Tim Harrison’s advocacy for exotic animals — and for common sense — has taken him from southwest Ohio all over the world, speaking on national news programs, teaching for Homeland Security, and being featured in an award-winning documentary. 
He will be in Wilmington April 3 on behalf of his organization, Outreach for Animals, as the featured speaker for the Clinton County Reads dinner at the General Denver, which will be a brief stop on his whirlwind schedule, which ranges from rescuing alligators and pythons from Ohio basements to speaking about “Big Cats in Our Back Yard” with actress Tippi Hedren in Los Angeles just days before he speaks here. 
The Clinton County Reads 2014 book choice, “A Walk in the Woods,” includes information about wild animals along the Appalachian Trail, most often bears, which author Bill Bryson names as one of his great fears along the trail. “A grizzly may chew on a limp form for a minute or two but generally will lose interest and shuffle off,” Bryson writes. “With black bears, however, playing dead is futile, since they will continue chewing on you until you are considerably past caring.” 

As with most people, Bryson has a healthy respect for wild animals and wants to avoid encountering them. But in Ohio and across the United States, obtaining and keeping exotic and dangerous animals as pets is a frightening and controversial issue examined in “The Elephant in the Living Room,” the critically acclaimed film that features Harrison’s work as an advocate for “proper behavior around wildlife.” 

“There’s more tigers in the state of Ohio, in people’s back yards, than … in India right now, in the wild,” says Harrison, who is a forthright, no-nonsense person who has seen the underbelly of Ohio’s lax laws — as well as the underbelly of a 16-foot Burmese python. 

Harrison says the explosion of exotic-animal ownership can be tracked to the increasing popularity of reality TV shows that many of us would deem “educational.” People have doubted the link, but he tells them to ask the owners themselves, who frequently reply that they’d seen someone on television working with a wild animal. Harrison also points out that exotic-animal ownership is often viewed as a status symbol among various socioeconomic levels.

“The Elephant in the Living Room” won Best Feature Documentary at the 25th Annual Genesis Awards in 2011, and when writer/director/producer Michael Webber accepted the award, he brought Tim Harrison with him, telling the audience in Los Angeles, “This is the guy right here who for 35 years is the unsung hero who has gone and taken tigers out of people’s basements, who has taken 200-pound pythons out of people’s houses … this is a guy who is on the front lines every day, and nobody has known about it.”

Harrison was on the scene of what is now known as “the Zanesville massacre,” on Oct. 18, 2011, when Terry Thompson released dozens of wild animals — lions, leopards, primates, tigers, wolves, bears and others — that had been kept on his rural property, before killing himself. The community was on lockdown as news spread of the animal rampage. Eventually, police officers shot and killed almost 50 of the animals as they fled the property, with some venturing to nearby Interstate 70. 

The Zanesville case dominated the national news at the time and shed light on the free market of exotic animals here in Ohio, where cougars, zebras, African porcupines or any number of non-native species were sold at auction or through a “pet trader” that offers wild animals in classified ads. 

Ohio was one of seven states with no regulation regarding the sale or ownership of these types of creatures, according to the Humane Society of the United States. Days after the Zanesville ordeal, Gov. John Kasich signed an executive order to increase the powers of humane officers, shut down unauthorized auctions and restrict existing ones. 

However, although Gov. Ted Strickland had issued an executive order in January 2011 that would have prevented anyone “convicted of an offense involving the abuse or neglect of any animal pursuant to any state, local, or federal law” from owning exotic animals, Kasich had let it expire, preventing Outreach for Animals from being able to seize the animals owned by Terry Thompson, who’d been in federal prison. Harrison is currently working with Marcy Hawley of Wilmington on a book about what happened before, during and after Zanesville.

Harrison said that he spoke on Jay Thomas’ radio program and likened the governor’s role in the exotic animal problems to the mayor in the movie “Jaws.” “Even though he knew people were going to get hurt, he’s saying, ‘Go back in the water.’ It’s going to bite him in the ass morally, financially, physically.”

A year before Zanesville, Tim Harrison had spoken to Ohio lawmakers at the state capitol building about Ohio’s lax laws in regard to buying and keeping dangerous exotic animals. “I want you to remember this, anybody’s that’s listening up here or listening in the hallways: You now know what’s going on,” he said. “You can no longer stick your head in the sand. You can’t say, ‘I don’t know. … Now you know.”

Harrison has spent most of his life as an advocate for both humans and animals, protecting the public in his role as a police officer, firefighter and paramedic for the city of Oakwood, and protecting exotic and dangerous animals when they’ve been uprooted from their natural habitats and placed in American homes. He invites those who may not agree with regulations on exotic animals to attend his discussion in Wilmington so he can explain what he has seen on the front lines of the issue.
​The success of “The Elephant in the Living Room” has led to new relationships with influential people and with new sanctuaries to help the animals rescued by Outreach for Animals. To donate to the organization, visit www.outreachforanimals.org or send to Outreach for Animals, P.O. Box 24114, Dayton, OH 45424.

I was still in my 20s, still willing to jump chest-deep into a newspaper assignment without asking a lot of questions. 
Besides, the Marines called me. My country needed me. How could I refuse? 
And that’s how I found myself “embedded” 15 years ago — long before there was such a silly journalistic term — with six Camp Lejeune Marines and a Marine’s wife, hiking the Appalachian Trail. 
When I agreed to go, I had thought I was in decent-enough shape to do a little hiking in the woods. I figured we’d trek up a steep hill, then enjoy the scenery at the top. “La, la, la — look at the lovely wildflowers,” I might remark. I’d carry my backpack and have my hands free to jot down notes as we meandered along the mountain summits. 
I could not have been more wrong.
I barely made it up the first ascent before my lungs were screaming for oxygen, my legs wobbling beneath me. I carried my own backpack for maybe 20 minutes, tops. I was scared, I was overflowing with regret, I was embarrassed, and I was plotting my escape the entire first night in the forest. ​

