Tranquility

An unexpected trip to my home town where this blipper is known to haunt has given me an opportunity to share some memories. This early morning photo was taken on Futch Creek in northeastern New Hanover County, North Carolina, in an area called Porter's Neck, where I grew up.

Located approximately 15 miles northeast of downtown Wilmington (where our aforementioned fellow blipper is wont to hang out), Porter's Neck was a peanut plantation before the American Civil War. The planter, Nicholas Nixon, used scientific methods to grow the peanuts and developed them into a profitable crop. Of course it was no longer a plantation when I came around a hundred years after the Civil War, but I do remember a farmer who raised peanuts and tobacco on his farm in the area.

Most of the area was woods and pasture land when I was a boy and even a young man, but now it is fully developed and is one of the most upscale and sought after residential areas in Wilmington. I must, however, give the developers credit for preserving as much as they could of the character of the place; they could have just chopped down all of the trees and thrown up ugly tract homes.

When you're away and return home you see things you didn't see before and you appreciate things you never gave a second though to before.