Bed-Bugged: A Doodlebugged Mystery

BED-BUGGED, the first mystery in my Doodlebugged series, is now out, published by Laurel Fork Press.

Discerning readers may notice a striking resemblance between Doodle, the dog on the cover, and Shadow, my labradoodle with every bit as much “attitude” as Doodle. But Doodle does have more adventures!

Ask Doodle why he flunked out of service-dog school and he’ll tell you: smart and obedient don’t always go hand in hand. Now he has a new job sniffing out bed bugs for his new boss, Josh Hunter. But when the boss’s ten-year old daughter, Molly, needs Doodle’s help to solve a mystery, his nose and Molly’s camera lead them straight to danger.

A middlegrade mystery that will appeal to dog lovers of all ages.

Available on Kindle, Smashwords, and Nook.

The type weather that makes you want to rip up your garden so you have no guilt about not wanting to go outside and work in it. Too hot to walk. Too hot to think about walking. Unless, of course, you’re a highly energetic, heat-resistant labradoodle like Shadow. 

Shadow, the Ever-Ready Labradoodle

To the rescues comes a whopper of a storm–3.6 inches in little over twenty minutes of booming, roaring drama. And then, a cool breeze. Mist rises from the trees. And we remember why we love it here.

Mist rising on the hillside

Fog hugs the pumpkin patch

The Amalfi Coast

and then on to Tuscany where we stayed at Poggio Etrusco, a beautiful bed and breakfast (with full kitchen and drop-dead gorgeous grounds) located near Montepulciano.

Poggio Etrusco

Okay, so the owner Pamela Sheldon-Johns, a renowned chef and author of over a dozen cookbooks, is my cousin–you don’t need to take my word for what a great place this is.  She was rated by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top ten culinary guides in Europe. We had a fabulous time sampling the food, vino, cappuchino, and gelato in half a dozen cities. Oh, and we did some sight-seeing as well.

In other good news, I sold my story “Side Effects” to Realms of Fantasy and hope to have a new crop of stories available in ebook format soon. Look to Laurel Fork Press for upcoming titles.

Spring Colors

Ah, spring.  For a brief few days, the color of spring is fall-like, full of reds and oranges and pale yellows.

Our redbud bloomed a few days ago and for a couple of days looked like a bumblebee hive. I don’t think I’ve seen so many bumblebees at one time as I did in the tree. On the mountain, the leaves are finally turning green. Daffodils are waning already and tulips are preparing to bloom. On the parkway, white dogwood blooms peak out from the edges of the woods.

Off the mountain, the trees are now deep green and the azaleas and rhododendrons are in full glory, as are the yellow, pink, and white dogwoods.

Cheers the soul, it does,

Here’s Shadow by one of our favorite stops along our path through the woods.

We have the tree trimmed, the outdoor lights strung (finally), and today, now that we can get out after last week’s monster storm, I’ll finish the grocery shopping.  Tomorrow, I’ll cook a pork tenderloin and a turkey breast and enough of our favorite orange rolls to last a few days.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!  May you all have safe travel, warm homes, delicious food, and treasured time with the family!

Harvest Table Restaurant and Meadowview Farmers' Guild

If one word could describe Harvest Table Restaurant and its neighboring general store, Meadowview Farmers’ Guild in Meadowview, VA, it would be local.  Local food, locally grown. Local products on the shelves. Local jobs.  Local investment. Local money staying in the community.

Steven L. Hopp, the guiding force behind Harvest Table, is a self-proclaimed “locavore.”  The word, defined as a person who eats locally grown foods, was chosen in December of 2007 as New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, a reflection of how the concept of eating locally has grown in national consciousness.

Hopp, who lives on a 100 acre farm in Meadowview, Virginia, is a part time professor at Emory & Henry College in Emory, Virginia and is a co-author with his wife Barbara Kingsolver of the bestselling book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Harvest Table, which opened in late September of 2007, serves meals made from locally grown organic foods including free range chicken and eggs and pasture-finished beef.   Open Wednesday through Saturday, the restaurant features menu items that range in price from five to 25 dollars with the average entrée running $10-15.  There’s also a kid’s menu for seven dollars featuring pizza, free range hot dogs, or a cheese quesadilla.  Originally open only for dinner, Harvest Table is now also open for lunch from 11 a.m. to 2. p.m.

Hopp, whose enthusiasm for the store and restaurant is as infectious as his good humor, said the restaurant caters to diners from all walks of life who not only want to know where their food comes from, but who also want to taste truly fresh food.