As a teenager, I started dating a boy whose family was from southwestern Ohio. His grandmother and his mother (who later became my mother-in-law) made beef and noodles, poured over mashed potatoes. A starch on top of a starch. Oh, delicious heresy. 
These were chewy, homemade noodles, cooked in broth, then poured over homemade mashed potatoes. These were not dumplings. I hadn’t known such a thing existed. And there were rolls with butter, every time.
I’ve eaten many plates of noodles over potatoes over the years — beef and noodles, chicken and noodles — but I’ve only eaten them in the Midwest. On the East Coast or the West Coast, noodles over potatoes is a system shock to the carb police, those healthful eaters who would neither eat mashed potatoes nor noodles, much less pile them on top of each other, add a dinner roll, and call it a meal. 
The only time I’ve seen noodles on top of mashed potatoes outside the Midwest is at the Ohio-based Bob Evans restaurants, which has 560 restaurants in 19 states. 
However, noodles over potatoes (most often simply called “noodles”) is a staple comfort food in middle America, with people from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania eating the dish, especially in rural areas. 
And it is present on the menus of Amish restaurants across the region, causing many folks to suggest the dish came from the Germans’ love of both potatoes and noodles, especially a thick egg noodle such as spatzle. 
My mother-in-law, Connie Spurlock, learned how to make noodles in the Washington Court House kitchen of her mother, Garnet Leisure Armstrong, who learned in the kitchen of her mother, Mae Clay Leisure, also from Fayette County. They served chicken and noodles as well as beef and noodles, but my mother-in-law prefers beef broth, so she sticks to beef and noodles. 
She has passed down her method for making noodles, which she, like most noodle makers, will tell you isn’t really a recipe; she just knows how many eggs to mix with how much flour. “The boys would call and ask, ‘How do you make this or that?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t go by a recipe.’”
My daughter will receive her great-great-grandmother’s noodle tradition, though my first personal attempt was disastrous. I’m a noodle eater, not a noodle maker.
To make a generous portion of noodles for six, my mother-in-law starts with 4 eggs, mixing them up in a bowl and adding flour as she goes. Once the flour is well mixed and firm, she keeps working it with her hands. The dough is almost ready when it is “pretty stiff” and not sticking to her hands.
Then she generously flours the counter and rolls out the dough with a rolling pin, flopping it over and over until it’s as thin as she can make it. She slices up the noodles thinly, then leaves them out to dry. 
For broth, she boils a chuck roast or swiss steak in salted water until tender, often adding soup bones or short ribs for more flavor. She removes the bones and pulls out the roast to finish it in the oven, but leaves the broth for cooking the noodles. (My mother-in-law prefers her beef separate from her noodles, so she doesn’t serve them as one dish; instead, she keeps the beef on the side.)
And, of course, she serves them with homemade mashed potatoes, offering up the noodles as a gravy alternative.
Helen Eakins, who has lived in Clinton County for most of her 96 years, has been making noodles for more than 80 years, and her mother made them before that.
Along with making chicken and noodles at home, Helen and her friend Nellie Rich, who is 90, have made them for at least 25 Election Day dinners at the Harveysburg VFW, with the Community Helpers Club of Harveysburg, formed in 1939. 
For Election Day 2013, the women helped make a “great-big roaster full” of noodles, using about 36 eggs, served over mashed potatoes, along with green beans, and homemade dessert. The money raised from the dinner goes to a scholarship for a Massie Township student at Clinton-Massie High School in Clarksville. 
Helen Eakins recently came to my house to show me how she has made noodles for more than eight decades. She made it look so simple, mixing the eggs and the flour, then rolling out the dough on the counter, slicing through it to make long, thin noodles that she separated and left to dry completely. The noodles could be cooked in broth right away, too, and will freeze well for a later use. 
The batches she made for me did not last long in the cold, comfort-food-necessary Ohio winter.
Helen uses 3 eggs, 2 cups of flour, and a little salt, though she said you could use 2 eggs, 1 egg yolk, 3 tablespoons of water, 2 cups of flour, and a little salt. 
She pours the liquid on the flour and starts stirring, eventually kneading with her hands, creating a dough that becomes stiff enough to roll out. She cuts her dough in 3 sections, rolls it out (“Make ’em thin,” she says), then slices it.
After separating the sliced noodles, she leaves them out to dry or cooks them right away. Both she and my mother-in-law regularly freeze noodles to be cooked in broth later. 
Helen uses the broth from a boiled chicken or, sometimes, a prepared-broth shortcut. 
I told her that my research indicated that serving noodles over mashed potatoes is a regional culinary tradition that has not spread completely across the nation.
She was surprised. “I can’t imagine eating it any other way. Oh, dear,” she said.
The coasts don’t know what they’re missing.
***
The following are some of the restaurants in the area that serve noodles over potatoes at least weekly: 
•Our Place restaurant, 827 E. Market St. in Washington Court House, serves chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes every Wednesday.
•Courtview restaurant, 149 N. Main St. in Washington Court House, serves chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes every other Wednesday  (March 19 should be a noodle day) and beef and noodles over mashed potatoes every other Sunday.
•The White Star restaurant in Adams County, at 38 N. Main St. in Peebles, serves noodles (usually chicken, sometimes beef) with optional mashed potatoes on Wednesdays and Sundays.
•The Old “Y” restaurant in Brown County, at 1940 U.S. 62 in Winchester, serves chicken and noodles (usually by itself, but mashed potatoes is an option) in its regular rotation of specials, but it’s not on the daily menu. 
•Bob Evans serves its Chicken-n-Noodles Deep Dish Dinner at its restaurants nationwide.

​If you’re sitting down with this magazine, perhaps with a hot cup of tea, you’re probably not the person who needs to read this particular article. Maybe you should pass it on to one of those people who says, “I’m so busy” as a badge of honor. 
Tap Mrs. Busy on the shoulder and ask her to look up from her smartphone. Tell Mr. Busy to read after midnight, since he brags that he only needs five hours of sleep. Slip it to him on Sunday as he sits in the bleachers at his kid’s sporting event. 
It’s now a 24/7 world, and we’ve been conditioned to think that more is better, convenience is mandatory, and rest is a four-letter word.
For 2,000 years, it was much different: A day of sabbath was observed across cultures, with time for worship and repose. Only in the past several decades has it eroded to the point where nearly any activity — shopping, sports, bar-hopping, working — can happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 
“Sabbath was initially intended not as a heavy theological mandate, but as common sense — because we need to renew,” said the Rev. Dr. Tom Stephenson, pastor at Wilmington’s First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The word “sabbath” means “to rest,” or even “to cease,” which makes the action more intentional, Stephenson said. 

