Patsy Pridgen

Remember that TV margarine ad with the line “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”? Well, she sure doesn’t mind fooling us. I wrote a recent column for the Sunday edition of The Rocky Mount Telegram about how crazy warm our Eastern North Carolina February has been.  “Instead of a few snow days or at least the usual cold,” I penned, “we’ve had a big dose of spring. …Is winter already over?”

Two days after I clicked SEND, it snowed. Fortunately, my totally wrong forecast was only a paragraph in the middle of a piece about all the contradictions in life, but I could still picture people glancing out their windows as they read my words and asking, “Did it not snow in her part of town?”

Well, yes, it did. Looking at my beautiful backyard, I almost didn’t mind my foolish paragraph. My husband, a much better photographer than I, captured part of our winter wonderland.

Anticipating the snow (unlike me), my better half stocked our bird feeders before the first flakes. We enjoyed watching a variety of birds flock to the food. I love the cardinal on the feeder to the left. He matches the two on the outdoor pillow.

A few days before it snowed, I swapped out my snowflake garden flag for the “It’s five o’clock somewhere” one pictured above. Yep, Mother Nature had me fooled!

Apart from my botched column, I had one other mishap due to the snow. My daffodils! With the warm February temperatures, these early blooms had busted out big-time.

Here’s what the snow did to them.

As you can see, the flowers are pretty much on the ground. Once the snow melted enough for me to check, I was relieved to see the blooms were at least still there. From my kitchen window, I had seen only stalks.

Slowly, slowly, these little beauties are raising their delicate faces to the sun again. I don’t know whether they’ll regain their former posture, though.

Mother Nature can be a tricky ol’ gal, that’s for sure. But I guess with hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters up her sleeve, a nice, gentle snowfall isn’t such a bad prank.

Thrilling news! (For me, anyway.) I’ve received my first invitation to talk about Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder at a book club–well, not counting the club I’m in myself whose members, of course, HAD to pick my book for our January meeting.

St. Andrews Book Club here in Rocky Mount has invited me to its March meeting. “We would love for you to join us and talk about your book,” the email read. You don’t have to ask me twice, ladies. Your wish is my command.

Why would a book club want to read Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder? some may ask. Oh, let me count the ways:

1. It’s a fun, semi-easy read.
2. It’s a cozy mystery (nothing rated R; the worst cussing is “hell”).
3. The setting is a small town where everybody knows everybody.
4. It has a feisty female protagonist (you guessed it–Ms. Dee Ann).
5. It’s Southern fiction with quite a few eccentric characters (for example, the Chief of Police, Dee Ann’s babysitter, her landlady).
6. It addresses late 1970s social issues such as women’s rights and race relations.
7.  It depicts what it was like to be a young wife and mother during this time. Maybe book club members would remember the late 1970s themselves and enjoy a trip down memory lane.

Yes, I know, I look absolutely crazy-eyed in this picture, circa 1979. But don’t you love my curly perm?

Oh, I almost forgot: perfect for book clubs, there are discussion questions at the end of Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder. Nobody has to jump-start the conversation.

Sooo, if you are a member of a book club within roughly an hour’s drive of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and would like to have a real live author come talk about her cozy mystery set in a small town in eastern North Carolina, let me know.

Send me an email at patsy.pridgen@gmail. com. and I will be happy to accommodate your club if at all possible. Hope to hear from you!

Remember the heyday of rock and roll when many of the songs had lyrics that, like poetry, were subject to different interpretations?

Why am I thinking about rock and roll at 6:30 on a Saturday morning instead of working today’s crossword puzzle in the newspaper?

Well, last night I went to hear On the Border, an Eagles tribute band. I busted out my new wide-legged jeans for the occasion. I distinctly recall having a similar pair back in 1973, my sophomore year in college.

Being a tribute band meant On the Border played only Eagles music, which sounded to my amateur ear just like the Eagles back in the day. Although I didn’t recall every single lyric, I recognized every single song. Classics like Take It Easy, Lyin’ Eyes, New Kid in Town, Take It to the Limit.  I’d forgotten just how good the Eagles were. And how much I loved them.

