Category: February 2017

For the ultimate send-off, hire a funeral band

By Grant Britt
Photograph by Sam Froelich

I’m gonna blow you away.

I made good on that promise in Florida many times, playing trumpet in the Key West Funeral Band in the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. That’s not so unusual in itself, but the fact that I’m a white boy born in North Carolina — and was the only band member of that persuasion — gives my accomplishment a little different perspective. The 150-year-old Key West Funeral Band was the only one of its kind outside of New Orleans, and some of the grandsons of the founders are still current band members.

I first found out about the band when they came marching by the house where I was living in The Conch Republic. I came running out and stood gaping as they passed by in all their ragged splendor, then followed them all the way to the graveyard. I finally worked up enough courage to approach the man I assumed to be the bandleader because he was wearing a captain’s hat, and asked him what the joyful noise was about. Thinking I was just another tourist inquiring about the quaint native customs, he gave me the short version. “It’s a funeral, white folks!” he snapped before turning back to the graveside festivities. After the service, however, I convinced him that I wasn’t a tourist and in fact lived right around the corner from him and had a genuine interest in the proceedings. That’s when he relaxed and opened up a bit.

It helped that I was familiar with the music. I am a confirmed backslid Baptist, a condition brought on by my abiding disrespect of authority of any kind, secular and especially ecumenical. I also have a healthy appetite for alcohol. Though estranged from the church, I have retained both a love and admiration for the hymns. The Baptists can’t abide drinking or dancing, but they’ve got some catchy rhythms suitable for either activity, and I recognized a few of them being played that afternoon.

In the course of the conversation, the bandleader mentioned that they were looking for a trumpet player. I was in my late 20s at the time, and although I hadn’t played since the fifth grade, I told him I was the man and he set up an audition for the following week.

I went back to the trailer my wife and were renting in Key West’s Old Town in a neighborhood settled by the island’s black Bahamian residents and dug out the tarnished, battered horn I had ever since I was thrown out of band for smoking cigarettes. I commenced to drive the neighbors, dogs and family to the brink of madness with my horrendous bleating. By the time of the audition, I had re-familiarized myself with The Broadman Hymnal, that great Baptist musical celebration of blood and salvation, and had honed my bleating to a semiprofessional level. I passed the audition and was inducted into the band. This consisted of the consumption of a bellyful of beer, frenzied backslapping and the eliciting of a couple of promises — that I could perform under the influence and could get Sunday afternoons off, as that is the popular planting time in those parts.

There was one other condition. I had to assemble a uniform — white shirt, black pants and black shoes. Simple enough — for most people. But this was the mid-1970s and I was in favor of an alternative lifestyle, and, being of the hippie persuasion, had thrown out all my corporate togs before relocating from Carolina to Key West. I owned nothing that was the least bit respectable, so I’d have to make do.

Let’s see — here’s a pair of blue pants — that’s close to black, and maybe my fellow band members won’t notice the 2-inch-wide red stripe running down the outside of the leg. And as for shoes, these boots ought to work. So what if the sides are green, red and blue tapestry with 4-inch Cuban heels? The pants will cover them — most of the time. And as for a white shirt, why I’ll just pull out the guayabera, the ornate shirt worn by barbers and Cubans that somebody gave me as a joke. I looked like a Cuban executive or an escapee from a Haitian disco, but it’ll work, I thought.

The other band members thought otherwise and rode me for about six months. They finally gave up when I told them it was a marketing technique to add a little color to the band and that it was good PR. They thought I was crazy, but since I could play the horn and showed up on time, I guess they figured that dressing a little funny could be overlooked, and they finally left me alone.

Now it’s time to get down to business. There you are, all laid out in your Sunday best, looking natural, or as natural as a dead person can look. But looks don’t matter when you’re in the situation you’re in. You’d get a pretty good sendoff even if we weren’t there, because in this part of town, people down here turn a funeral into a celebration. But this is your lucky day. Somebody in the family has scraped together a few extra bucks and hired the funeral band to see that you go out in style.

