Donna's Muse Papers

A Very Important Tree   We used to celebrate Mama’s birthday every year by putting up our Christmas tree. December 16 to be exact. Friends came to help and there were goodies to eat. My Uncle Willie always sent a check for $10 for us to buy our tree as his gift to the family. That was the start of Christmas at our house. The first Christmas tree I remember was Papa Tom’s Christmas tree. It was big and stood in the front hall. Mama’s homeplace is known now as The Latham House and is a historic landmark in my hometown, Plymouth, North Carolina. Papa Tom got the tree from a farmer-friend’s woods. It was a cedar and was prickly, even more so as it dried out. It was decorated with beautiful glass ornaments. Some were clear with multicolored stripes, some round and some teardrop shaped and shiny and bright. The lights were glass and shaped like little flames. The color was painted on. I know that because old ones’ paint flaked off leaving them clear. I remember one day, after ...

It’s the day after New Years Day 2021. I have already made a list of goals for the year. Not resolutions. Those are too demanding and only serve to make me feel like a failure when I don’t accomplish them. Goals are different though. Goals can be on-going journeys that take however long they take. One of my goals is to pay more attention to my blogs. See, what I mean. I don’t resolve to write in them every day. For one thing, I know I won’t. But I would like to be more consistent about it. I’ve set the goal to finish editing and publish my new novel, My Neighbors from the Woods . It’s a story about a woman preserving her independence which just happens to include a family of Bigfoot as characters. I’m kind of hanging back on releasing it until its safe to gather in person and I can have a real-life book event. Also, on my list of goals that I hope to do in 2021 (but its okay if I don’t) is to publish a book of poetry that’s been on the back burner for a couple of decades. It has ...

For the past decade or so my family and I have gathered together for a week of reunion and recreation on the banks of the Tar River near Franklinton. We do this under the guise of attending Preddy Fest, a bluegrass festival which enjoyed its twenty-first anniversary this year.   The creator of Preddy Fest, Rodney Preddy, allows weekend ticket holders to come onto the farm and camp out the week prior to the concerts. We join the 200 or so campers who gleefully go a whole week without hookups (there is a shower house on the grounds). Some have fancy rigs with generators to power air conditions, others sweat it out in tents. Almost everyone has a golf cart for transportation – Rodney makes rental possible for those who don’t own their own. This year my daughters, granddaughters, and two great-grands along with significant others set up camp: tents and campers, a canopy which served as a communal sitting, picking, eating area – and then it started to rain! Now, let me admit ...

When I was writing my first book, Pale as the Moon (published 1999 by Coastal Carolina Press) I had a vision of who would read it. In my mind I saw a little girl at the beach. She was sitting in one of those Adirondack chairs on the deck of a beach cottage over-looking the ocean. That was because the book is set on the Outer Banks of the NC coast. Pale as the Moon is a good beach read, even some adults have confessed to reading it. This is the season for beach-reading! I haven’t published a new book in a couple of years, but I’d like to introduce you to some friends who have released books this summer. My friend RJ (Bob) McCarthy has just released the third book in his Tony Quarry Carolina Mystery series – Quarry Steps To . The story is set in the rural community of Sligoville where factory closures have left the residents jobless and filled with resentment. Some have turned to criminal activity including drugs. In protecting a retired teacher from teenage vandals, Quarr...

It is hurricane season, which heightens the chances of going without out power for a while. I learned there are lots of things we don’t really need to survive. Well, I already knew it from countless camping trips my husband and I took with the kids when they were little and we were poor. First of all flashlights will get you to the bathroom without stubbing your toes. And you can read by flashlight, find the potato chips and check to make sure the kids didn’t sneak out in the middle of the night. Second, cooking on the grill or over a wood fire is fun – for three days then it’s a pain in the tail because the kids get tired of gathering deadfall. Third, a five-gallon bucket and a toilet plunger will make a pretty good washing machine, and then there is the solar powered dryer, aka the clothesline. There are plenty of things you can do for fun besides watch TV or hanging out on social media: board games, read, walk, play out doors, sew, paint and draw, arts and crafts...