The Eagles, not the tribute band

One song especially caught my attention. Hotel California. It is actually the name of an Eagles album as well.

If you were ever an Eagles fan–or were alive in the 70s–you probably remember the refrain, “Welcome to the Hotel California.” You might also recall snatches of lyrics: “We’re living it up at the Hotel California,” or the more ominous “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”

Like many good fans of rock and roll, I always wanted to know what the song is all about. What did the Eagles want us to get, other than catchy lyrics and a cool way to say the name of a hotel?

Well, here in 2020, we have Google, so I did just that. Here’s a smattering of some theories I found:

• Hotel California is a song about the jaded, hedonistic lifestyle of southern California (particularly Los Angeles) in the 1970s. Phrases such as “mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice, Tiffany-twisted” could support this interpretation.
• Hotel California is a metaphor for a drug trip. “The smell of colitis rising up through the air” could be code for marijuana. “This could be heaven or this could be hell” could signal an initiation into drugs.
• Hotel California is about the Eagles’ association with the Church of Satan, established in California in 1969. The lyrics “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave” could refer to the fact that once you make a pact with Satan, it’s unbreakable. Also, these lines could support this theory: “So I called up the Captain, ‘Please bring me my wine.’ He said, ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.'”  The spirit of Jesus, symbolized by the wine, left when the Church of Satan was established…in 1969.

Okay, then. What does the song mean? Who really knows? Maybe the Eagles intended for us to think about it. Great art is like that.

The tribute band, not the Eagles

Wow, it’s been almost a month since I last posted. (Did you even notice?) I can blame my laziness on only one thing: my Christmas hangover. Not the alcohol-induced type but the stupor brought on by too much rich food and holiday fun.

Yep, my twelve days of Christmas seemed to have lasted quite a bit longer. I’m just now getting the tree out of the house and the decorations back in the attic.

Is there anything more depressing than cleaning up after Christmas?

But hey, I tell myself, it’s a new year, in fact, a new decade. 2020. I can hardly believe it’s been twenty years since we were all worried about Y2K. Remember the dire predictions about how computers were supposed to go haywire when the new century rolled in, and all our online information would be lost? Didn’t happen, did it? Thank goodness.

So what will I do with this new year in a new decade?

Well, I can figure out how to use one of my holiday presents, an Instapot. I’ve not yet taken it out of the box (see Christmas hangover above). I’ve heard great things about this gadget, raves about how it can change the way you cook. But I understand there’s a learning curve, much like the early days of using the microwave.

It also looks a little bit like that scary pressure cooker my mother and grandmother loved. I was always a little nervous when that pot whistled and the dial thingie on the top started to do a little dance.

Figuring out how to cook in an Instapot may be a project. But since it’s now January, I’ve got time.

Another Christmas gift was a waterpick. (In case you’re wondering, I asked for practical stuff this year.) One of the many indignities of getting older is that you have to work harder on maintenance. To put it bluntly, according to my dentist, I could use a water dental flosser.

Like the Instapot, this is another gift that hasn’t yet seen the light of day. I opened the box just long enough to spot the detailed instructions and decided I would learn to use my waterpik after the holidays. Something else on my January to-do list.

In addition to figuring out my new gadgets in January,  I’m also continuing to market my debut novel Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder.

Thanks to all who’ve bought copies either locally at Almand’s Drug in Rocky Mount or through Amazon. It’s tough being an author, especially an independent one like me who doesn’t have the help of a publicist with one of the big four publishers.

But in January 2020, I persevere. As my brain recovers from its holiday sugar overdose, I’ve started revising the sequel to Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder. Here’s a summary of a little of the action in what I’ve titled Life and Death in Narrow Creek:

It’s 1982 and Dee Ann Bulluck has enjoyed almost three peaceful years as a young wife, mother, and technical college instructor since moving to a backyard apartment in small-town Narrow Creek, North Carolina. Then her landlord suddenly dies sitting in his recliner on a calm Saturday morning. Turns out, his cause of death is something even more sinister than his diet of honey buns and Pepsi Colas, and the major suspect is Miss Josie, his wife of 35 years….

