The day after Thanksgiving 1864 was a truly "black Friday" for the Union prisoners who attempted to escape from the Confederate prison camp in Salisbury, North Carolina. (This bonus episode is a story appearing in "From Time to Time in North Carolina" by Randell Jones.)

Grateful to be alive

Surprised and trapped in their North Carolina mountain home by a harsh and threatening late-winter blizzard, a couple struggles to survive and to care for their horses, thankful for any good turn of fate to befall them throughout their ordeal.

Putting your heart and soul into the soil

A love of tilling the earth may not always be enough for making a living, but this writer believes at least for her Greatest-Generation father, it just might be what the doctor ordered for making a life.

Talent. Self-confidence. Perseverance. Patience.

An artist explores and discovers. Damaged, an artist believes and persists. This artist recreates herself—bearing the weight of “born talent,” refusing, rebuffing, rebuilding, rebounding, reborn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the belly of the cultivator

This Blue Ridge Mountains-loving North Carolina writer peels away the folklore and gets to the core of the story, grafting another legend onto the family tree, the apple of her family’s eye.

An avuncular former Sunday School teacher recalls with a sly chuckle sharing with his young adolescent students and their parents a most important--and mostly true--lesson he learned at his own age 13.

facing an age-old fear -

“A wrinkle in time” may have a new meaning to this writer who is considering the prospects and perplexities of appearance and aging, tongue-in-cheek, of course, Well, maybe.

the point of Halloween - An old master of interaction creates a new trick that treats his gaggle of ghosts and goblins to a nearly lost Halloween spirit from his childhood, unmasking their pretenses and revealing to them something about themselves less scary than they might think it.

As her teen son leaves on his gap year experience before college ("A Walk in the Park" by Kyle Paterson, June 26 podcast), writer Valerie Paterson shares her view of leaving her son abroad at the edge of the world for an outdoor encounter and reveals her own transformative experience of visiting Patagonia, Chile,

Do the repeat offenses of a mysterious, rapscallion grandfather, explain the pattern of interrupted careers of one who settled at long last into writing?