But first we’ve got to loosen up a little. We usually gather in Regular Fellows, a little club with the coldest A.C. and the hottest jukebox this side of Nassau to have a few tall, cool Ballantine Ales. For the uninitiated, Ballantine is a greenish malt beverage with the odor of kerosene and a kick like a booster rocket. About five of these bad boys running around in your system will have you speaking in tongues. In short, it’s a quasi-religious experience, just the thing for a funeral warm-up.

Don’t infer from this that we got blind before a job. We just needed a little lubrication, as this stuff was thirsty work, and it’s warm down there.

We’re ready. We plant ourselves on your front porch if you got one, or in front of your house if you don’t. Here you come out the door feet first, in the hands of six strong men, and we blow at you until they load you in the hearse. It’s a good-sized blow. Depending on the stature of the deceased in the community, which determines how many people will come out and line the streets to see us strut our stuff, there can be as many as ten of us who have rolled out for the occasion. With a bass, drum, a snare, a pair of tenor saxes, a clarinet, a couple of ’bones and as many as three trumpets on a good day (and only me on a bad one), we could stir up quite a breeze.

Now that we’ve got you tucked away for your last limo ride, we line up in front of you and behind the flower car. We used to follow the hearse, but the exhaust fumes nearly laid all of us to rest, so we spoke with the undertaker and he made other arrangements.

We always try to follow Satchel Page’s admonition about never looking back, because something might be gaining on you, and because the last time we did, something was. On that memorable outing, the hearse stalled and couldn’t be restarted. The pallbearers took the coffin out and put it on rollers for the few final yards into the graveyard. Unfortunately, the hearse had stalled at the top of the only hill in Key West, Solares Hill, which is all of 6 feet above sea level. To complicate matters, the deceased was of considerable bulk. What’s more, the rollers in the hearse were well oiled, and before the pallbearers could get a good grip on the casket, it had gotten away and was headed straight for the band. We turned around when we heard the pallbearers shout, then commenced the fastest double-time in band history, still blasting away. When the pallbearers finally caught up with their charge, we were already in the graveyard hiding behind the biggest tombstones we could find. We all stayed put until they lowered that gentleman in the ground, for as somebody in the crowd remarked, he just wasn’t ready to go yet, and we wanted no part of any more escape attempts.

But that was the exception. Most of the jobs were routine, with the only danger being of a dental nature. As any marching band brass section member can tell you, the meeting of enamel and brass when you step in a pothole and your mouthpiece gives you a good rap in the choppers is not a good thing. It hurts like hell, it plays hob with the rhythm and it’s messy — you get blood all over your nice white shirt. But there’s not a whole lot you  can do about it. You just spit out the teeth, wipe your mouth and keep playing, because we’re just getting started.

We’re going to church now, and this is the toughest part of the job. Since we don’t have a lot of material, we compensate by playing each tune five times. That’s not too bad if it’s a small funeral, but you’ve got a whole lot of friends, you rascal you, and so once we’ve marched to the church, we’ve got to stand outside and blow until the whole funeral procession, including all the mourners have gone in. When we’ve blown the chorus of “Nearer My God To Thee” twenty-five times in a row and the people are still lined up on the sidewalk with no end in sight, we start to get a little edgy. All that Ballantine Ale we loaded onboard earlier is starting to back up in our throats, the sweat is pouring into our eyes and our lips are swollen to the size of truck tires. Finally all your friends, lovers, family and insurance agents have straggled in and the wailing begins.

This is where we break off. All of the services down here are of the open casket variety, and I don’t care how natural you look, none of us wants to be looking at your ugly puss for two and a half hours while the preacher whoops and testifies, and the professional mourners your family paid for are screaming and falling out of the pews and rolling in the aisles. It’s not that we’re disrespectful, but doing this two or three times a week, all that concentrated grief can makes us a little crazy. So we take a serious break and go down on the strip to pass the time. We know you ain’t going anywhere.

After a few more tall cool ones or maybe a little man, as a half pint of hooch is known around here — and maybe a game of dominoes in Bop Brown’s Jazzy Spot — we’re rested and ready to roll once again.

This is the best part of the day. All we’ve got left to do is the home stretch, and just like they do in New Orleans, we’re gonna strut. The city in its wisdom had banned us from rocking out on the way back home from the graveyard because it causes too much commotion and ties up traffic, so we’re gonna do our strutting on the way to the bone yard.

