedroom, tossed the dog on our bed, and shut the door, then pulled back on my boots, not bothering with a jacket, though it couldn’t have been much above freezing out.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, finally appearing outside. “I completely forgot.

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” she said. “So sorry to bother you.”

I jumped in the car and moved it, feeling like an idiot. Later that evening, when my wife got home from work, I told her what had happened and said I probably needed to call John and Donna and apologize, not only for forgetting to leave the driveway open, but for my irritable demeanor.

A couple of days later, there was another knock. This time Tammy was home, and the waters in our home were much calmer. It was Donna again, this time bearing a basket filled with all kinds of goodies, including a nice bottle of wine, truffles, chutney, and a number of other bottles filled with various treats. Not only was it obvious that each one had been carefully handpicked, each of the items had a Post-it note attached with a brief description or suggestion, handwritten by Donna.

“We just wanted to give you this to thank you for letting us use your driveway,” she said.

We thanked her, and spent 15 minutes looking through the basket, remarking at what an amazing and kind gesture it had been, especially in light of my poor response a couple of days before.

I had been thinking of some gesture of our own in the days following, even though we didn’t see them for a few days. Then, one night, we got a call from another neighbor, one across the road. She told us that while John and Donna were on vacation in some tropical place, Donna had complained of weakness moments after scuba diving, and then died suddenly.

Died suddenly.

“She what?”

We couldn’t make sense of it, not at all. These were retired people, but young, active, retired people, always on the go, always doing something outside. Donna in her flower garden, John in his workshop.

We had just seen her a few days ago. She had brought us this wonderful basket, filled with stuff, marked with personalized notes. You have seen those bumper stickers, the ones that say, “Commit random acts of kindness.” Well, Donna committed a specific act of kindness, where others might have complained about the neighbors’ lack of concern or tact.

She left the neighborhood much too soon, but we’ll never forget her kindness. We will surely miss her. I can’t help but notice that the flowers are blooming early this year.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Politics and state budgets aren’t usually that interesting, but this year that’s not the case. Ideologies are clashing as lawmakers struggle to find a way through this recession, and we will all be affected by the outcome.

North Carolina and Wisconsin are very different states but share a similar problem — a budget crisis like that facing states across the country as stimulus funding dries up and tax revenues are still down. Fortunately for us who live in the Tar Heel state, our leaders are dealing with their problems in a very different fashion.

In last week’s edition, we published a cover story examining how the state was looking at this year’s Golden LEAF allocation as one extra pot of money from which to stem an expected $2.4 billion budget shortfall. The money is a continuing payment from the massive lawsuit brought against tobacco companies by 45 states.

Gov. Beverly Perdue does not support raiding the Golden LEAF money. She has sent a budget to lawmakers that will lead to a raft of cuts, including cutting thousands of state jobs, but she says she won’t reduce teaching positions. A story in The Mountaineer newspaper this week had local lawmakers predicting the possible closure of the prison in Hazelwood and significant cuts to community colleges and a cost shifting that will force public schools to come up with money for transportation and text books (meaning teachers could be cut despite Perdue’s promises).

Amid this climate, what is the state to do? Even the Democratic governor’s budget will hurt local communities while keeping alive a sales tax that was due to expire. Almost every GOP lawmaker in the General Assembly ran on the promise to sunset that tax, so the Republicans — who control both chambers of the state legislature — have to either make deeper cuts or find new money. And that is what led to the proposal that money from funds like the Golden LEAF may be diverted for at least a year.

After our story ran last week, newly elected Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, called to say our story was good in pointing out the budget position the state finds itself in. Now, however, everyone has to look for creative ways to find a fix.

“What if the Golden LEAF money were re-distributed to, say, the Rural Center,” suggested Davis, saying this was just an example of the kind of thinking that needs to happen in the General Assembly. His point was the money would still come back to the rural communities who need it, but that the $1.6 million in administrative costs could be saved.

So what’s going to happen in Raleigh come June when the rubber hits the road? Unfortunately, I believe some sacred cows will be gored in the name of fiscal responsibility. Personally, I think a one-year diversion of funds going to some granting agencies is not a bad idea. I also think pay cuts for higher-paid state employees is not out of the question.

I would rather look at those options rather than cutting classroom teachers, raising tuition, and hamstringing the community colleges. We can only hope that with compromises a fair spending plan can be developed.