December was fun, but now it’s January and there’s work to be done.

Just about everywhere in America this time of the year, you see Christmas lights and Santa Claus, Christmas trees and nativity scenes. But just about everywhere also has its own spin on the holiday season. Here in Rocky Mount, NC, the restored Mill Village has celebrated Christmas with a couple of special events.

A short history lesson: Rocky Mount Mills, built in 1816, was the second cotton mill built in the state. It thrived for well over a century and a half, but when textile manufacturing moved overseas, the mill began to decline, closing in 1996.

The mill and the surrounding campus sat idle and decaying until the whole kit and caboodle was bought by Capitol Broadcasting Company in 2007. Since then, the buildings have been reclaimed, restored, and repurposed into craft breweries, restaurants, offices, and lofts. As a bonus, the cutest tiny houses were brought in for overnight visitors.

Back to Christmas at the Mill Village, as the folks in Rocky Mount call it. The Chamber held its 115th Anniversary Christmas Ball in the Power House. That night, my husband and I wandered through the old cotton plant with its refinished wood floors and exposed brick walls and pipes. It was magical.

The next evening, the Mill Village hosted a family event, The Lighting of the Tower.

Before witnessing the grand finale when the lights came on, my grandson and I enjoyed a horse-drawn wagon ride around the campus. It was free, as was the whole evening–well, not counting the one holiday craft beer purchased by Grandma.

Another unique local Christmas experience can be found right outside the Rocky Mount city limits. Smith’s Red and White Grocery hires talented artist Jimmy Craig Womble each year to paint Christmas scenes on the store windows. They’re so beautiful I hate to think they’ll be scraped off after Christmas.

Inside the store is equally festive. Yes, this is a giant Santa next to a fully decorated Christmas tree and, yes again, there’s a train circling on a track. And this is not the only Christmas display–or train–in the store. I’m on sensory overload–in a good way, of course–when I go in to shop and find myself buying all sorts of Christmas candy like those double-dipped chocolate covered peanuts in the display case below.

If you’re from the Rocky Mount area, I hope you’ve experienced  some of what makes Christmas special here. If you live somewhere else, I’m sure your hometown has a unique holiday celebration or tradition. Let me know what it is. I love to hear about all the different ways to celebrate Christmas!

What’s there to do on the first Sunday in December after you’ve had your Thanksgiving turkey leftovers for lunch and taken a nap?

Go to a Christmas parade! I hadn’t been to the one in my hometown in years and realized yesterday what I’ve been missing. The Rocky Mount Christmas Parade was a dose of  wholesome fun and a great way to usher in the holiday season!

So what made me decide to go this year when I haven’t been in the last fifteen (maybe longer)? I went to see my grandson, the cute little Boy Scout with the yellow tie in the picture below waving at the crowd. His troop was on the Barnhill Farms antique fire truck.

But here’s the thing. After he rode by fairly early in the parade, I could have left and gone on about my Sunday afternoon business. But I was enjoying the spectacle of bands, floats, and local dignitaries cruising by. I stayed put. Here’s some of what I saw (and heard).

Who doesn’t love a marching band? Southern Nash Senior High School is stepping along.

The Northern Nash Senior High School Band sported Santa hats!

Somebody spent some time decorating this float.

Check out the tree and the poinsettias on the Edgecombe Community College float.

Okay, we’ll go with balloons here.

Hey, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade isn’t the only one with blow-ups!

Want to see a smiling councilman? Go to the Rocky Mount Christmas parade!

These little fellows stood beside me on the sidewalk in front of First United Methodist Church. I enjoyed watching them watch the parade.

Loving the candy thrown from the floats.

I took so many pictures my phone died before the grand finale arrival of Santa. Fortunately, my twelve-year-old grandson was standing by. I had him text me his photo of the last float of the Rocky Mount Christmas parade.

Is this the real Santa? Photo credit to Sammy Bowles

Will I go to the Rocky Mount Christmas Parade next year even if I don’t have a cute little grandson to lure me there? I’m thinking yes. It’s an opportunity for a feel-good day about my hometown. I love being proud of my city.