​Resting on the seventh day is the essence of the Fourth Commandment, and it applies not only to free humans but to their servants and their animals. In the Old Testament, Stephenson said, it was about justice — even the slaves had to have days off. 
“The wisdom of that is that even God takes a break, that God has downtime,” Stephenson said.
Even farm fields are supposed to be allowed a sabbath every seventh year, though it never quite caught on. “There’s a time when the ground lies fallow — we forgot the fallow part. We’ve bought into a culture that says, ‘What have you done for me lately?’” Stephenson said.
Both Stephenson and Victoria DeSensi, assistant professor of psychology at Wilmington College, point to a cultural shift in which downtime is actively discouraged. DeSensi, in her early 30s, remembers a time when stores were not open on Sundays — but now many are open 24 hours a day, including on Thanksgiving. Stephenson believes the post-World War II industrial revolution kicked off the notion of working without rest, and he remembers his father in the early 1960s holding three jobs to make sure the family owned its home instead of renting. 
“It’s no surprise that when we got to the mid-’60s, that families were falling apart in record numbers,” he said.
From a psychological perspective, DeSensi said, a social norm has been created, and people think they’re now supposed to go shopping on a holiday that for hundreds of years had been a down day of family and food. Most stores opened their doors in 2013 on Thanksgiving, a formerly untouchable American holiday.
“Blue laws” that ban Sunday activities in many states, dating to the 1600s, have gradually been repealed, with a few still on the books.
A couple of major companies have resisted the seven-day trend: Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby. Chick-fil-A’s 1,700 fast-food restaurants and Hobby Lobby’s 560 craft stores are closed on Sundays. Chick-fil-A’s founder believes that “all franchised Chick-fil-A operators and their restaurant employees should have an opportunity to rest, spend time with family and friends, and worship if they choose to do so,” according to a statement on the company’s website. 
Nordstrom department stores, Costco warehouse clubs, and Menards hardware stores did not open this past Thanksgiving. Menards instead issued the following statement: “As a family-owned company, Menards believes Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness. With this in mind, we will be closed on Thanksgiving Day so you and our Team Members can celebrate this joyous time with family and friends.”
The cultural expectations also play out in regard to when families should spend time together, or how sacred church services truly are.
Stephenson and his wife have lived in Georgia and North Carolina, where there remains a Southern standard of keeping Sundays and Wednesday evenings clear of obligations outside family and church. Coaches of youth sports would push parents to allow their children to compete and practice on those days, but the Southern expectations and norms gave the parents the backbone to push back — with the parents winning out, Stephenson said. 
The any-day-is-sports-day philosophy is alive and well in Ohio and plenty of other states, however. A study published in the March 2013 edition of Review of Religious Research found that pastors of 16 “declining” American and Canadian Protestant churches blamed outside activities, particularly youth sports, as the main reason families have stopped attending services. 
Some churches have responded to the loss of families by adding alternative service times on Saturday, so church members can attend both sports and worship, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. Other churches have instituted their own sports leagues to counter the exodus.
Stephenson said he sees many families whose children participate in multiple extracurricular activities each week, and he worries most that the children themselves are not able to have their own downtime, their own sabbath, in order to rejuvenate themselves.
The culture of academia supposedly embraces the idea of a sabbatical (based in “sabbath”), but professors and their students are not immune to the pressures of being on call or studying all hours of the day. DeSensi worries about the potential for burnout in some of her colleagues, and she knows that the majority of her students at Wilmington College, unlike her peers in graduate school at Indiana University, work jobs to help pay for school, in addition to their academic obligations. 
“It's something I've had to remind myself, that these students are definitely overworked,” DeSensi said.
Students are also now in nearly constant communication with other people through social media. Nearly 75 percent of adults ages 18 to 44 sleep within reach of their cellphones, according to a Stanford University study. 
According to various medical studies, lack of sleep leads to many health issues, including stroke, obesity, diabetes, anxiety, depression, and the top U.S. killers: heart disease and cancer. Lack of sleep also causes people to make careless mistakes and have poor judgment, which can affect their daily work or their safety in an automobile.
“The restorative qualities (are) obviously something essential to physical health,” DeSensi said. “It's kind of ironic, because people are trying to be more productive, but they end up making preventable errors.”
DeSensi said she personally tries to be more efficient during work hours so she can leave for home at a decent time, where she uses her 35-minute commute to decompress. She also strives to get at least seven hours of sleep each night.
Stephenson admitted that pastors — with their round-the-clock access to congregants — are as guilty as anyone when it comes to burning the candle at both ends. However, he said, his current congregation is extremely understanding when he does find he needs time off, and he has tried to make sure he takes some time for himself. Like computers, he said, we sometimes just need to reboot.
When a day of rest is not built into cultural expectations, and vacation days frequently go to waste, workers often become less productive because they are exhausted. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity. 
Many U.S. corporations are learning this lesson. Google, named for the fourth time the best company to work for in the United States, offers its workers nap pods, maintains 1,000 bicycles on its campus for workers’ use, and gives employees their own garden space to grow vegetables, among other innovations that keep employees happy and productive.
The United States, however, is the only developed country in the world without a single legally required paid vacation day or holiday, according to the Center for Economic Policy and Research. By law, every country in the European Union has at least four work weeks of paid vacation. And, unlike many American workers, the vacation is used each year.
Eileen Brady is the co-author of “Images of America: Wilmington.”
###
SIDEBAR:
A FEW WAYS TO SPEND A DAY OF REST
•Determine what “rest” truly means to you. Some people are introverted, so being alone and without the company of others helps them recharge. Extroverts, however, will find it rejuvenating to be among people.
•Unplug from electronic noise. Shut down your computer, your smartphone, your television. Remove your Bluetooth and your children’s earbuds. Listen to the sounds of nature instead. Hear the wind blow through trees, the rain pelting the ground, the birds chirping.
•Enjoy family time by playing board games or reading aloud. But don’t always include family in your own personal sabbath: People also need time alone with their thoughts, or with their spouse, away from children. Children, too, need time without noise and expectations and electronics.
•Take a rest from worry and activities that stress you out. Don’t pay bills or work on your taxes, even if it’s quiet and you’re alone. 
•Remember time for recreation and hobbies. “Recreate” means to “make new again.” Paint, draw, look at art, gaze at nature. 
•Slowly savor a well-cooked meal. If you enjoy cooking, create a meal that you will enjoy. If cooking stresses you out, have something cooked for you by a professional. 