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In Wisconsin, the plan to take away the bargaining rights of unions is just shortsighted, an idea that will do much more harm than good.

For those following the situation up there, the GOP governor wants public sector employees to begin paying some of their own money into their retirement and health insurance plans. In a state where the average teacher salary is about $75,000 per year, this seems a reasonable proposition.

On the other hand, he also wants to take away the collective bargaining rights of the union. The employees have agreed to the pay concessions, but they are protesting in the streets to protect their bargaining rights for the future.

As the economy has soured and we’ve lost manufacturing jobs in this country, unions have been painted as a big evil. The union groups that once were credited with standing up for the little guys and winning concessions from factory owners are now painted as the cause for the flight of manufacturing to the Third World.

Despite sometimes unsavory actions by union leaders and despite sometimes unreasonable demands for workers who make more than most working-class folks, I still believe strongly that unions play an important role in the American workplace.

As income disparity widens, unions remain a voice for the working class. As the workplace changes, unions continue fighting for benefits and fairness. Taking away their voice is just wrong, and that’s exactly what the Wisconsin governor wants to do.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

By Scott Muirhead • Guest Columnist

Politics aside, what could possibly be more absurd than plastic flowers? (OK, there are hundreds of things, I know, but we’re on a tight schedule here. Besides, polyethylene gladioli are long overdue for a bashing.)

Fake flowers seem to be the darlings of those who obviously do not grasp the concept of real flowers. But to avoid stumbling into a pit of poetic mush, let’s just say that the bittersweet joy of flowers, ahem, stems from their impermanence. Whether on the vine or bush or in a gilded vase, flowers die. We bring them indoors fragrant and fresh, luminescent and vibrant, then in a few days they shrivel and blacken and die. It is then that they are unceremoniously but with admitted satisfaction dropped into a trash bag. They had for a few days splendidly served as one of our better metaphors for life, which, like the flowers, is real and limited.

Meanwhile, plastic flowers, those illegitimate offspring of the oil fields, those insolent phonies squat on the credenza reeking of cheap commercialism, collecting dust and never changing. Life is not like that, although I suspect there are wives within the readership of this very newspaper who consider their husbands to be a lot like plastic flowers.

Maybe fake flowers are good for guilt. You can place a plastic bouquet of jasmine and hydrangea by a tombstone, and you don’t have to come back for months. Best of all, no guilt! Everybody who happens by will think you had just been there that morning.

Otherwise, the point of artificial blooms eludes me. I suppose they are economical. They never go away, and money spent on real daffodils and roses could be more enjoyably applied at Burger King or for a cell phone upgrade. In all its shapes and forms and embodiments, plastic is eternal, you know.

Plastic flowers are especially tedious for those who travel interstate highways, where every 50 feet or so there is a little makeshift memorial, a wad of mud-spattered chrysanthemums adorning what may appear to be a rhinestone studded candy box left over from Valentine’s Day.

The memorials are a bit of a distraction, actually. Drivers are craning their necks trying to read the epitaphs at 70 miles an hour, on the outside chance they know something about the departed. Such behavior will inevitably result in even more roadside plastic.

There is something quizzical about the interstate testimonials. If a homeowner falls and breaks his neck cleaning gutters, does his wife rush to K-Mart for a buggy full of fake baby’s breath and Queen Anne’s lace? Does she jab a little PVC lilac cross in the ground at the head of the deceased? No. She collects the insurance and hightails it to the casino. But just let that dolt husband of hers get killed on the highway and see what happens. There’ll be plastic purple tulips everywhere!

And probably there is not a church house in the land whose narthex or altar is not — shall we say — adorned with the colorful petals and leaves of a Taiwanese injection mold factory. There is something ironic about that artificiality.

But where the utilitarian beauty of fake flora is most abundant is in our delicately manicured graveyards, where spring springs eternal. Why visit the gardens of Biltmore? You can see all the pretty flowers you want, anytime of year, right down the street at the nearby cemetery. But what about the poignancy that is life? Isn’t it dying and death that make life so precious?

And lest you think me a completely callous monster, I confess I am not immune to the sadness that sometimes accompanies the death of a family member or business associate. But I like to mark the occasion with real cut flowers. In a few days they, like the memory of the dearly departed, wilt and vanish. You can read all about it in Ecclesiastes.

(Scott Muirhead claims to have enrolled in a sensitivity course in college, but admits he dropped out after a few minutes. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)