Trending: Boards Breathe Hope 65 Roses

In the frenzy of a bidding war during the 2014 Pipeline to a Cure Swansboro’s Emily Sylvester — mother of a 13-year-old daughter Betsy a surfer girl living with cystic fibrosis — sat at a table with her college friend Jenny Keenan. Sylvester says she and Keenan have remained close over the years even going…

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Trending: Summer Blues

Summer Blues Cape Fear Blues Festival Turns 20 Blues man Dave Fields will travel from his home in New York to Wilmington to headline the 20th annual Cape Fear Blues Festival in late July. “He’s a consummate performer; he really knows how to entertain ” says Lan Nichols the event’s organizer. Fields a native of…

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Art Treatise: Flaming Acrylic Sands in the Carolina Heat

Astonishingly vivid and bright Cameron Smith’s beach paintings reveal layered patterns combining texture shape color and design: the smell of damp sand the ruffle of a sun umbrella in a light breeze the slouch of a sunbather’s back after falling asleep while reading a magazine. “It has such complex subject matter ” Smith explains. “I…

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Home of Distinction: Tree House

A long and winding unpaved road snakes south through the wooded landscape. Take the left hand turn at the fork off Quail Run and just beyond a screen of trees a sun-drenched clearing opens. Here a cedar shingled three-story seacoast home awaits the members of the Hardy family. “We love that it really connects us…

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Submerged in Summer

Subterranean {Hidden or Secret} In 2003 when Kim and Patrick Edwards moved into their European-style chateau in the Summer Rest Road neighborhood the front yard was landscaped with meticulously clipped boxwood hedges leading to a door framed by Confederate jasmine vines. The back was a swampy mess sloping sharply down toward grassy wetlands. Their children…

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Savor: A Genteel Sufficiency

My sanctuary is located on South Lumina Avenue. One can find respite from formality on a Wrightsville Beach porch — a great place to do nothing. I relax here nostalgically thinking of genuine comfort communion feasting and fellowship. My father John Thomas Denny was a veneer and plywood industrialist. He cut the timber and built…

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Talking Trash: What’s in Your Beach Bag?

On any given summer morning Wrightsville Beach’s strand sparkles with bounty for treasure hunters: whole sand dollars million-year-old shark tooth fossils colorful seashells from an array of species so vast it can’t be counted. But for every treasure there’s something else nestled in the sand and churning in the waves that has reached insurmountable numbers:…

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