We’ll have plenty of company, and they’re in high spirits as well. Most of the congregation has sneaked out of the church at some point during the two hours the service had been going on and has been doing the same thing we have. The Ladies Auxiliary Choir has been warming up in church during the proceedings, and they’re going to be right behind us. The streets are lined with well-lubricated participants, and we trot out our zestiest stuff for this part of the journey.

The ’bones are wailing, their slides hooking unwary onlookers if they lean in too close to the band. My whole body is vibrating from the blowback from my horn and the others around me. The bass drummer is pounding so hard that the beats are coming back off the walls of the buildings we pass and slamming us in the heart. There ain’t nothing finer — it’s like walking with the King. As one blissful mourner once shouted as we passed by, “Man, you guys sound so good I wish I was dead!”

When we hit the graveyard, it gets even better. All that marble acts like an echo chamber and you can hear the notes running around seconds after you’ve played ’em. We march over to the grave and play one more chorus of “Lead Me To Calvary” as the family gathers around us. The sun is setting, the choir is humming softly in the background, and we finish up in a circle, playing softly as the coffin is set down for the last time.

That’s it for us. We don’t stay for the last rites for the same reason we don’t go in the church. It’s just too much. But still, the day is not over for us. All of us have full-time jobs, for the death rate in this little town won’t allow us to make a living as a band. But that’s fine too — we couldn’t take a lot of this, and at the prices we charge, there’d have to be an epidemic for us to make a killing at this.

So that’s it for you. Everybody said they had a good time. Sorry you missed it. Tell all your friends — well, maybe not. But the word’ll get around anyhow. If you want the best, the Key West Funeral Band is the only way to go. After all, it’s your funeral.  OH

 Grant Britt is still blowing O.Henry readers away, but with his keyboard, not a trumpet.

The Snow Moon

Perhaps no poem paints a more fitting portrait of this time of year than Thomas Hardy’s classic verse about a “blast-beruffled” bird whose joyful song pierces the silence of a dark and desolate eve like an arrow through autumn’s last apple.

Read: February is here. Behold the first glorious explosion of golden daffodils.

Although “Darkling Thrush” is set at the cusp of a new year (and century), its haunting image of “tangled bine-stems” slicing the sky “like strings of broken lyres” invokes, at least for this nature lover, the bleakest yet most beautiful days of winter. Since the heaviest snows tend to fall this month, the full moon on Friday, Feb. 10, has long been called the full snow moon. The Cherokee called it the bone moon because, well, food was so scarce that supper was often marrow soup.

Speaking of soup, now’s time for root vegetable stews and chowders thick with heavy cream and gold potatoes. Make enough and you can eat from it all week — a quick and hearty fix after a cold evening spent pruning the rose bush and deadheading pansies. Through the kitchen window, a brown thrasher gently swings on the suet feeder before disappearing with twilight. It’s cold, but daylight is stretching out a little further every day. The soup simmers on the stovetop. Spring will be here soon.

 A Grimm Fellow

Wilhelm Grimm, younger of the Brothers Grimm, was born Feb. 24, 1786, in Hessen, Germany. Perhaps that’s why National Tell a Fairy Tale Day falls just two days later, on Sunday, Feb. 26. In addition to publishing a hefty collection of folk tales — “Hänsel and Gretel,” “Der Froschkönig” (“The Frog Prince”), “Dornröschen” (Sleeping Beauty), “Schneewittchen” (“Snow White”), and on and on — the brothers started writing a definitive German dictionary in 1838, but never did get around to finishing it. Add a little extra magic to this month of love by spinning a tale about fairies or mermaids, or, in the spirit of this bleak wintry season, perhaps something a bit darker. Like the one where the evil stepsisters cut off their toes to make the glass slipper fit.

February, a form

Pale-vestured, wildly fair,—

One of the North Wind’s daughters,

With icicles in her hair.

