Jim Dodson

Back in the Februarys of My Boyhood

My neighbor was outrigged in a full arctic parka, down on her knees wrapping what appeared to be miniature quilts around a number of rose bushes in her yard.

Holy Church of N.C. Barbecue Divided

Several years ago, not long after I arrived home in North Carolina, Pilot Publisher David Woronoff and I were asked to serve as judges of an amateur barbecue cooking contest at the Carthage Buggy Festival.

With Some Help From His Friends

Matt Hollyfield was getting something called a "faux-hawk" haircut when I stepped into the Blue's Crossing Barbershop in Aberdeen late Tuesday afternoon to get a quick back-and-sides.

Jim Dandy Super-PAC Will Set Record Straight

Inspired by the deluge of savage attack ads that have made the Republican primary season so informative and jolly fun to watch, I’ve have decided to allow unnamed persons who think I’m pretty swell if terribly misunderstood to form my very own Super Personal Action Committee to set the record straight on my dirty rotten opponents.

Fast Bound by Family: Look Back at Ancestry

I have always found the idea of a family a little difficult to deal with. It is at once life’s most wonderful and agonizing circumstance.

January Is My Burrowing Time

I may be the only person I know who really digs the month of January.

Making a Head Start on Wish List for Next Year

Don’t quite know how you do it, Santa, but you managed to get through another Christmas Eve bringing happiness and flat-screens to kids of all ages.

Allure of Orvis Gifts Is Difficult to Resist

As I bleat to anyone who has ears about this time every year, Christmas is coming and I really don’t need or want a thing from a soul.

Our Kids Could Change the World

Two weeks ago, a woman about my age was sitting beside me at the airport. I was reading the latest Newsweek. She was reading “The Help.” As strangers waiting beneath a clock sometimes do, we began to chat.

Finding Reasons to Be Grateful

They say distance is good for perspective. It’s certainly good for what ails me.

Tall Tales Just Keep Spinning

Ed “Moose” Duke is my kind of liar. By that, I mean he’s professional liar, or more accurately a storyteller and tall-tale spinner extraordinaire. Probably because I hail from a race that includes jackleg preachers and veteran porch-sitters who could talk the ears off a potato, when characters like Ed Duke speak, I draw up a chair and listen.

On Making a Difference

The elderly furnace in the basement rumbled to life this past week, causing the radiators in our house to clank like Marley’s ghost.

Gardeners Have Special Insights

I worked quietly and diligently in my terrace garden several evenings this week, cleaning up the beds and putting things away for the winter, enjoying the last roses of Indian summer. Somehow, in the process, I missed the end of the world for the second time this year.

A Deeper Magic Within All of Us

This week we’re on deadline at PineStraw magazine, so as usual I’m a little crazy from the Chinese fire drill going on between my ears.

Halloweening: Eat, Drink and Be Scary

Last Halloween, a lone trick-or-treater thumped on our door, a cute little girl dressed like Bob the Builder, complete with a work belt, electric drill and construction hard hat.