As the second world war raged in far-flung places, Virgene Webb quietly began making her mark on public education in a small school in western Clinton County. 
She carefully entered the names of her first students into her grade book, in beautiful, teacherly cursive: Lorraine Baker, Ruth Esther Bloom, Shirley Bloom, Donald Brewington, Richard Butts ... John Shinkle, Betty Stingley.
Miss Webb started teaching in the basement of Kingman School in Chester Township, in time working her way up to a top-floor classroom with windows. 
That was 1943. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Classrooms were filled with female teachers because

In the black-and-white photograph of the chair, made of sculptured roots and yellow pine, it looks sturdy and well-built, almost new. The chair, crafted around 1900, has been handed down and moved across state lines, ending up in our neck of the woods.
At one point, though, the chair provided seating on the largest estate in the United States, the Biltmore mansion in Asheville, N.C. In fact, the wood from which it was made was almost certainly homegrown, created from trees on that property.
It was built by Dave Taylor’s father’s hands, and it is one of his most prized possessions. He considered allowing the Biltmore to once again place the chair on the estate in Asheville, and a 1974 letter from George H.V. Cecil, then president of the Biltmore Co., states that although there was a policy of not acquiring items for exhibit, Cecil was interested in personally purchasing the chair. But Taylor decided to keep it in the family.
David “Dave” Taylor of Wilmington was born in the woods at the Biltmore in 1930, which was completed in 1895 on 125,000 forested acres in western North Carolina. The home of George and Edith Vanderbilt, it was — and still is — the largest home in the United States, a 250-room French Renaissance-style château in what is now Pisgah National Forest. 

​The working estate employed 750 workers to run its nurseries, granaries, poultry runs, pigpens, kennels, stables and dairy, which included 700 Jersey cows. 
Taylor’s father, James “Jim” Taylor, was born in 1872 and started working in 1890 for George Vanderbilt, the youngest son of industrialist William Henry Vanderbilt and his wife, Maria Louisa Kissam. The Vanderbilt family earned its enormous fortune through steamboats, railroads and other businesses, and George was one of three sons who inherited part of a $200 million fortune when his father died in 1885.
Jim Taylor helped construct the mansion and stayed on as part of the large staff of the working estate. He helped with the gardens, which were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., who also designed Central Park in New York City and is generally considered the father of American landscape architecture. Jim Taylor also served as a “gateman,” guarding the entrance of the estate.
He continued working on the Biltmore grounds as a ranger, patrolling the thousands of acres for poachers and trespassers. He didn’t like to kill anything himself, his family has said, but when he would catch poachers in the act, they’d drop what they had shot and they’d run away. The children had plenty of venison to eat from what their father picked up that way.
George Vanderbilt housed Taylor, his wife and their three sons and a daughter in the “red house” near the property’s gardens. Jim Taylor’s first wife, Cannie, died in 1915, and Taylor later remarried a woman named Daisy, who bore three more children, including Dave Taylor.
 Dave Taylor was born in 1930 in a log house a mile or so from the main house, and their family was treated well by the incredibly wealthy Vanderbilts, especially Edith Vanderbilt, whose own daughter, Cornelia, was born in 1900 and was allowed to play with the other children on the estate. 
George Vanderbilt was kindhearted but aloof, though his wife often helped the Taylor family personally.
“Mrs. Vanderbilt was a down-to-earth woman,” says Dave Taylor, a sentiment echoed by his older half-sister, Joanna Taylor Patton, who was interviewed by the Biltmore before she died. “She’d come down and help change diapers.”
Joanna Taylor recalled that her mother entered baking contests in the Fall Fair at Biltmore and her father entered fruits and vegetables to be judged.
One year, Jim Taylor won first place for the biggest pumpkin, Joanna had told a Biltmore employee. Edith Vanderbilt tasted all the baked goods at the fair, but George Vanderbilt stayed in the carriage without mingling with employees and their families.
Edith Vanderbilt also gave George Vanderbilt’s clothes to Jim Taylor, whom she called “Jimmy,” and she gave him the first automobile he ever owned. 
Dave Taylor has a photograph of his father with the Vanderbilt grandsons, George H.V. and William A.V. Cecil, that the Biltmore enlarged and hung on display amid antique farm equipment, north of the Biltmore Winery.
After George Vanderbilt died in 1914, Jim Taylor’s son James “Oat” Taylor became a chauffeur for Edith Vanderbilt, driving her on local errands and occasionally to another Vanderbilt family house on the eastern seaboard.  
Chauncey Beadle, hired by Frederick Law Olmsted to oversee the nursery at Biltmore, ended up staying at the estate for 60 years; he was a good friend of Jim Taylor and always remembered the children in later years. He served as estate superintendent in later years.
It was a charmed existence in an idyllic setting, until Jim Taylor died of tapeworm in 1936, and Mrs. Taylor was unable to provide for all of the children. 
“Mom never worked in her life, and here she had seven kids,” Dave Taylor says.
A North Carolina judge ordered five of the children to be sent hundreds of miles north to the Junior Order United American Mechanics National Orphans Home in Tiffin, Ohio, also known as the Junior Home. Two girls stayed with their mother. Dave Taylor was barely 7 years old.
The change could have introduced a Dickensian twist on the story. However, Dave Taylor and his siblings thrived in the orphanage. He could not imagine a more nurturing environment, and he still remains in touch with many of the others who grew up at the orphanage. 
“They were the best days of my life,” he says.
The orphanage, established in 1896, was a self-supporting community of approximately 40 buildings, populated in those years by as many as 1,200 residents.
There were residential cottages, a gymnasium, schools (both academic and vocational), a hospital, a bank, a post office, a cannery, a library, a power plant, a chapel, a greenhouse and a central dining hall.
Each year, the former residents of the orphanage still gather for a homecoming. “Tiffin and Findley is full of us kids,” Dave Taylor says. 
In 1940, when Dave Taylor was 10 years old, the Tiffin orphanage sent 240 kids to a new branch orphanage in Lexington, N.C., also a Junior Order home much like the one in Ohio. Dave and his siblings were sent on a train to North Carolina.
Almost 200 boys, 17 and older, entered the military to help with the effort in World War II. 
The North Carolina orphanage was a working farm, and it was as welcoming to Dave Taylor as the Tiffin home had been. There was plenty of fresh air, plenty of time for sports. He picked cotton for a nearby farmer for a penny a pound.
“The only thing I didn’t like — there wasn’t enough schooling,” Dave Taylor says. The children attended school three hours a day and then were sent off to work on the farm.
It was there, however, that Dave Taylor learned to play basketball and other sports. He passed his knowledge along to his son, Mike Taylor, a standout athlete at Wilmington High School in the 1980s. His daughter, Lori Boggs, also went to Wilmington High School. 
Across the street from the orphanage in Lexington lived a family whose daughter had married Jim Mallory, who had played baseball for the Washington Senators, the New York Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. 
“He was the smartest man in baseball, football or basketball I’ve ever known,” Dave Taylor says. After his stint in pro baseball, Mallory coached briefly at the Junior Children’s Home in Lexington, N.C., where his path crossed with Dave Taylor’s before landing a job at Elon College. 
Dave Taylor graduated in 1948 from the orphanage, and his former coach, Mallory, offered him the opportunity to play football at Elon College. Taylor spent two weeks there before deciding to head north instead. 
A buddy whose mother was working in Ohio had asked him what he was planning to do with his life. I said, “I don’t know — I still got my farm shoes,” but he ended up moving to Ohio to find work off the farm, at a General Motors plant in Dayton. 
He took a bus across the Ohio River and ate the first bowl of chili in his life; growing up in the orphanage, he had never had beef, but “plenty of milk, plenty of gravy.”
“We got an egg on Tuesday,” he says, “and a piece of pork on Sunday at noon.” 
Dave Taylor started off on the General Motors assembly line and worked his way up to general foreman, retiring in 1986.
He still has fond memories of both orphanages, and there were occasional trips back to the Biltmore, even after he and his siblings left in 1937. His father’s good friend Chauncey Beadle made sure that the children returned regularly to experience the wonders there, including visits to rooms not open to the public. The estate was their playground on those days.
The biggest highlight of the Biltmore visits was one shared in many of the stories of those who grew up there: the Biltmore Dairy. The rich ice cream from the Biltmore Dairy supposedly had the highest buttermilk content on the market.
“They let us run around and eat all the ice cream we wanted,” Dave Taylor says. It was a child’s dream fulfilled.
Four of the Taylor siblings, James, Robert, Mary and Helen, still live in North Carolina. The youngest, Helen, is 78 years old.
These days, Dave Taylor lives in a brick ranch in Wilmington, hoping to see family and revisit the Biltmore mansion as soon as he can. He spends time on a farm near Lynchburg, tending to gardens there, once again wearing his “farm shoes.”