– Edgar Fawcett, “The Masque of Months” (1878)

Say it with Flowers

Violet and primrose are the birth flowers of February. The old folk poem calls the flower blue, but violets bloom mauve, yellow and white, too. Gift a lover a violet on Valentine’s Day and they’ll read: I’ll always be true. As for the primrose, a pale yellow perennial that thrives in cool woodland glades, the message crackles like an ardent fire:
I can’t live without you.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste;

Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste.

And therefore is love said to be a child

Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.

– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Room to Grow

Boxwoods need space, in both gardens and hearts

By Ross Howell Jr.

April Westerberg’s love for boxwoods goes back generations. The owner of a business that repurposes unwanted things for new uses, Westerberg and her husband, William, sell her items at the Chartreuse Barn in Thomasville and at the Holiday Show Made 4 the Holidays at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, along with Christmas wreaths, roping and trees.

Last December, my wife, Mary Leigh, had just bought boxwood roping and a fir wreath from April’s stand.
I was collecting the greenery as Mary Leigh wrote a check.

“You might want to wet the boxwood down before you hang it,” April said to me. “Boxwood can be a little . . . prissy.”

Recognizing a kindred spirit, I launched into my tale of woe, how I’d just transplanted boxwoods from our front yard to the back, hoping to stop the depredations of a willow oak that had left the boxwood bordering our front walk in a hopeless condition of misshapen dissonance.

“When you plant them,” April said, “think of a little girl, twirling in place with her arms outstretched. They need a little room. People sometimes plant them too close to other plants.”

Then she looked me in the eye: “Boxwoods need to have their hair and nails done. They crave attention,” she said. “But I love them. They’re beautiful year-round. You can keep them in a pot. You can trim them into a hedge. I used boxwood in my bridal bouquet, with gardenias and Baby’s Breath.”

April inherited her love of boxwoods from her great-grandparents, immigrants from Italy and Sicily.

“My great-grandfather was a gardener who liked to give what he grew to others,” she said. “He loved boxwoods, and growing them became his specialty. In the spring he’d have us kids set 2-inch clippings in little plastic cups. I remember carrying egg cartons with those clippings all over the place.”

In fact, it was her great-grandfather who suggested her name: “He said April was the most beautiful time of year, and that’s what my name should be. Not ‘Aprile [ap-reel-eh],’ his native Italian, but ‘April,’ because he was proud to be an American.”

So “What’s in a name?,” asked the poet and playwright Shakespeare. In April’s case, it was her destiny.

“The day my parents found out they were going to have me, they went out and bought a nursery in upstate New York. You could say gardening’s in my blood. My father had been mowing lawns and doing landscaping. So he bought a nursery business. It turned out well. Later he moved to Nashville, where he developed gardens for some of the country music stars. I remember riding around in his pickup with him. We’d pull up at these nurseries, with great expanses of boxwood and Fraser firs, and it really made an impression on me.

“Later we moved to Galax, Virginia. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, Joyce, because my father was always on the road with his business. She had a little warehouse where she sold greenery. How she loved growing her boxwood! She taught me so much. She used to say, ‘April, if you get into this business, I want you to remember me, but don’t blame me when your hands hurt.’

“Not long ago, I had a couple tell me about a place where they used to buy Christmas decorations. ‘It was a lady who sold greenery,’ they said. ‘We’d stop by every year, but this time, everything was shuttered up. It was near Galax.’ When I realized they were talking about my grandmother, I started to cry. In my booth I had a picture of my grandmother and me when I was a girl, and I showed it to them.”

Turning reflective, April said, “Christmas Day was also my grandmother’s birthday. When she passed away in 2010, it was devastating. So the Christmas season is bittersweet for me. Obviously, it’s important to our business. But when I think of my grandmother Joyce, well, it’s hard.” But then, hearts always hurt more than hands.  OH

Ross Howell Jr. is the author of the novel, Forsaken. The boxwoods he transplanted to the bed in front of his backyard cabin are happy for the moment. He tends to them assiduously and admits to encouraging them often, telling them how beautiful they are.

