NC | Wing's World

Okay, Hillsborough, NC isn’t exactly my hometown, but the farm I grew up on is halfway between Durham, my official birthplace, and Hillsborough, where I began my public school teaching career. Close enough.

And close enough for me to freeze between disbelief and horror when I heard about the firebombing of Hillsborough’s Republican HQ this past weekend.

Photo by Justin Cook for NYTimes

Hillsborough?! Home of Orange High School (go Panthers!) and the Village Diner, where my fellow teachers and I used to gorge ourselves on the salad bar during staff workdays? (Hey, if fried chicken has lettuce under it, it’s salad!)

In the words of Richard Fausset’s excellent NY Times article, Hillsborough is

this small North Carolina town, where residents, in the face of cultural change, have largely found an amicable balance between liberal and conservative, traditional and trendy, in the heart of a swing state that is one of the nation’s most politically and culturally divided.

Although I should be inured by now, acts of violence like this always shock me anew. My first response: WHY?! My second: Thank god no one was hurt. And now I have a choice.

I could let my horror sink deeper, adding to the sick sense I think most of us are feeling this election season.

OR…

I could focus on this sentence in the NYT article:

A group of Democrats created a GoFundMe page that had raised more than $13,000 by Monday evening for the Orange County Republican Party.

Or this one:

Evelyn Poole-Kober, the vice chairwoman of the Orange County Republican Party…said she was long used to living among Democrats and was friendly with many of them, including members of her garden club.

Election ugliness? La la la, I can’t hear you. I’m too busy focusing on Democrats raising money for, and growing flowers with, their Republican neighbors.

And voting, quietly and without a fuss.

Cumberland Island is known for its wild (or feral) horses, and I’m a horsey gal.

Horse in your campground, ma’am? Why sure.

But here’s what really couldn’t drag me away: its Spanish moss. Can anyone tell me WHY this stuff is so entrancing?

Soooo….pretty…

Seriously. Tell me. I’ve been trying to figure it out.

It’s gray. It’s parasitical–or at any rate it gets a free ride from the trees it drapes; we’re not talking any sweet symbiotic relationship here. And it’s EVERYWHERE in South Georgia, especially on the barrier islands. It should creep people like me out. Instead, I can’t get enough: fondling it, taking pictures, gazing at it from every angle.

In my quest to break down the components of natural beauty, one word kept coming to mind: grace. But what does it mean to call something graceful?

OK, the tree ain’t bad either.

It undulates. Something about the smoothness of wave action must be inherently awe-inspiring, or comforting, or both.

It hangs vertically in a forest of torturous sideways live-oak limbs (seriously, these things grown LITERALLY every which way but up) and herky-jerky pines and saw palmetto, providing a soft set of downward strokes, like Impressionist painting. Or like tinsel strands on a Christmas tree. Also comforting, though I have no idea why.

It’s soft, despite looking spiny. Well, OK, I get the appeal of soft.

Somebody stop me!

As for connotation–if you read my last post, you know that Southern scenery, even at its finest, is haunted by ugly history. So I would never say Spanish moss’s beauty derives from its context. More the opposite.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten here in my quest to understand. What do you think accounts for its beauty? Help me figure this out, y’all.