No place like home

I grew up in a happy, safe, little town on the coast. Most locals subscribed to the Wilmington Morning Star or the Myrtle Beach Sun Times newspapers for daily and AP news. There wasn't a whole lot of major news out of Shallotte, and when there was -- like a bank robbery or the busting of a corrupt town official -- it was picked up by one or both of those dailies.

For real Shallotte news, we read the Brunswick Beacon, our hometown weekly. The Beacon reported on everything from the occasional truck break-in to the high school's sports to the activities of the Long Bay Garden Club. It ran the weekly television schedule, school lunch menus and tidal predictions for the fishermen and surfers.

When I did really well on the SAT in the seventh grade as part of the Duke University Talent Identification Program, I was featured in the Beacon. Wish I had a copy of it. I had waist-length, bone-straight, North American field mouse-colored hair and a mouth full of metal. I was quoted as saying I enjoyed reading, writing, drawing and sewing (I was taking classes for the last two and was really bad at both, but my mother was in the interview and coaching me).

My mother always sent me the Beacon when I was in college and the first five years after, when I was a struggling editor here in Raleigh. I loved reading the wedding/birth announcements and court docket to keep up with the people I knew. But by the time I was 24, it seemed like my former classmates who stayed back home had peaked out, so I cancelled my subscription.

The Beacon went online last year, and I started reading it again, but I complained to my mama that the content was very limited. So she got me a subscription for Christmas. I try reading it once a week when it arrives in the mail, but I've been gone for 20 years and don't know any of the names in my former favorite sections, and half the obituaries start out with "born in (not Shallotte)," and that's just not something I want to know. I like thinking it was preserved in a time-capsule just for me.

I was flipping through the latest issue yesterday and saw an eighth-page item that warmed my heart so much I ran into our office to show my English husband.

"Giant collard," the caption read. The photo was a little old Shallotte native standing above her eight-foot collard plant. The copy read: "She said it isn't the first oversized collard plant she has cultivated. She said all she did was fertilize and tend to the plant."

So now I'm craving a good pot of collards -- not the fancified ones you can get at "new Southern" expensive restaurants in Raleigh -- the ones grandmas and great-aunts bring to family reunions back home. Collards washed and chopped a day in advance, then cooked down slowly with fatback and some sugar.

I'm also craving that safe, happy little world of my childhood.