Worthwhile

Artist Lauren Worth’s house of light and fantasy

By Cynthia Adams  
Photographs by Amy Freeman

Lauren Worth makes her way to the back of her sunny house. Like the rest, it is uncluttered and peaceful. As she walks, she chats about how she and her husband, David, bought it after a “premature” downsizing to Ascot Point. They discovered they were too young to move into that situation, she explains, with a half-grin, half-grimace. Neither retired nor seriously contemplating doing so, they soon exited Ascot Point.

And yet, she adds, downsizing was a good exercise.

Having gotten rid of most of their furniture in that prior, premature move, the Worths found the current, larger home. It is not a McMansion but a house of wonderful scale, occupying a quiet street in Irving Park. They furnished it largely with things taken from a mountain home. 

Worth laughs. “We were too practical to go buy all new furniture just because we had gotten rid of everything.” With a shake of her head she adds, “We would never do that.” The house itself is open and modern, but it is the back half of the Worth dwelling that makes the statement. So she likes that this new house (built in 2006) suggests a vacation home, in Worth’s mind at least. That has something to do with the interiors being shot-through with light, and also the nearby pool, a languid, liquid piece of art. 

It is a nice counterpoint to the large cook’s kitchen that opens onto a den with a dramatic, two-story fireplace. The den, with a wall of glass, in turn, opens onto the rectangular-shaped — and dazzling — pool.  It’s the sort that suggests a famous someone just left one of the lounge chairs to call her broker or agent.

The pool occupies most of the backyard. It is flanked by a fireplace and outdoor living room at one end and a bar at the other. The sum of this means easy entertaining for a crowd of a hundred or more — or even their son’s recent engagement party.

The smooth marriage of the house and pool exudes California Cool, a vibe that says, “Let me entertain you.” As the afternoon sun moves, the pool’s surface becomes a silky trampoline, playfully bouncing light back to the interior of the house.

Yet the cultivated sparseness of the architecture and interiors also makes for a perfect canvas. The neutrally decorated walls become the perfect backdrop for the art that Worth collects. Or rather, as she explains, art that she has gathered.

Pausing, Worth says she especially feels fortunate to find herself here, in such a sunny space — especially given she also works here in an upstairs studio; serendipitously, it already existed when she and David moved here two and a half years ago.

She stops to point out pieces of artwork the couple have collected, lingering to explain why she loves the particular artist. (Worth has been long involved with The Public Art Endowment through the Community Foundation, and has been a hard-working advocate for public art.) “I also buy art from artists I respect and know personally, and it gives me great joy to stroll by their work every day in my home. I buy mostly 2-D work but also ceramics and sculpture.”

Worth is a working artist herself, which is why it all becomes so personal. “I basically buy art because I like it, and I’m not consciously building a collection or buying it as an investment,” Worth told me in an email. “I guess you could say that all our artworks have become a collection of sorts because most of the works are by artists with an N.C. affiliation,” she wrote. “N.C. has a rich history is supporting artists and offering nurturing, educational and highly creative environments for artists (such as GreenHill, N.C. School of the Arts, Penland School of Crafts, The Governor’s School, Weaver Education Center).” 

Worth well knows how difficult it is for artists to make a living selling their artwork. “That’s another reason I want to keep supporting other artists and add to the work we have.”

The artistic impulse must feel like a genetic imperative. Worth’s uncle, Marshall Bouldin, and his son, Jason Bouldin, are artists. “They are outstanding portrait painters, and I’ve learned a great deal from both of them over the years,” Worth explains. Personally, however, she especially likes contemporary, nonrepresentational works. 

In an artist statement, Worth once wrote: “I am a gardener of strangeness in the true sense of Baudelaire. For me, art is a puzzle, each piece beautiful, strange and unique, slowly forming a larger image as we begin to understand its logic and intoxicating beauty. My engagement with the natural world has led me to believe that we can be sustained through playful care, reverence and stewardship of the world around us. It is my goal as an artist to cultivate curiosity and encourage the discovery of beauty in the strangest of places.”