Unless an 11th-hour deal was made last night, the sequester has sequested. The automatic cuts of $85 billion will be trimmed from the federal budget over the next seven months. 
Federal workers are freaking out about future furloughs. Hundreds of thousands of nationwide jobs will be lost, and the economy that was picking up speed will slow down again. Airports and military-base communities will be the hardest hit.
To a Clinton County resident, it sounds a lot like a DHL pullout.
It’s tough to get worked up about the substantial loss of jobs in a place that has already lost a substantial amount of jobs. Clinton County’s unemployment rate went from a low of 5 percent in April 2008 to a high of 19.1 percent in January 2010. It was at  9.7 percent ...

Just a few weeks earlier, I had been sitting in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, tears of appreciation streaming down my face during “Nabucco,” the opera that made Giuseppe Verdi famous.
Far from the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, I found myself in a grand performing arts venue once more, appreciative tears flowing anew. The production wasn’t an epic Italian opera — just kids strumming harps and creating rhythm with buckets — but I was filled with gratitude that my daughter would feel so comfortable on a stage as beautiful as any in the nation.
Tucked into downtown Wilmington is another living memorial — this one to Charles Webb Murphy’s mother — that is truly one of the most beautiful theaters anywhere. For a city our size, it is an anomaly.
The marquee can illuminate the entire block and wake up a sleepy little town, but the building’s true beauty lies within. The intricate interior ...

At the end of the day, we were either walkers or bus riders. That was in the paleolithic age, before precious family gasoline was spent for school transportation, spawning the arrival of a third category: the “pick-ups.” 
I was a bus rider. My parents picked me up from Martinsville Elementary School a handful of times. Otherwise, I had to spend a couple extra hours each weekday commuting on a big, yellow Bluebird bus.
I’d wait at the end of my driveway until the bus doors would swing open, the heat would blow in my face, and I’d inhale the familiar yet nauseating smell of pleather seats and rubber aisleways, sometimes mingled with that strange sawdust that covers vomit — a nasty side effect of mixing children, motion, and diesel fumes.
I was also part of that unlucky passenger category of being first on, last off. My ride each morning started extra early, and my ride each afternoon ...

My mother hoped it would be a phase.
My husband still ranks it up there with the world’s most harrowing announcements. 
It was 21 years ago that I decided to stop eating meat, just months before I married a hardcore carnivore. 
The carnivore knew I wasn’t trying to foist my choice on him  — or anyone else, for that matter. I made the decision for myself only. I’ve cooked meat regularly since then, and I can surreptitiously eat around meat in anything served to me. 
Mainly, my husband was worried that our ability to dine out — one of his favorite pastimes — had come to a screeching halt. 
That didn’t happen, though it does still bother him when I have to resort to ordering a plate of french fries or a small garden salad. For the most part, there’s some kind of item ...

“Levy” must be Latin for “headache.”
The proposed 8-mill levy for Wilmington City Schools is a headache for taxpayers who have to pay for it, school employees and students who rely on it, school board members who try to sell it to the public, and anyone like me who struggles to comprehend its implications.
I’ve been trying to educate myself about the issues, and although I can’t claim a complete understanding of the Wilmington levy, or Ohio’s unconstitutional need for levies, or the fairness to a community still in the throes of a jobs crisis, I certainly do have a complete headache.
The first pains came as I read through the pages of comments on the News Journal’s story after the schools decided Jan. 14 to place a levy on the May ballot. The levy was described, among other things, as a money grab, an unfair burden on farmers and a misuse of money. A few folks, however, said that the relatively low increase is a small price to pay for education.
The overall indignity

​My van’s thermometer registered a 5. Nothing else. No zero followed the 5. Just 5.
Some things should never be single-digit numbers: test scores, batting averages and morning temperatures.
A couple Clinton County schools were delayed because of the weather. A couple weren’t. 
It had not even occurred to me to check to see if my daughter’s school were delayed, because A.) The roads were clear of snow and ice, and B.) This is Ohio, not some fraidy-cat Southern state where they cancel schools at the drop of a flake.
But students here do wait for school buses before 7 a.m., so it makes sense that the coldest weather in four years would factor in. I just didn’t think to check for a delay. Five-degree weather must numb my cerebrum.
This week, southwestern Ohio has been nowhere close to being the iciest part of the United States, and we haven’t even been breaking our own record lows. But it has been colder than I, a weather whiner, had ever wanted to experience again in my life. 
The coldest location Monday in the continental United States was Embarrass, Minn., probably named after the people who chose to live in a place where it gets to 36 below zero.