 “If you ask me where this food comes from, I can tell you,” Hopp said. “Furthermore, if you sit down here and get a burger, I can guarantee you that all of the meat in that burger comes from one cow, and I can take you to the lot where that cow grew up.  It’s as simple as that.” 

He added with a laugh, “Not only that, sometimes the family who grew the cow comes in here and eats.  They order their own beef!”

Both the restaurant and store are housed in a hundred year-old building that required extensive renovation. Now the exterior is painted in bold colors, while the interior features wood floors and paneling and an atmosphere that Hopp described as an intentional balance between elegant and casual.

"An intentional balance between elegant and casual."

 His aim during the renovation was to refurbish the 6000 square foot building with as many existing materials as possible. 

“It was like a salvage operation,” said Hopp, pointing to several chestnut wood posts taken from an old barn and to the weathered bricks from old chimneys that frame the main cooking oven. 

Although the restaurant has only been open a few months, the response has been gratifying.  “Our accountant says the numbers are astounding in terms of a new restaurant,” Hopp said.  He anticipates the restaurant will be making a profit in less than six months.

         “Part of our success is the food we have is the freshest we can find,” he said.  “We give food the dignity of its season. “

While most people realize that homegrown tomatoes and corn taste better than ones that have traveled great distances, Hopp maintains the same is true of other foods.

“Fresh asparagus bears almost no resemblance to the asparagus that comes from Argentina,” he said.  “The minute you cut it, the chemistry starts to change.”

Meats also taste better fresh.  “Truly free range chickens that are raised in pasture their whole lives are much better,” Hopp said, noting that it’s the older diners who most often notice the difference.  “They come in and say ‘now this how a chicken is supposed to be’.”

Consequently, the menu at Harvest Table changes according to the season and availability of the ingredients. “When grapes are in season, we celebrate them.  When they’re out of season we find an alternative, “ Hopp said.

He is the first to admit that finding supplies can be a problem. “Our chefs are excellent at looking at what we have and turning it into a list of entrees, but sometimes they have to go beat the bushes.

  “Sometimes they end up calling people they don’t know, saying, ‘I hear you grow potatoes’.”

Because of that, he says the circle of suppliers is temporarily larger than he’d like.  Right now Harvest Table buys its artisan cheeses out of Kentucky and Tennessee and has had to buy some of its poultry out of Roanoke. He hopes to shrink that circle in the next five years and get his supplies as close to home as possible.

 “We’re trying to run a modern restaurant,” Hopp said.  “If you come in, you want to have a good selection.  If we have to go to Georgia to get carrots, right now we’ll go to Georgia.  But at the same time we say if you want to put in a plastic hoop house and grow carrots all winter next year, we’ll buy every single one of them.”

Hopp hopes to attract local growers to meet his supply demands, and has posted signs throughout the store that say in bold type, “Farmers Wanted.” 

Farmers Wanted

 “If you want to raise 50 chickens, give us a call. We’re using two chickens a night, about 1000 chickens a year.  If anyone in Washington or Lee or Tazewell County wants to raise free range chickens, come and talk to us.”

Shrinking the circle is important to Hopp who firmly advocates the value of keeping money in the community.  The impetus for Hopp and his investors to open Harvest Table and the Meadowview Farmers’ Guild was the proposed truck stop at Exit 7. 

“In the local publicity about Exit 7,” said Hopp, “the litmus of its success is usually the amount of tax revenues.  There is never any mention of how much money is leaving this region because of the businesses there.”

 “If 40 million dollars is made at such a truck stop, probably 36 million of it leaves this region permanently, while all the shoppers are from within 20 miles of here, so that money is going out of this county.”

Instead, he said, “Imagine if all the restaurants at Exit 7 said ‘we want to buy potatoes in Washington County rather than subsidized potatoes that get shipped in from somewhere else.’  Think what would do for the economy here.”

“Meadowview used to be a booming town,” Hopp said.  “What we’re trying to do is keep the money here.”

Harvest Table and Meadowview Farmers’ Guild store employ a staff of eighteen, but Hopp said the economic reach extends far beyond that.  Every supplier and grower who sells to Meadowview Farmers’ Guild also makes money.   

“In the three months we were open last year, “Hopp said, “we channeled money into over 50 individuals and families in the region.”

Another way Hopp strives to keep Harvest Table and Meadowview Farmers’ Guild local is through its investors, all of whom are anchored in Southwest Virginia.  Organized as an S Corporation with Hopp as a main investor, the company still is seeking additional investors.

Although several companies have approached him about marketing the shares nationally, Hopp prefers to keep ownership regional.

“I don’t want someone in Oklahoma holding a piece of this and trying to dictate what we do.  I feel like it should be made available to local and regional investors,” he said.