Inside her studio, she says, “I live with my own art on a daily basis in the studio, which is a blessing and a curse: I love what I do, it challenges me, but I sometimes just get sick of staring at it all the time,” she admits. Worth takes the conversation upstairs, and moves about her studio describing where she buys the handmade papers she uses in her work (usually at Penland) and how she makes the oversized stencils she uses from her own enlarged photographs taken in the deep woods in order to create mixed medium collages. Using acrylic paint, acrylic gel medium, handmade paper, photographic images, magazine clippings and handmade templates, Worth builds the multi-layered collages. Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and Swiss-German surrealist Paul Klee are inspirations to her.

“There is a natural metamorphosis of the painting itself. I try to make sure that proportion, scale and composition is right,” Worth says of her artistic process.

She has shown in the last year in Aspen, Colorado, the Semans Gallery in Durham and in New York. Her work is sold in New York through the Walter Wickiser Gallery, and at the Tyler White O’Brien Gallery in Greensboro and online. She has three paintings that were chosen for GreenHill’s Collector’s Choice this winter.

While Worth inhabits an otherwise orderly life and home, she protests the studio is a mess (it isn’t) as she points to works in progress. Pausing before a 28 x 48 commission underway, she gestures to details she has created that blend paint with her own, manipulated photographic images. Her technique was developed as a result of a desire to break out of her old art forms.

“I woke up one night and thought of it, seven or eight years ago. I was trying to think of something different that would capture the feeling of a tree but give me room to manipulate it. There were a lot of branches, for example,” she says, pointing to a collage, “and texture.” 

She chooses what to leave in, or out. Then, Worth says she further abstracted the branches “so there is a semblance of it . . . a combination of representational images and abstract geometric forms. I want there to be something left of mystery in a painting. I like to put fish in trees . . . although fish do move in trees in Alaska, where salmon spawn.”

For Worth, art is a portal into a fey world where each tree branch, wisp or willow is not exactly as it appears. There is a bit of mystical, magical witchery, wonder, even quantum physics in each composition. “My paintings have a mind of their own,” she says and laughs. The outcome is beautiful and fantastical: Feathers and coral grow in trees. Using magazine clippings, for example, Worth fashioned coral to portray it as a parasite on the tree. 

“It is about metamorphosis. We go into the woods for the stillness we find there, but under the quiet there is all this universal flux, this constant change.

“There is a semblance of a branch,” she says, pointing to a detail, “but it is a combination of representational image and abstraction.” 

She accepts commissions on occasion, saying that her collectors “know what they like — not like what they know.” When a work is done, Worth steps away. 

In one titled Gossamer Delight, she painted over what was originally there because it didn’t quite please her. The ghost of the original painting bleeds through. “This is called pentimento,” she explains. “It comes from the Italian for ‘repent.’  It’s almost like we try to get rid of our sins but can never quite do it.”

Now, Worth accepts, even likes, the painting that the former one has become. “Each piece skirts the border between the real and the imagined like a memory that may have been a dream,” she once said.

Nor does it pierce her heart when someone is critical of her efforts, Worth says.  At one of her shows, a man told her he did not care for her work. 

“I wondered if he would have liked more space,” she muses. Not personal space — just space within the art itself. Worth absorbed the criticism, trying to find its meaning and use. She had already been trained in the art of handling criticism in her prior life as an artist working for years at Wind Rose, a long-standing Greensboro business. (The owners have since deceased.) It was there, working in an atelier, that Worth learned to take all in stride. Wind Rose artists created unique works of art from furniture and accessories, hand painting the imported European pieces — sometimes to withering criticism of designers who reviewed the pieces designated for trade only.

“It was great, really great,” Worth says of Wind Rose. It was a true artists’ studio; the years working at Wind Rose gave her confidence. There could be strangeness in beauty, she discovered. “Ned, an owner, said, keep painting balanced but asymmetrical. This gives it rhythm and tension.” It also led her to desire that things around her be beautiful, she says, and accept her own self-creation. 

“I consider myself a late emerging artist.”  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O. Henry and writes for various magazines and publications. While working in the Netherlands, she tried her best to visit all 300-plus museums there and solidified a love of art and artists.