There are friends who laugh together, friends who talk for hours, friends who show up in crisis, friends who share food, friends who may as well be family. 
 I am lucky enough to have many of those kinds of friends, near and far. I can listen to their voices, shop with them, hug them, dine with them and travel with them. I trust them with my family, my pets, my money, my emotional well-being. 
I dare say most of them would bail me out of jail. 
So we’re clear that I’m not an anti-social loner in a Kaczynski cabin?
I just don’t have any Facebook friends. Because I’ve never joined Facebook. I am not one of the 1 billion-with-a-B people on the planet who use Facebook. Seven out of 10 Americans who are active online visit Facebook, according to Nielsen, the folks who also keep track of our TV viewing. 
I’m in the minority, but I’ve never really been one to succumb to peer pressure, which was especially helpful when high-school peers were inhaling nitrous oxide from whipped-cream cans. And on Senior Skip Day at Wilmington High School, I was sitting nerdily in class because I had perfect attendance I didn’t want to ruin. ​

Her business was there before Walmart arrived in Wilmington and became her strip-mall neighbor, bringing a great deal of retail traffic with it. Later, her business survived the superstore’s pullout and relocation outside of town. 
From Betamax to Blu-Ray, Jen Andorfer has rented it all at First Choice Video. She has worked there more than half her life and has owned the business since 1992. A teenager from Springfield who loved to watch movies, Jen also eventually owned stores in other southwestern Ohio cities, but the Wilmington store is the one that remains.
“It’s the only job I’ve had since I was 16,” Jen says. 
The Clinton County community embraced First Choice Video, and Jen returned the love. She has only raised prices twice in 23 years. Children can still pick a five-day rental for 99 cents. She rents five videos for five days for five bucks. She uses store walls

Just 20 miles east of Wilmington, there is a place where disco balls still cast mirrored magic on roller skaters young and old.
At its essence, it’s just a roller rink, and it’s been there for ages. But there’s a timelessness found there that is reassuring when technology and overscheduling seem to distort spontaneous human community. Kids at Roller Haven in Washington Court House still fall under the spell of the colorful lights, the Top 40 music, the physical challenge and the hypnotic revolutions around the wooden floor.
The music may indicate it’s 2013 — think “Gangnam Style” and “I’m Sexy and I Know It” — but the DJ usually throws in a song here and there from generations back. On weekend nights, teenagers crowd the center of the rink to dance without wheels.
I can still remember my first visit, at age 6, followed by sporadic super-fun skating parties as an adolescent, when Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” was the song

One member of our family meets weekly with her friends, and everyone else pitches in to make sure she gets her social time. It’s not who you might think.
Ruthie, our 8-month-old puppy, gets chauffeured Tuesday nights to “puppy pawties,” where she cavorts with Buster and Miley and Cody and Bailey and a roomful of other canine comrades. 
Ruthie loves it so much, she’d drive herself there if she had opposable thumbs.
Each time, there’s a brief puppy version of cocktail hour, with mingling and hugging (and slobbering and rear-end-sniffing). Then it’s down to business with basic obedience commands to learn and practice. And then more play fighting, neck biting and pouncing, ending with each puppy getting weighed on the veterinary scale, equipment that causes anxiety for many pets.
There are field trips to local pet-friendly stores such as Lowe’s and Tractor Supply Co. 
And there’s homework.

​Our puppy loves it, our daughter loves it, and we find it’s a major mood-lifter to be around peppy puppies of all shapes and sizes. It’s especially fun to watch the apprehensive ones gain confidence and learn to enjoy themselves with new peers — kind of like a four-legged Dale Carnegie course, or the last 20 minutes of a middle-school dance.
Susan Ertel and Elaine Wingo host the puppies at Country View Pet Hospital, which has been sponsoring puppy socialization classes for a couple of years. Susan and Elaine are patient and understanding teachers, even when a pupil pees on the floor.
Well-socialized dogs are easy to spot, Susan said, because of their confident body language and pleasant disposition. They make safer and more enjoyable pets. That’s because they’re more comfortable in various circumstances and therefore less likely to behave fearfully or aggressively when they encounter new situations, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Socialization is crucial for pets that will regularly meet children and steady streams of adult visitors. Ruthie the puppy, a rescue from the Clinton County Humane Society, is still learning manners and self-control around visitors, but our goal is for her to grow up to become like our older dog: trustworthy around toddlers but still an appropriately protective pooch.
Because children are able to attend puppy class, even households that might not have kids traipsing around are able to help their pets feel relaxed around young ones. And the children learn how to properly participate in the process.
“You want (your dog) to be a good family member — it’s a win-win situation,” said Susan, the author and illustrator of “Belle: The Hound That Was Found,” a children’s book about the basset hound she rescued and later trained to be a therapy dog. 
“That’s kind of how my journey with all this began,” said Susan, who has had Belle for 10 years. Susan and Belle started with basic obedience classes, followed by training for Belle’s testing through a national therapy-animal program called Pet Partners.
One major animal-therapy goal is for the dog’s behavior to be predictable in all kinds of situations, so socialization especially comes into play for therapy dogs.
Belle has been a regular therapy dog at Holmes Elementary School, Clinton Memorial Hospital and the Foster J. Boyd Regional Cancer Center. In February, though, Belle underwent surgery, followed by chemotherapy for cancer, which later returned. Belle is doing well, Susan said, but is now retired from pet therapy.
Belle no longer mentors at puppy classes either, so Susan and Elaine sometimes borrow a class member or invite successful alumni back to school. A couple of weeks ago, Zelda the sheltie showed the class how her owners had kept working with her long after puppy socialization was over. Zelda’s amazing obedience skills caused the rest of us holding goofy, gangly puppies to watch with envy. 
Still, it was inspiring to consider how far a dog’s behavior can advance with consistent practice, kind of like realizing your toddler could someday earn a degree from Harvard Law.
We’re sure that Ruthie has Ivy League potential, but the humans in our house have to put in the effort to make sure she does her homework. That’s a little more of a challenge.
Already, though, Ruthie has shown great progress. She’s not at all afraid of getting weighed on the scale, and she bounds into the vet’s office with extraordinary exuberance. For Ruthie, a trip to the veterinarian is like a walk in the park.