Hopp’s celebration of things local extends to Meadowview Farmers’ Guild, built to resemble an old time general store and stocked with local goods that range in price from two to 600 dollars.  He emphasized that the store isn’t just for high-end merchandise aimed at wealthy tourists.

Meadowview Farmers' Guild

“We consider any local products—crafts, woodworks, soaps, bird houses, rugs” said Hopp.  He carries, for example, jewelry made by two eight year-old girls who call their company Two Chick Jewelry.    He added, “I would love to get some quilts.” 

 “Most of it’s done on commission and we have a time period in which the item needs to sell.” 

Although the Meadowview Farmers’ Guild looks like an old-fashioned general store, Hopp is adamant that a return to a local economy is not a return to the past, but a rather a path to a better economic future.

With the rising cost of gas and oil, he maintains that it will become increasingly more expensive to ship produce across the world.

“The better prepared we are to return to a local economy, the better off we’re going to be in terms of our own security, not only food security but economic security.”

 Hopp’s dedication to local foods stems in part from his belief that it makes no economic sense to use oil to ship produce–which is mostly water–all over the planet, and partly from a life-long interest in gardening.

At one point, before the project to live on local foods for a year that was so informatively and entertainingly described in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Hopp and his wife Barbara Kingsolver were raising three gardens a year.

“A lot of people nationally got the impression that we woke up one day and said, “I’m tired of sushi, let’s grow our own food, but the reality was both of us gardened and raised and butchered chickens long before the book.”

Hopp, who has supplied produce to Harvest Table from his own garden, plans to continue to do so, just as he remains “absolutely” committed to eating locally grown foods.

“In part because of the freshness and in part because it’s just our way of life,” he said, adding with a smile, “Plus, now we have a place to go out to eat!”

Some say it’s about preserving the past, others about securing the future. Some say it’s about helping kids learn to work together. Others see it as a way to just kids but whole families together. Just mentioning the Virginia Junior Appalachian Musician (JAM) program at the Blue Ridge Music Center brings an opinion, usually accompanied by a smile.

JAM student Kali Jo Taylor

When the thirty-one kids ranging in age from six to thirteen took their place on the stage at the Blue Ridge Music Center to give their very first JAM performance, the results were a resounding success. Holding guitars, banjos, and fiddles, the kids played a couple of tunes, then put aside their instruments to demonstrate some of the flat-foot steps they’d learned.

“Considering that many of these kids picked up an instrument for the first time just eight weeks ago, it’s pretty impressive,” said Tony Hatcher director of the Virginia JAM program. Hatcher grew up in Bristol and has been a longtime fan of traditional music and dance.

The “appreciation” concert—for immediate families only– took place on Sunday, Oct. 28 and marked the halfway point of the inaugural sixteen week session of the Virginia JAM, a program designed to teach traditional mountain music to kids. On Jan 19^th, the Virginia JAM will give a fundraiser concert at the Rex Theater in Galax that will be open to the general public.

From the beginning, the Virginia JAM has been a group effort. “We always had it in our minds that we wanted a youth education program,” said Debbie Robinson, director of the Blue Ridge Music Center, itself a joint project between the National Park Service, which provides and maintains the grounds, and the National Council for the Traditional Arts, which funds and runs the programming. Robinson had studied the highly successful JAM program founded by Helen White in Sparta, NC, and wanted to bring something similar to the Galax area.

“Part of the reason for the Blue Ridge Music Center is to be educational as well as entertaining,” Robinson said.

The Blue Ridge Music Center near Galax, Virginia

She procured grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the D’Addario Foundation as well as from private donors to get the Virginia JAM program started. Partnerships with the National Park Service and the City of Galax assured that the Virginia JAM would have both a summer and winter home.

Another partnership critical to the Virginia JAM’s success was with the Blue Ridge Music Makers Guild an organization of thirty-five Galax and Carroll County musicians and instrument builders.

“We provide instruments for children who can’t afford them or who are interested in learning to play,” said Bobby Patterson, chairman of the guild, which established the Mom and Pop Stoneman Memorial Instrument Lending Library as a resource for children in the Blue Ridge Plateau area who want to play traditional music. Members take donated instruments, restore and repair them into good working condition, and then loan them out to children who either can’t afford an instrument or who want a trial period before having to buy one. Hatcher said that about a third of the Virginia JAM students use instruments from the guild.

With the funding and partnerships in place, Robinson and Hatcher hired teachers, local musicians with decades of professional experience under their belts, and recruited a host of volunteers. Now it was time to get the students. Another JAM partner, the local radio station WBRF, aired free information about the program, which was also publicized through local newspapers and at local bluegrass and old-time gatherings.

