Spring has sprung

I'm in North Carolina on March 1st, and all the flowering bushes are doing their thing - beautiful! Most activities have been on winter hours. Unlike Florida, winter is not the busy time for NC. The price of my site went up $15 today. I took a ride down to the end of Cape Fear, to Carolina Beach. I really wanted to spend a couple days here because of that Nick Nolte - Barbara  Streisand movie about a family from Cape Fear. Do you remember that? And... I am rarely a-feared about being alone, but today I was on a pier out into the Cape Fear River, and I felt uncomfortable, and had to go back. Thanks, Nick Nolte!! Driving down the river road was like the Cape with scrub pines and sand. New houses and mansions are being built. A lot of the existing and new houses are built on stilts, with the garages on the lower floors, since there is frequent flooding. And...I love the colors - purple, orange, turquoise, blue, green, pink - for the houses and the mailboxes.

I toured a couple historical homes from the 1800s and  one from the 1700s. Wilmington has a number of these. Quite a few have been made into Bed and Breakfast hotels. And quite a few have been used in movies. There were 2 movies being filmed while I was there - one for TV and ??? One of the homes I toured was previously used by Harpo Industries. They repainted a portion, which at some time the trustees want to bring back to the original. But it was well-worth the changes to have it used for a movie production. Another home advertises itself for weddings, and there's a brick placed in the wedding walk for every couple that does that. Hopefully they don't get divorced, since that brick is part of history now. Maybe they could just paint a big "D" over it, if that happens. It would be funny if a person chose that home for more than 1 wedding. She/he could have 3 bricks each with his/her name and that of one of the spouses. Ohhh dear, we could go on and on.

I also went to a great quilt exhibit at one of the museums. I had gone to see the play "Gee's Bend" in CT with friends. It was about women who lived in Gee's Bend during the civil rights movement, their strife and the quilting they did. A few of the quilters in this exhibition were from Gee's Bend. Although I'm old and can't remember her name, I think the main character in the play had quilts in the show. I think this because of all the places her quilts were exhibited. I had gone to a quilt show in Myrtle Beach. Most of the quilts were machine quilted or "long-hand" quilted. You voted for best in a number of categories. And generally, they were all beautiful. My favorite was the outline of three girls, each made from a dress of the grandmother, mother or daughter, hand-quilted. At the exhibition in Wilmington all the quilts were hand-quilted, a number of them told a story. A number of them were using scraps from old clothes, blankets or ??? My favorite there was one which looked like it was put together pretty randomly, as the scraps became available - a utilitarian quilt, a quilt made for practical reasons.