On a January morning almost four years ago, my daughter was with friends in her kindergarten classroom just a couple of blocks from our home.
But I was 25 minutes away at Fort Belvoir, a large Army base in Virginia, when my phone rang. 
Another kindergarten parent was calling. Our children’s school was on lockdown. There was a shooter in the neighborhood. That was all the information my friend had.
Panic swiftly arrived, followed by a primal desire to get to my child, complicated by distance, strict speeding laws on base and urban traffic.
I can still remember the shade of the tree over the parking spot where I took the call; the angle from the entrance to where I was heading; the repeated cell-phone calls to reach my husband, who couldn’t be awoken at home that quickly after finishing a overnight shift. It’s all part of my flashbulb memory.
Slowly, details emerged: the man with the gun

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas.
And I’m not talking about pine.
We have never had a fresh-cut tree, but we have always had fresh-baked cookies around Christmastime. So the scent of sugar, flour and eggs wafting from the oven is a major sensory tradition in our family. 
And then, each year, Christmas cookies become the driving force for New Year’s resolutions. But let’s not think about that now.
It seems that each geographic region we’ve lived in celebrates with its own particular Christmas cookies, and I’m often surprised when someone has never tasted a cookie that’s considered a staple in other places. 
We made snickerdoodles two years ago for my daughter’s teacher in Virginia, who fell in love with them and had to have the recipe. I hadn’t know there was a person on the planet who hadn’t eaten a snickerdoodle. Surely they aren’t an Ohio-bred Christmas cookies, a la buckeyes, are they?

Last week, two Massachusetts women lost their jobs for a failed attempt at humor in Arlington National Cemetery. People who were particularly offended mounted the effort to have them fired. 
If only it were the first act of disrespect at Arlington, I would be able to offer up more outrage. But I seem to have grown desensitized to public stupidity.
From the self-absorbed people who are unaware of their surroundings at even the most sacred sites, all the way to the forgotten FBI investigation of the mishandling of human remains at Arlington, the Facebook frenzy over this random act of brainlessness seems somewhat disingenuous.
Maybe I’ve just been conditioned to expect people to act as if every tourist attraction — even if it’s a war memorial or national cemetery — is a cool ride at Disney World.
Here’s what happened last week to prompt the firings: Lindsey Stone was hunched next to a sign in Arlington cemetery that reads “Respect and silence,” holding up her middle finger and pretending to shout, while her friend Jamie Schuh snapped a photo. The “humor” was that they were challenging authority, as they are apparently wont to do. 

​And then they did what seems to be the typical next step for those who don’t think things through: They posted it on a social media site, for all the world to see.
More than 30,000 people joined a Facebook group demanding they be fired, and 2,500 signed a petition on Change.org. The women’s employer, a nonprofit that assists adults with disabilities, first put them on unpaid leave, then terminated them after the increasing public outcry.
And while the women had the legal freedom to create their joke, First Amendment rights do not protect people from losing their jobs for doing or saying dumb things. 
The women have apologized and told the Boston Herald they had only intended the photo as a “visual pun” in response to the sign, not as a disrespect for service members, and some service members have defended their freedom to act as they did. 
Many of the people who signed the petition have a military connection, so the signers’ indignation would seem to be rooted in their understanding that Arlington is not only the historic home to thousands of veterans but also an active cemetery, burying an average of 100 people a week, many of them in Section 60, the area reserved for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is normal to spot funeral caissons or hear the echoes of 21-gun salutes.
Arlington is called “our nation’s most sacred shrine.” It is referred to as such on a sign at the entrance (not the sign in the Facebook photo), which also reads “Please conduct yourselves with dignity and respect at all times. Please remember these are hallowed grounds.”
You’d think it were written in Sanskrit.
As someone who has visited Arlington National Cemetery dozens of times, I believe that disrespect and lack of dignity are commonplace. I’ve also seen it at different memorials across the nation and 4,000 miles from Arlington at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
The women who created the frenzy did so by self-publishing their callous gesture. But they are no more offensive than those who lounge around on the marble steps at the Tomb of the Unknowns as if they’re on the lido deck of a Carnival cruise. 
They’re not any worse than the hundreds of people I’ve seen over the years at the tomb’s changing-of-the-guard ceremony, the ones who are talking and texting and joking and laughing and refusing to turn down their insufferable ringtones. 
You can watch YouTube videos of honor guards at the tomb, stopping to silence others who can be heard in the background, unwilling to shut their traps. The guards usually say, forcefully, “It is REQUESTED that everyone maintains a level of SILENCE and RESPECT!” Then the obnoxious people usually become forcefully quiet.
My family and I were once walking downhill on Roosevelt Drive in Arlington National Cemetery when a preschool boy stepped out into our pathway, clutching a folded American flag to his chest. 
We looked toward the adjacent section and saw a young woman dressed in black, holding a baby in a carrier, standing with another person at the new grave. The folded flag had been offered with the thanks of a grateful nation.
It was horrifying to realize that the woman had just buried what we assumed was her husband and the children’s father. And it was shameful that people were traipsing by and laughing and shouting within a few hundred feet of that woman’s worst day. 
On one hand, the fact that more than 4 million people are allowed to visit Arlington each year help remind people of the true cost of war. I just wish that more of them would realize that a cemetery -- any cemetery -- is a place of mourning and respect, and that not everyone needs to hear their inane conversation about where they should pick up pizza for dinner. 

It was almost six years ago that I wrote about the idea of creating a holiday parade in downtown Wilmington. After the column appeared, I became part of the committee to create Wilmington’s HomeTown HoliDazzle, working at the outset with several of the people who have labored tirelessly every year since then to make HoliDazzle come to life each November. 
However, I’ve never actually been able to experience HoliDazzle in person, which broke my heart.
The military moved our family in the fall of that year, a couple months before the first parade, and we haven’t been able to travel at Thanksgiving. 
I do remember receiving beautifully detailed, thoughtful emails from friends and fellow committee members who attended and enjoyed that first HoliDazzle parade in 2007 — it made me feel a connection, however small, when I was hundreds of miles away.
The military moved our family back to Wilmington this summer, so I am pretty darn thrilled to experience my first HoliDazzle (and Merry TubaChristmas!) on Saturday, which will be the sixth annual event. HoliDazzle brings 10,000 people to downtown Wilmington each year, and I cannot wait to be one of them. 
Following is the original column, published in the News Journal on Jan. 4, 2007.
***

