CityView Magazine

10 | March/April • 2014 publisher's note Mary, Mary, quite contrary How does your garden grow? With a wise design And plants aligned To use minimal H 2 O! Planning a visit to Cape Fear Botanical Garden? PWC hopes you'll stop by the At Home in Carolina water-wise garden exhibit. is collaborative project between the Botanical Garden and PWC shows how (contrary to "popular belief ") beautiful gardens can flourish with minimal watering – through proper plant selection and garden layout. You're sure to enjoy this lovely garden. And you'll learn how you, too, can have attractive landscaping that conserves our precious water supply. www.faypwc.com Cape Fear Botanical Garden 536 N Eastern Blvd. Open Mon.-Sat. 10am-5pm Sun. noon-5pm capefearbg.org Stop. Think. Conserve. Springtime at Last B y the time you read this, the snowstorms of January and February will be a distant memory. Your thoughts will be on the first day of spring (March 20th), ACC basketball, March Madness and the Dogwood Festival, as you read our lovely "Women in Business" issue. However, as I write this column I am snow bound at home. My memories go back to other snowstorm anomalies. e first one I remember happened when I was in the fourth grade at Westlawn Elementary (now Alma Easom, who was our principal) in the winter of 1960. We lived on Pilot Avenue in Haymount and had the best hill in town for sledding. It made for great sledding because numerous kids could go down the hill at once. Back then, people didn't park on the street like they do now, probably because most people had only one car. Can you imagine? People from all around town came to ride their sled down the steep hill. Like today, the other go-to spots are the high slopes at Highland Country Club and Rowan Park...but our street was the best. While I've weathered many storms, none were better than the one in the win- ter of 1960. We were out of school for many days, just as the kids are now. e child in all of us looks forward to these brief pauses of the reality of life; time spent catching up on our reading and our Netflix library. Everything seems to stop for a few days. As I look through the Facebook feed and see all the families "unplugged" out building snowmen and sledding at Highland CC, it brings back good memories. e truth is, inclement weather stops commerce almost complete- ly. Businesses close, which no one likes, but the salaries, rent and utility bills still accrue. People recognize this is a bad storm when the Haymount Grill closes for two days (which never happens). I believe these little anomalies (which they are in the South) are God's way of telling us He is still in charge. Of course man has assigned the name "Mother Na- ture" for these occurrences, not God. But I won't get on my soapbox about that now. While writing this, I look out my office window at home and see a City of Fayetteville truck plowing my street of snow and ice and dropping a brine mixture, much to my pleasure. Our tax dollars are hard at work when we need them. Bun- dling up to face the world, I'll head over to the post office and collect the bills that didn't stop during Winter Storm Pax. As my mother used to always tell us: "You be careful out there!"

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