Charleston Halloween

Charleston is a place with so much history and we love to explore the old streets and alleys, not the famous ones that attract all the tourist mobs but little out-of-the-way ones like these.  Here's a street, Adgers Wharf, paved with rocks from Europe that came over as ballast in the ships.  

It's quiet now, but in the 1700s when Charles Town was a walled city, the wall, along with fortifications holding cannons, ran along to the right.  For the next couple centuries fishermen came in from the sea  at Adgers Wharf and carried the fish up this street to be sold at the markets, door to door, or right on the street.  

Off the streets are the alleys that housed the poor tenement dwellers; today the same tenements are million dollar renovated town houses.

And off the alleys are the public walkways leading to the doors of more homes.  Many are named and many decorate for holidays like

Halloween.  

One of the barrier islands off Charleston, Sullivan's Island, is one of those lovely old neighborhoods, too.  There are two houses there you can always count on for some holiday spirit.

Hope you weren't eating lunch while reading this!  

Happy

Halloween!

The GHOST of Alice Flagg

South Carolina has its share of ghost stories 

and this is a good time of year to tell one of them. 

The tale begins in 1838 with a sweet and comely  Southern belle from a wealthy planter family, Miss Alice Flagg, her mother, and her brother charged with her care when their father died.  There are several versions, but they all agree on a few basic facts. Young Alice fell in love with a lumberman -- a LUMBERman-- much beneath her station in life according to her mother and brother.  The more they expressed  their disapproval, the more fond young Alice became of her young man. 

Eventually they agreed secretly to marry and to plight his troth, the lumberman gave Alice a gold ring.

As one would imagine, big brother and mother were not happy when they found out and forbade Alice to wear the ring, insisting she return it.  Alice dutifully removed it from her finger but wore it secretly on a ribbon next to her heart.

Mother and brother concurred that drastic measures were necessary to keep the lumberman out of the Flagg family and hustled 15-year old Alice (with her beloved's ring next to her heart) off to boarding school in Charleston.  

Alice was bereft without her beau and did not take to life in Charleston, as gay and fashionable as it was.  In fact, in just months she withered away to nearly nothing and died of a broken heart (though her doctor-brother diagnosed it as plain old malaria, which was quite likely as living on a South Carolina plantation practically guaranteed a malaria mosquito would bite you sooner or later).  

When brother Dr. Allard Flagg discovered the ring on his dead sister's body he ripped it off in a rage and flung it into the creek at their Murrells Inlet home.  Alice was buried nearby in a Methodist church graveyard in an unmarked grave.

Enter the ghost, the ghost of Alice Flagg.  

Who walks near her home at night, moaning and keening and searching the creek for her ring.

For some reason the rest of Alice's family is buried elsewhere, in All Saints Epicopal  churchyard with all the other worthy Flagg ancestors.  Amongst their graves is a plain stone set flat into the ground with the single word "Alice" on it.  

By church records, no one is buried there but some say 

another Alice Flagg lies under the stone, 

the Alice mentioned on the stone to the right, who, with her family, was swept away by a wave Magnolia Beach in the hurricane of 1893.  

Our Alice Flagg's people are buried just a few feet away, under the old oaks draped elegantly with Spanish moss.  For some reason, perhaps to torment them through eternity, our Alice's ghost has followed them from her resting place and makes regular appearances (although ghosts are firmly deterred by a sign outside the wall).  People, also discouraged from entering at night by a sign and locked gate, make their way in as well.  They leave plastic rings, shells, flowers, coins and bills, circle the stone a prescribed number of times on the well-worn path around it, and encourage Alice's ghost to appear.  Some are successful and see a wispy figure in white passing here and there among the trees.

Vizcaya Wedding

We have been in Miami for five days for the wedding of The Writer's son, held in a mansion-turned-art-museum, Vizcaya, on Biscayne Bay. It was built by James Deering, of International Harvestor fame.  

Deering, never married, had the Italianate house and gardens constructed between 1917 and 1922 as a place to entertain his friends.  Guests were expected to approach by yachts from the water so the bay side is the front of the house.  The wedding reception dinner and dance were held on the two levels of terrace just beyond the concrete boat.  

Part of the 1,000 acre estate is 

natural tropical jungle.

The formal gardens and sculptures 

were  lovely.  

At the end  

is the garden house (below) and reflecting pond where the ceremony took place.

Follow the rose petals up the stone stairs

Married and ready to party!

Some of the beautiful interior design and details 

🌹. 🌹. 🌹

In keeping with the wedding theme, I saw this this morning and thought it would be fun

 to put here.  I'll start.  

We met in the teachers' workroom after The Writer (aka The Actor) did a show for an assembly at my school.  He was attempting to repair a stage light.  Our first date was on a tennis court and I think I'd rather be married there than the teachers' workroom which always smelled of stale coffee and donuts!

How about you?

My Heart's in the Highlands

I think part of my heart will always be in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina where The Writer and I built our first home many years ago. These are photos of the trip we took a couple weeks ago on my birthday.

Hwy 64 between Highlands and Cashiers

Whiteside Cove, Horse Cove Road with 37 curves and switchbacks

Dry Falls, a 75 foot waterfall in the Nantahala National Forest.  

You can walk behind it and remain dry.  Sort of.  

Picnic lunch on the rocks by the road, Sugarfork.  

Mountain Rest, North Carolina.  Isn't that a perfect name?

Little Sliding Rock, a 10 foot drop on slippery rocks on the Chattooga River.

I was so tempted to slide down it until I stuck one foot in the water and it became numb!

What it would have looked like sliding down ....

🍁 🍂 🍁

I have some happy news to report today.  

After 10 weeks my mom is finally out of the care center and at home!  

My sister is there with her as she can't be alone yet and we will be going down to see her in a few days.  

Cotton

Near Kingstree, South Carolina, miles and miles of cotton fields

After the relentless march of the boll weevil across the South, the resurrection of one of our state's top crops has taken a hundred years.  Most of the cotton is ripe now and drying, 250,000 acres of a fluffy blanket of white in the distance.  

Even if you don't wear cotton clothing, you consume cotton. It's in your ice cream, your toothpaste, potato chips, pretzels, and cookies, your cosmetics and plastics.  

The paper money you carry around?  75% U.S. cotton!

If you live in the U.S., much of it comes from South Carolina.

Salter, SC, sharecropper's cabin

With a moderate summer, adequate rainfall, and a little mercy from Hurricane Irma, South Carolina farmers stand ready to harvest their biggest cotton crop ever.

Argh

Definition of infuriating: Write a post, insert all the photos, hit publish, and ... nothin'. Not published, not in Saved Posts, Draft, or Offline either.  Just gone.

I'll be back when I can figure something out.  We have been trying for two days without success so it might be awhile.  

Meanwhile, I have a question for you all.  What app do you use to build your blog?  I want: a) less frustration, b) better photos, c) LESS FRUSTRATION, ha ha.  And I prefer to use my iPad because that's where my photos are.  And not pay an arm and a leg.  

Is that too much to ask?

Thank you.