Thanks to all who’ve purchased a copy of my debut novel Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder from Amazon or locally at Bailey’s Jewelry or Almand’s Drug. I appreciate your support.

My novel for sale at Almand’s Drug Store in Westridge Village, Rocky Mount, NC

But now I’m asking another favor. If you’ve finished the book (and if you haven’t, why not? :), could you please take a few minutes and write a review on Amazon? It doesn’t have to be anything long or book reportish. You don’t need to summarize what happens. In fact, don’t tell the reader whodunit!

Just talk about how you feel about Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder. Could you relate to the book in any way? Did you like the characters, the setting, the story? Would you recommend it? (I’m holding my breath that the answer here is “yes.”)

It’s easy to post a review on Amazon. Simply find Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder on Amazon.com (you can use the link above). Click on the number/ratings beside the stars which takes you to customer reviews. Scroll to the bottom, and click Write a customer review. And then write something.

Here’s part of what alert reader Debra F. Lee wrote in a review:

“Being from Eastern North Carolina myself, I enjoyed this intriguing “whodunit” page-turner from page one all the way to the surprising twist of the ending. One of the many things I enjoyed about the book is its down-home language and feel. I’ve heard this kind of story called a “cozy” mystery, and it lives up to that name. The author not only makes references to the Eastern North Carolina setting that takes me back to the late 70’s and early 80’s, but also to the national issues of the time, such as the women’s movement and surreptitious racism. The story had me laughing one minute and appalled the next….”

Thank you, Debra F. Lee. Thanks also to Sunshine, Linda, and DPB, my other three reviewers so far.

Reviews are important for the success of a book, I’ve been told by those in the book-selling business. So if you’re not one of the above four people and you’ve read Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder, please, pretty please, post a review.

And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for (drum roll, please): Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder is finally on Amazon! Yes, you can order a copy by simply clicking on this link . Easy peasy!From start to finish, writing and publishing this book has been a long, sometimes frustrating experience. As I’ve said before, I’ve been through countless revisions and quite a few editors. I’ve spent a lot of hours writing when I probably could’ve been volunteering in the community or working on my golf game.

But I felt I had a story to tell. This book has a fun plot that fits the cozy mystery genre, but it’s also a portrayal of the life of a young wife and mother in eastern North Carolina in the late 1970s. In that respect, the book is historical fiction. Although the plot is made up, the times are not.

Thus, while I hope readers will enjoy the who-done-it aspect of the book, my goal was also to depict the social and political issues of the day as seen through the eyes of my feisty heroine, Dee Ann Bulluck.

She’s not always likeable–she herself says, “I can be mean…”–but she’s funny. For example, here’s some of what she has to say about:

• Husband Joe: “No doubt lying on the couch and eating Little Debbie snack cakes can add a few extra pounds to a person.”
• Daughter Heather: “I couldn’t help believing Heather was the prettiest child in the world. In fact, I thought she bore a strong resemblance to the Gerber baby myself.”
• Her new hometown: “After ‘Where does your husband work?’ the second question Narrow Creek natives asked when meeting me for the first time was ‘Where do y’all go to church?”

I hope you’ll buy the book. And, as I say in a Note to Readers, if you enjoy Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder, please do one or both of the following:

• Tell your friends to read the book (but let them buy their own copy!).
• Post a review on Amazon.com. It’s easy. Simply find Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder, click on the title, click on customer reviews, and then click Write a customer review to add your two cents’ worth.

I’m excited that the book is finally on the market. Now I have to promote it. I’m not much of a salesperson, so please help!

October is one of my favorite months. The leaves are at their fall foliage peak, turning those gorgeous shades of red, orange, and yellow. To me, there’s nothing more glorious than a blanket of October maple leaves covering my yard. I find myself delightfully kicking through them like a kid when I walk down my front sidewalk. I’m almost disappointed when someone (not me) clears them away with a leaf blower.

Look at this cotton field not far from my neighborhood. A landscape of October snow. It was so beautiful I had to pull over, get out, and take a picture as traffic zoomed by me on Halifax Road. I love the old buildings in the background too.