“We’ve had a good response,” Hatcher said. “Enough signed up for the guitar that we had to split it by age and experience level, and we ended up dividing the banjo into two classes, old-time and bluegrass.”

Hatcher said that students get an hour instruction in guitar, fiddle, or banjo along with a half-hour each of dance and singing. “There are two reason for the singing lessons,“ Hatcher said. “One of our goals is to help our students learn to play in a group. When you have a band, harmony and vocals are always important. And it helps them play the instrument if they can sing the melody.”

Instructor Ray Chatfield works with Ryan on Old TIme Banjo

Hatcher added that the dance instruction not only teaches the students an integral part of the history and tradition of mountain music, it also helps them learn to listen to the rhythm and pick out the beat.

Students pay ten dollars for each two hour session, but that is pro-rated down if a family can’t afford the tuition or if a family has more than one student. The cost for the students is much lower than what it would be for private lessons.

“Students can learn to play through this program that might not otherwise be able to play,” said Stanley Widener, the guitar teacher with the Virginia JAM.

Both Widener and fiddle teacher Scott Freeman first encountered the JAM program through the one run in Sparta by Helen White, founded in 1999. White, a musician herself who sometimes performs with Wayne Henderson, was a guidance counselor working for the Sparta Elementary School.

“I have way too many sad stories about life in these mountains,” White said, who was looking for a way to help students develop pride in their culture. She tells the now almost legendary story of how she saw the need for a program like JAM. She had noticed that very few students attended the local bluegrass and old-time concerts, but when she realized that kids were studying pictures of traditional string instruments in their school music class rather than the real thing, she asked the teacher if she could show the students her own instruments. After demonstrating the various instruments to the students, she said, “I gave each one fifteen seconds to play the instrument of their choice.”

“The class came alive,” she said. “There was buzz about it for days, requests to do it again. I knew then I had to get instruments into their hands.” With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, White was able to start the first JAM classes in Sparta as an after-school progam in the spring of 2000.

“We were born big,” White said. “We had 45-50 kids the first semester.“ Now the Sparta JAM has more than 90 applicants for the 60 slots available, and the program has spread to ten other counties. White has a grant this year to bring all the programs together and set a standard for JAM so that “the name becomes meaningful.”

Grace Wilson assists in a group session

“We’ve needed something like this in this area,” said Scott Freeman who taught with the Sparta JAM program for three years before joining the Virginia JAM to teach fiddle and vocals. “I have nothing against high school sports, but there are other things that show team effort and how to get along with people.” Noting that many kids who play sports end up with injuries that last into adulthood, Freeman said, “Lots of times you play that last football game in high school and it’s over.” By contrast, what the kids learn through the JAM programs “they can take with them. It’s something they can do forever.”

Widener agreed, adding, “You can tell the kids are having fun. Teaching them is a breeze. They pick it up faster than adults. And they’re good at helping each other.”

That sentiment is echoed by parents and kids alike. “It seems like kids teach kids,” said Vickie Boyd, whose son Jared is in the old-time banjo class.

Elizabeth Greeson makes the hour and a half trip from Guilford County, NC to the Music Center every week with her son Daniel so he can study fiddle with the Virginia JAM. “It’s a neat opportunity for Daniel to connect with kids his age,” she said. “There’s nothing comparable.”

Virginia JAM student Jesse Allen, age eleven, said that though he’s studied guitar for about three years he likes the chance the program gives him to play with others. But his aspirations go beyond just having a good time. “I’m hoping to make a living off it when I grow up,” he said.

JAM student Jesse Allen from Laurel Fork, Virginia

“JAM has built a sense of pride across the generations,” White said, noting that almost all of the kids in the various JAM programs have someone in their family who plays either bluegrass or mountain music, whether it’s a parent, grandparent, aunt, or cousin. “I’m always hearing students say things like ‘my grandma said my great grandma had a fiddle and she’s going to see if she can find it.’”

With the Blue Ridge Music Center closing for the winter, the Virginia JAM will move to the Galax Recreation Center for the last eight weeks of this session. After the concert at the Rex Theater on Jan 19, the program will take a short break, and then begin another session in late February or March.

Founders and participants hope to see the Virginia JAM become a established part of the community, and both Hatcher and Robinson are seeking grants and donations to continue the program permanently.

“We want to have a way to pass history and tradition to the next generation,” Hatcher said.

Vickie Boyd, Jared’s mother, put it another way: “We’ve got to keep the music going.”