Don’t look now, but, the Gate City is on its way to becoming Greensbordough

By Annie Ferguson  •  Photographs by Mark Wagoner

The second coming of Dunkin’ Donuts to the South was well-timed in my little corner of Greensboro. The year was 2008, and less than a mile from my office — where I was working on United Airlines’ inflight magazine with a talented — and doughnut-obsessed — group of editors, I could suddenly find a Double Chocolate doughnut. What?! I hadn’t had one so easily accessible since childhood, when family and friends would convene at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Salisbury after Sunday Mass. What’s more, I was pregnant. If anyone was more deserving of a serving of Dunkin’ Donuts in the land of Krispy Kreme, it was me. After all, I was eating for two. My fellow editors acknowledged my, er, delicate condition by occasionally delivering my favorites right to my desk.

But the coming of Dunkin’ Donuts was just a foreshadowing of what became a veritable donut renaissance. Forget the multinational chains with their big-buck advertising campaigns. It was small, enterprising family-owned businesses that turned Greensboro into a mecca for the deep-fried, sugary confection that I still crave. Competing against one another to see who can come up with the most innovative and over-the-top treat, these mom’n’pop shops produce doughnuts that are anything but run-of-the-mill. All are homemade with love — and some with the haute cuisine flourishes reminiscent of the cupcake revolution of the early 2000s (but being doughnuts, not nearly as precious, and a lot easier to bite into).

In 2010 — when I was back to eating for just one, dontcha know — Lian Ly and her family opened Donut World on West Market Street. Since then they’ve opened locations on Battleground Avenue and Gate City Boulevard. That was followed by the opening of the trendy Rise Biscuits Donuts in Friendly Center. Then, I heard news outlets heralding the arrival of the Outer Banks institution Duck Donuts. So as not to begin waddling like a duck, I enlisted a little help from my friends to serve as a sort of elite product testing unit to separate the best from the rest.

But I reserved the universal favorite for myself and my husband. With a trio of shops in Greensboro, Donut World has quickly become nothing short of a pilgrimage site. The cinnamon roll donut combines two of my favorite pastries, and it lived up to my sugary dreams. My husband swears by the apple fritter, emphasis on apple, with lots of butter contributing to the confection’s sticky splendor. My ultimate preference is probably their sugar-raised donut, (meaning, an extra dose of sugar used in crystalized form as a topping), but most folks seem to get in touch with their inner Homer Simpson and go for the salty-sweet, the less conventional bacon maple bar. All the donuts are substantial and filling, yet contain no egg. Although there’s nothing fancy about the shops themselves, the service is fast and cordial.

Rise Biscuits Donuts opened its first store in Durham at Southpoint in 2012. If you want unconventional flavors (New School menu) or classic types (Old School Menu) the new Friendly Center location is the place to go. My friend Ellis Harman surprised herself when she discovered she liked the Cheerwine iced donut with a cherry on top. Kari Smith’s favorite is the quirky Fruity Pebbles creation. Cheri Timmons, who still swears by warm Original Glazed Krispy Kreme doughnuts, branched out with the Pineapple Basil with Pistachios (filled with basil cream and topped with pineapple glaze and chopped pistachios). This is also a great donut shop to visit if you’re wanting something savory. And just in case you know someone who, perish the thought, doesn’t like doughnuts, they can eat one of the shop’s iconic biscuits.

The first Duck Donuts opened about ten years ago when Russell A. DiGilio and his family realized something was missing from where they vacation in the Outer Banks: fresh doughnuts. Yet DiGilio’s approach took this concept further with custom-made donuts served warm. The Greensboro shop opened last month in The Shops at North Elm, and there are locations up and down the East Coast as well as Ohio.

At Duck Donuts, customers are invited to choose from a variety of coatings, toppings and drizzles made warm and fresh to order. “Eating one of their freshly made-to-order masterpieces is like waking up wrapped in a warm doughnut dough blanket,” says Lynn Gianiny, who is partial to the blueberry powdered sugar concoction. One of my former coworkers, Jason Gamble, well known for his discerning taste, used to bring Duck Donuts to Greensboro after vacations in the Outer Banks. They’re that good. I’m sure he finds the Greensboro location a little more convenient, where he recommends the chocolate with chocolate sprinkles.