Usually October finally brings some relief from the summer heat here in eastern North Carolina. (I say usually because this October has been unusually warm!) We haven’t seen a frost yet, but at least we said goodbye to 90 degree days and high humidity. And a bonus to no frost in October this year: my okra look scraggly, but these sad-looking stalks are still producing.

Halloween is fall festival time, too. I went to two in North Carolina this year: one on the coast and one in the mountains. The Swansboro Mullet Festival advertises as the oldest festival on the Crystal Coast. Incidentally, the festival is a celebration of the fish, not the haircut.

The other fall festival I attended was the Wooly Worm Festival in the little town of Banner Elk. What does one do at the Wooly Worm Festival? Well, you can buy a worm to enter into the Wooly Worm Race–or simply to give to your grandsons, along with a purchased cage. I wonder what the survival rate is for these poor captive wooly worms. How many ever see their glory days when they change into beautiful tiger moths?

On a happier train of thought, I love October because it brings, on the very last day, Halloween. I embrace the holiday–maybe because I have grandchildren who are still young enough to trick or treat or maybe because Halloween is just plain fun.

Candy for everyone who comes knocking at my door trick-or-treating!

What’s easier or more fun than baking up a couple of batches of those Pillsbury ready-to-bake pre-cut Halloween cookies for the family to enjoy? Full disclosure: my husband and I are probably the biggest fans/consumers of these.

Finally, apart from the colorful foliage, the cooler temps, the fall festivals, and Halloween, this year October brought me another treat: the paperback edition of Miss Dee Ann Meets Murder is ready to be released (hardcover and eBook version soon to follow). More about how to order a copy next week!

Sometimes a project goes exactly the way you think it will–but sometimes, not so much. My husband and I were at the Beech Mountain Ski Resort when we saw this repurposed lift chair for sale outside a shop.

At $175.00, it was a little pricey, but I decided it was exactly what we needed to go on the front porch of our newly-purchased house on Beech Mountain. I mean, why buy a traditional swing or some type of deck chair when we could have something as authentic as a repurposed ski lift chair? Something that used to take Beech Mountain skiers up the slopes?

We didn’t have a vehicle large enough to haul such a chair home that day, but a few weeks later, we arrived at Beech Mountain with the rented U-Haul we were using to move some stuff to the new house. After unloading, we had a big, empty trailer and were ready to go buy a ski lift chair for the porch.

This is when the project became a bit more complicated. We found out the chair isn’t sold the way it looks outside that ski shop. Oh no, we learned we were looking at the finished product. For $175, we could purchase a lift chair minus the legs or any kind of suspension system.

We should have thrown in the towel then, but I had become obsessed with having one of those chairs. We’ll figure something out, I told my husband.

We paid our money and were given directions to the lot where old ski lift chairs go to die. Pick any one you want, we were told. No resort employee went with us. We were on the honor system, I guess, to get only what we paid for.

Believe me, after we struggled to load one of these bad boys, we didn’t want another. Talk about heavy! I pictured the resort employee who sold us the chair back in her office laughing. There’s a sucker born every minute, I imagined her thinking.

Once we got our chosen lift chair home and out of the U-Haul, then we decided to haul it to its new home, the front porch. This involved going up a flight of front porch steps. There our lift chair currently resides (I won’t say “sits”).

I know; it doesn’t look like the one outside the ski shop. But there’s hope. We saw a ski lift chair in the neighborhood that someone has actually fixed and painted. Excuse the fuzzy picture; it was a foggy day on the mountain.

Last weekend, we chatted up a guy at the Banner Elk Wooly Worm Festival who does welding. He said for $150, he would come pick up our chair, weld some legs on it, and return it to the porch.

Pick it up, fix it, and bring it back? We’ll pull out the checkbook again. We don’t know how to weld, and we sure don’t want to lift that sucker again. I just won’t think about the original price plus what it’s going to cost to fix the darn thing so we can sit in it.

One day I hope to post a picture of our ski lift chair with legs. It might even be painted–by me. I can save that little bit of money.