​I stood in downtown Lebanon with 39,999 other people early in December and thought, “What does Lebanon have that Wilmington doesn’t have?” I mean, we have a quaint and picturesque downtown, with its beautiful architecture, active business community and government offices that haven’t relocated to a strip mall. 
A few of the best restaurants in town even eke out business in the midst of a chain nation.
So why were thousands of people gathering in downtown Lebanon instead of downtown Wilmington? Why were people shelling out money all over Warren County?
A parade. A holiday parade.
Everyone loves a parade. But not just any parade, I’ve come to believe. A parade with a twist. A parade with specificity. A parade like Lebanon’s annual horse-and-carriage parade, which drew an estimated 80,000 people (40,000 in the afternoon, and 40,000 in the evening) and brought participants from hundreds of miles away.
The mild weather helped this year’s attendance in Lebanon, but I also saw thousands turn out in last year’s bitter cold and freezing rain. 
Lebanon cashes in on its historic appeal by harking back to the pre-automobile era, with horse-drawn carriages decked out in jingle bells and sparkling lights.
Towns in eastern North Carolina, where my husband and I have lived, capitalize on their nautical appeal by holding Christmas flotillas, parades of boats decked out in lights, viewed by multitudes of people in waterfront downtowns.
Heck, we even drove 600 miles to see a flotilla this year. OK, so we technically went for Thanksgiving with friends, but a medical emergency nixed those dinner plans and thus made room for the flotilla to become the highlight of the trip. 
The point is that a holiday parade is a perfect way to show off a downtown and open local doors to people with Christmas lists in hand and money in their pockets.
So I propose a New Year’s thought (I wouldn’t dare create resolutions for anyone), borrowing on an idea from my adopted hometown of Richlands, N.C.: Let’s start a nighttime tractor parade.
That’s right — our farmers can bedazzle their John Deeres, make merry with their Massey Fergusons and alight their Allis-Chalmers tractors.
They can compete for bragging rights. They can celebrate their final long nights in the fields. They can bring us, our kids, our parents and our friends into downtown Wilmington in the middle of the cold months.
Along with celebrating Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Eid or winter solstice, we can celebrate our city’s farming roots.
We’re a farming city — our only “skyscraper” is a feed mill.
We’re a farming county — with 840 farms, according to the 2000 census.
We do it well, and we should create our niche with the area’s only nighttime tractor parade.
It might start small, as the Lebanon parade did, but it could likely morph into a regional event. Antique tractor owners might trailer their model B tractors from parts unknown to get a chance to show off for an appreciative audience.
Urbanites might bring their kids here, and we’d gladly take their cash.
There’s a whole year now before the Wilmington Tractor Spectacular would have to begin. Think we could do it?

If we’d had a million dollars and a hovercraft, we may have continued living near Washington, D.C., many more years.
There were countless benefits to living in the D.C. suburbs, but the cost of living, the traffic and the distance from our families in Ohio were major downsides. Clinton County has its own perks, of course, and in the season of Thanksgiving, I’m sharing some of what makes my family and I grateful to live here.
*Seeing stars. The night sky is unpolluted at our house, so the sight of billions of stars in cloudless darkness even makes taking the trash to the street an opportunity to stare up at the sky in awe.
*Lack of traffic jams. Sure, we sometimes get stuck behind a tractor or two, but there’s a comfort in knowing that a 20-minute trip away from Wilmington is pretty much always going to be a 20-minute trip -- not an unexpected two-hour exercise in frustration.
*Graeter’s ice cream. I sure did miss Buckeye Blitz.
*Cornfield sunsets. Almost every night, I snap a photo of the sun setting beyond the fields. It’s like ever-changing art. It may not be an oceanfront vista, but dusk here among the rolling hills is pretty darn close.
*Tomatoes. Inexpensive, plentiful tomatoes grown in southwestern Ohio soil taste like

This Sunday, if you want to personally thank a veteran, just turn left at the sweet-and-sour chicken. You’ll likely run into someone who has fought for your freedom. 
If you want to thank someone who has gone out of his way to make those veterans feel special, just look behind the counter at No. 1 China Buffet. 
As he has done for at least 12 years -- first in Hillsboro and now in Wilmington -- Billy Kong has opened the doors of his Chinese restaurant to military veterans, offering them his appreciation and a free meal. 
A man who was 12 years old when his family moved to New York City from the Fujian Province in China now hosts what has become Wilmington’s preeminent celebration of Veterans Day. 
For Kong, it’s simply a way to give back. 
“That’s the best way for me to express myself, to say thank you,” he says. 
For those who’ve seen the gratitude on the faces of the veterans, it’s a stirring display of generosity.
“It’s amazing. It’s just packed from the time he opens to the time he closes,” says Keith Knauff, who owns Knauff Satellite Sales and Service in New Vienna. Knauff has gone along when his brother, Phil Knauff, who served in the Army

Emily nearly kept my fiancé from making it to our wedding in 1993.
Just three years after the honeymoon, Bertha tried her best to destroy our new house. Her big sister Fran blew into town two months later, crashing through our fence and taking several prized pecan trees with her. 
A Category 3 hurricane, Fran was a monster storm that killed 27 people overall and destroyed 696 homes in our North Carolina county alone. The only reason Fran was not even more destructive was because Hurricane Bertha, also arriving in the summer of 1996, had essentially cleared the way weeks earlier. Sneaky Emily had brushed the Outer Banks before heading back to sea, so the military gave the go-ahead for my fiancé to travel to his own wedding.
Bertha, a Category 2 storm and the first hurricane I’d ever lived through, felt more like an extreme, long-lasting Ohio thunderstorm. It also seemed to forge a oceanic path

The first day of autumn usually triggers some kind of cider-craving mechanism in my brain. And while a global economy makes it possible to eat mediocre apples year- round, only those recently picked at an orchard are crisp and fresh enough to make it really feel like fall.
The perfect apples of my memory came in a small paper bag, which had a cute carrying handle, bearing the words “A&M Orchard.” I remember the sweet coolness of the Apple House and the cider we’d take home, unmatched in quality anywhere. 
It is the drink my young Ohio-bred nieces and nephews asked for by the name “side-uh,” influenced by their grandmother’s New York accent.
So I decided to restart a tradition of visiting the orchard near Midland and proposed a day of apple picking with my daughter, who eagerly tagged along.
We headed south on U.S. Route 68,