Perhaps Greensboro’s vibrant doughnut scene is a result of the relative donut repression in our neighboring Twin City. Well, at least as far as variety is concerned. Gamble, a Winston-Salem resident, claims there are no decent nonchain doughnut shops in the city. That’s probably just smart business since Winston is home base to some pretty famous doughnuts — Krispy Kreme Original Glazed. A man named Vernon Rudolph bought a secret yeast-raised recipe from a New Orleans French chef, rented a building in what is now historic Old Salem in Winston-Salem and began selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts to local grocery stores in 1937. The tantalizing scent wafted into the streets, and passers-by stopped to ask if they could buy hot doughnuts. Rudolph decided to cut a hole in an exterior wall so he could sell hot Original Glazed doughnuts directly to customers on the sidewalk. No longer relying on scent alone, in 1992 Krispy Kreme added the red neon sign outside Krispy Kreme shops that beckon to passersby, “Hot Now,” making a stop almost irresistible. Watching doughnuts roll right out of the oven at the Stratford Road location in Winston (one of the earliest) is a local pastime, and residents swear the goods here taste better than anywhere else. The city — indeed all of the Triad — takes its glazed doughnuts so seriously, they teach ’em young to appreciate the treat: At the Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem, kids can play Krispy Kreme Doughnut Factory so as to learn cooperative play while sending play doughnuts through a conveyor belt.

In general, doughnuts are most often made with a soft dough leavened with yeast (Krispy Kreme) or baking powder (Dunkin’ Donuts), shaped into a ring and deep fried then sprinkled with sugar — and sometimes filled with crème or jelly. What’s great about the family-run shops in Greensboro is that you can often find all three under one roof. In the United States, the first mention of doughnuts in print occurred in the early 19th century when Washington Irving wrote about Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (New York): “The table was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough nuts, or oly koeks.” The oly koeks (oil cakes) did not have holes. The same is true for similar pastries found all over Central Europe, where they are often associated with saints’ days and festivals. Around the mid-19th century, doughnuts started featuring the characteristic hole we know today. The Pennsylvania Dutch are often credited to be the first to make donuts with holes in the center, perfect for tunke (dunking).

To add an international flair to your donut connoisseurship, try a zeppole, a warm doughnut sans hole, made fresh at restaurants such as Elizabeth’s Pizza’s seven locations. These confections, sprinkled with cane sugar, are traditionally enjoyed on Saint Joseph’s Day (March 19) in Italy. The recently opened ZC Hawaiian BBQ in Golden Gate Shopping Center has cinnamon-sugar malasadas, originally a pre-Lent treat in Portugal and introduced to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants in the late-19th century. Once upon a time, they were reserved for Fat Tuesday to use up the lard and sugar on hand before the season of abstaining from such pleasures.

In Greensboro, it can be difficult to come by Israeli sufganiyah, which is a jelly-filled donut made for Hanukkah. However, they are sometimes sold at synagogues and temples as fundraisers during the holiday season. But rejoice! The new Rise Biscuits Donuts at Friendly Center sells a raspberry jelly –filled sufganiyah. Frying foods in oil — usually sufganiyah and latkes — is symbolic of one of the miracles Hanukkah honors in which a small amount of oil lasted eight days (although chef/rabbi/and cookbook author Gil Marks asserts the prevalence of sufganiyah is attributable to a job-creating program for the Israeli baking industry in the 1920s). But you don’t have to be Israeli to be meshuggana for shugga. Just line up at any of the Gate City’s new doughnut emporiums and beat the cold with a sweet treat that’s hot. Now.  OH

Thanks to her friends’ help eating donuts, Annie Ferguson managed to not put on any pounds during the research for this article.

Grievance

The winter wind is searching for a love

To love her like one loves the fall,

spring, summer, seasons better thought of

Than her silent biting chill, her pall.

Forgotten, crystal blooms on bare-branched trees,

Crisping air that skates on glassy lakes

Wakes the spirit, opens sleepy lungs to breathe

While snowflakes choose their own design to make.

Now she hisses sleet through blizzard teeth,

Love me for who I am and what I bring.

There is no resurrection without death,

Without a sleep, no dreams, no notes to sing.

Hear my lonely recitative,

Say you love me.  Say it to me, please.

   — Sarah Edwards