Well, y’all. I almost let this one slip right on by.
Every March since this little blog was born, I’ve sat down to mark the occasion — to take a breath, look back at the year, and say thank you to everyone who keeps showing up here.
But this spring? This spring knocked the wind out of me.
Somewhere between Brandon developing Bell’s palsy, covering the LPNC convention, opening the AFP-NC celebration for America’s 250th anniversary, and losing the only inanimate thing that has ever felt like part of my soul… March and April slipped clean through my fingers.
And maybe that says something about this year all by itself.
Because Year Five of Where the Dogwood Blooms held some of the highest highs I’ve ever experienced — and some losses I still don’t entirely know how to carry.
So if I’m a little late to my own party, I hope y’all will forgive me. I’m here now.
The year started softly. Spring arrived the way it always does in North Carolina: quietly at first. One day the trees are bare, and the next the whole Piedmont looks like it exhaled green overnight. I wrote about green up because I couldn’t help myself. There’s something holy about that season here if you pay close enough attention.
Then came Wilmington in azalea season — because every North Carolina town has its thing. Burgaw has blueberries. Fayetteville has dogwoods. And Wilmington? Wilmington shows off every spring like it knows people came to stare.
And Lord, did we eat this year.
We talked drive-ins and burger joints. We discussed the proper construction of a North Carolina hotdog — mustard, chili, slaw, onions, and I will not be entertaining alternate interpretations at any time. I preached the gospel of Cackalacky Sweet Sauce yet again because some opinions only get stronger with age.
Summer carried us farther from home. I finally took the girls to the Core Banks, which still feels mildly criminal that it took us that long. Then I headed south into Georgia and wandered through Warm Springs, Callaway Gardens, Providence Canyon, and a brewery in Columbus that I still think about more often than I probably should.
But by late summer, the tone shifted.
Belle started her senior year, and I don’t care how old your children get — there are some milestones that hit you square in the chest anyway. Class of 2026 suddenly made time feel very real.
Then Belle and I went home to Canton.
That trip became one of the most meaningful things I wrote all year. It started as a love letter to western North Carolina — the Parkway, the Smokies, Joey’s Pancake House, mountain air that still feels like memory itself. But underneath it was grief, too. I knew even then that I was writing toward goodbye.
Not long after, I wrote about Daddy’s tombstone. Perhaps that one was too raw. Too real. But some stories sit on your chest until you finally let them out.
I managed to squeeze in a Raleigh ghost tour because, apparently, my ideal hobby is collecting strange stories in old cities. That has not changed.
Then came fall, and somehow fall altered the course of my life.
In September, I ended up on media row at the Salt & Light Conference. I purchased a shirt there that ended up drawing the wrong kind of attention from complete strangers. Somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway afterward, I pulled over at an overlook, typed out what was on my mind, and hit post.
And then the internet exploded.
Twenty-one million views. A retweet from Elon Musk. Thousands upon thousands of strangers had feelings about it. I’m still sorting out what that experience meant, honestly. But it changed something in me. This blog will always belong to North Carolina. Always. But I’m not interested in shrinking myself in other spaces anymore just to make other people comfortable.
The fall also brought Bald Head Island — this time as a visitor instead of in uniform — and enough apples from two orchards to nearly bury my kitchen. We made apple butter, fried apples, pies… and Brandon learned there is apparently no upper limit to how many apples I consider reasonable.
I also got to appear on The Appalachian Podcast, which felt strangely full circle in a way I didn’t expect. Like all these stories I’ve been carrying around for years, finally found the right room to echo in.
Then came the holidays. I wrote The Southern Goodbye. I wrote about Vicks VapoRub after whatever plague swept through our house around the New Year. And Brandon gifted me what can only be described as an anniversary pew pew, which honestly tells you almost everything there is to know about our marriage.
The new year brought the podcast going fully on video — something that still feels surreal to type — and Baby Belle turning eighteen, which I continue to pretend I’m handling well.
I wrote about fireplaces and woodstoves and the way warmth gets inherited like recipes do. I wrote about buffalo roaming North Carolina long before any of us got here. I wrote about mica mines and Dix Park and all the strange little corners of this state that keep revealing themselves to me, no matter how long I’ve lived here.
And right before this anniversary slipped past me unnoticed, I made a trip to Old Salem with Brandon, which reminded me exactly why I started all of this in the first place.
But here’s the thing about Year Five that surprised me most: it’s the year this blog finally stopped feeling like something I was carrying alone.
For a long time, the unglamorous sides of running this thing — the monetization puzzle, the video editing, the business of it all — sat entirely on my shoulders alongside the writing, the research, and the road trips. That’s a lot of hats for one person.
Not anymore.
After five years, I finally found someone to take monetization off my plate entirely, and I can’t tell you what a relief it is to just not have to think about that anymore. And then Craig Reynolds came along and offered to handle video editing like the absolute hero he is. What that means, in practice, is that all I have left to worry about is the part I actually love: cranking out content about the best state in the country.
Five years in, and this thing is somehow just getting started.
Five years ago, I had a head full of stories and nowhere to put them. I loved North Carolina too much to keep quiet about it. The history. The language. The food. The mountains. The beach. The backroads. The people. I wanted a place to gather all of it before it disappeared.
And if I’m being truthful, I also needed something that belonged to me.
That sentence hurts differently now than it would have a year ago.
Because the mountain land I loved all my life — the place that shaped my understanding of home before I even had words for it — is gone now. I lost it piece by piece in a courtroom. And while I hadn’t been welcomed back there since Daddy died, some part of me never stopped believing that one day I would be.
That hope is gone now, too.
But this is what I’ve realized in the middle of all that grief:
Nobody can partition memory.
Nobody can sell off the stories I’ve lived or the roads I’ve traveled or the pieces of North Carolina I’ve spent five years preserving here.
Nobody can take the things I’ve written down in an effort to remember.
This blog — this stubborn little love letter to North Carolina — still belongs to me.
And maybe that’s what this anniversary was really about all along.
Thank y’all for being here through every version of this journey — the joyful years, the heavy years, and all the messy in-between parts. It means more to me than I even know how to say.
Here’s to five years of Where the Dogwood Blooms.
And here’s to five more.
Cheers, y’all!
