Cathy Baldwin -    Dorothy Morris was destined to work with flowers. Her father is a third generation bulb grower, and working with the land goes back many generations in her family dating to a time of tobacco traders. “I spent the summers on the backs of tractors and swore I wouldn’t end up farming,” laughs Dorothy. Today Dorothy owns and operates Bells and Whistles, a full-service wedding and event design business that specializes in wedding flowers, décor and rentals. But it all started across the Wright Memorial Bridge at her farm The Flower Field. “We grow anything that blooms,” says Dorothy of The Flower Field....

By Kip Tabb - What an amazing weekend on the Outer Banks. The weather wasn’t perfect, but other than that, it was about as good as it gets.  The 11th Annual Bike Week started on Saturday, the First Southern Shores Historic Flat Top Cottage Open House Tour and the 3rd Annual Womanless Beauty Pageant. We’ll write about Bike Week after it’s a complete week, but all the others call for a story of their own. Womanless Beauty Pageant Crowns a New Queen Bribery as a means of winning a beauty contest has a certain finality and simplicity to it. No subjective scoring from the judges, no false pretense from the contestants—raise the most...

Cathy Baldwin -  Using pen and ink and etching on glass, Gordon Lewis of Gordon’s Glass is an Outer Banks artist with a spectacular eye for the natural world. Gordon Lewis knows his way around a ball point pen. His intricate pen drawings of sea life, birds and boats often take him upwards of forty hours. It’s the sort of rare, raw talent that can’t be taught. By day he works in the construction industry. “I do paint and drywall,” Gordon explains. He has the well-worn hands of a carpenter, enjoys fishing, favors blue jeans and drives a pick-up truck—not the sort of man one might expect to make a masterpiece in his spare...

By Cathy Baldwin -  Nestled off Kitty Hawk Road, sits the home of Jeanne and Steve Brook, a beautifully updated 100-year-old white farmhouse with a red barn and a wonderful menagerie of animals. Twenty-one guinea fowl, two fainting goats, chickens, roosters, a peacock and his peahen mate, ducks, a bunny named Junior, and Reilly the herding dog make this well-kept yard their home. But as beautiful as the peacock and his three feet of cascading blue-green feathers may be, the real stars of the show are their doves. Jeanne and Steve currently have nearly a hundred homing pigeons (rock doves) and ring-neck doves, some for weddings and some for...

By Kip Tabb -  Photos by CHELLEshots, Michelle Conner -   From there, the distance to Monkey Island is four miles, and the ride normally took about twenty minutes. We saw large rafts of coots, which are locally known as blue peters, in the middle of Currituck Sound feeding on milfoil. We also saw ducks and geese, which got the sportsman’s blood up.—Travis Morris in Duck Hunting on Currituck Sound.   Travis Morris is 81 years old, although if he didn’t tell you that, it would be hard to tell. He is a one man operation at his Currituck Realty office up there in Coinjock. The author of seven books on the history and life of...