{"id":3937,"date":"2026-04-15T12:43:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T12:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/?p=3937"},"modified":"2026-04-15T15:14:52","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T15:14:52","slug":"idylls-of-the-queens-three-girls-after-my-own-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/?p=3937","title":{"rendered":"Idylls of the Queens: Three Girls After My Own Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

By RAHN ADAMS<\/strong><\/p>\n

MORGANTON, N.C. (April 15, 2026) — Today is my best friend and favorite artist Timberley’s birthday. It’s also Tax Day, of course, but that isn’t how I remember it’s her big day.<\/p>\n

April 15th has always been circled on my calendar. It was also my late younger brother’s birthday, and it was the day I was fired in 1987 from my one and only full-time radio job here in my one of many hometowns. I had been darn good at that kind of work — speaking into the can, as they say on O Brother, Where Are Thou?<\/em> — but I got canned anyway, no matter how many awards I’d won and whose birthday it was that day. In the late ’80s, I was a man of constant sorrow. Now I’m just a soggy-bottom boy.<\/p>\n

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EVEN AT AGE 11, Timberley was a ‘princess’ at the local newspaper where her father was ad director.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Timberley, the queen of my heart for the past 45 years, also got fired without good cause from a Hickory radio station around the same time, not on her birthday, though. That wasn’t how we met — not in the unemployment line — as we were already married. Still, the twin experiences convinced us early on that media jobs, in general, and the small-town radio business, in particular, aren’t necessarily fair. It\u2019s even worse now, competing with the internet and social media.<\/p>\n

So, yes, Timberley has always had to compete for attention on her big day. But our taxes have been filed (I’ll write about that debacle some other time, hopefully not after I’ve learned we’re being audited), and I have no intention of ever again working for the goober who still owns the local radio station — or for anyone else in the local media. That’s a definite benefit of being retired from the rat race.<\/p>\n

Now, I’ll try to keep this column short, because we do intend to celebrate the day at least by going out somewhere nice to eat, and we do have some errands to run, as well as some honey bees to tend in our growing apiary outside the little house on the hill. That leads me to my next queen to discuss here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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OUR PRIZED QUEEN knew what she was doing by hitching a ride on this frame.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One day last week we inspected our two full-sized hives and two smaller support hives. The large colonies were both doing well, with the more established one almost bursting with bees. We took one look at the huge number of workers and at all the brood about to hatch, and decided, among other things, to remove a full frame to keep the old queen — a really good one that we raised last year — from swarming with half of the colony, something that can easily happen in the spring.<\/p>\n

We couldn’t find the unmarked queen on any of the frames, so I pulled out one that had a bit of everything — honey, pollen, brood, eggs and bees — and moved it to a special hive for queen breeding called a queen castle<\/em>. Later, when we studied photos we’d taken of that frame, we saw that our year-old queen was standing on it pretty as you please. Doh! But that accidental move on our part probably did keep the large hive from swarming that day or the next. That queen knew best.<\/p>\n

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THIS BOOK’S STORY goes beyond poems about Arthur and Guinevere.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, Timberley will have to share her big day today with yet another “queen,” one that Timberley herself brought into our lives by buying an interesting old book years ago at a used bookstore near Hickory. That was so long ago that I’d forgotten about the book. We found it recently while packing up some things in Boone to bring down the mountain.<\/p>\n

The book is an 1895 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King<\/em>, 12 narrative poems about King Arthur and his court, including Queen Guinevere. The volume originally had a nice leather cover before someone covered most of it with black cloth tape, apparently to patch a century’s worth of wear and tear in the soft brown cowhide, like a broken-in baseball glove.<\/p>\n

What had sealed our purchase of the book years ago, though, and what has reignited my interest in it now is a long inscription in delicate calligraphy on the end-sheet inside the front cover. In 1899, the public library board of a large Texas town awarded this very book to a teen-aged girl there for her “competitive article on the Advantages of a Public Library” — the winning essay in a writing contest.<\/p>\n

The girl’s and three judges’ names appear in the inscription. With everything else going on this week, we only had time to look for the girl online — and we found her fairly easily. It turns out she was 15 when she won that contest and that she grew up to be a well-known poet in Texas literary circles (yeah, I know what you’re thinking), as well as a mother and a respected community member all around. She was the poetry queen of that county and of almost the entire state.<\/p>\n

She published two books of poetry in her lifetime, neither of which is still in print. We did find single copies of each book listed on Ebay, but they were expensive, and I’ve been hesitant to buy anything on that platform ever since I paid good money for a “vintage” radio that arrived full of frayed wires, mouse leavings and a muddy dirt-dauber nest. That’s what did it for me and Ebay. I did clean up the mess and get the radio kind of working, but it wasn’t what the seller had promised — much like my past confounded experiences in the radio business.<\/p>\n

The other day I emailed the public library in the poet’s hometown — the same library, I presume, that had awarded her Idylls of the King <\/em>127 years ago — and I asked if they still had her poetry books and, if so, whether or not they could send them to me through some sort of inter-library loan. They don\u2019t have either book, they said, but told me where to find both volumes. They were polite and helpful.<\/p>\n

That took me yesterday to my <\/em>local public library, who, it turns out no longer participates in any loan programs that could get me those poetry books from Texas. The helpful librarian did, however, tell me which area libraries might be able to do the job for me. He was the same librarian who had earlier patiently printed me one tax document after another because I’d decided to do our taxes old school. As I look back over my life, I can thank libraries for making life better.<\/p>\n

So that’s the current mystery we’re investigating, which I’ll report on here once we have all of our ducks — or, in our case, all of our queen bees and their hives — in a row and have done more research on not only the poet, but also on the three contest judges. From what we already know, I have a feeling it’ll be a good story.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Timberley and I have a special birthday celebration to attend. Thanks for reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By RAHN ADAMS MORGANTON, N.C. (April 15, 2026) — Today is my best friend and favorite artist Timberley’s birthday. It’s also Tax Day, of course, but that isn’t how I remember it’s her big day. April 15th has always been circled on my calendar. It was also my late younger brother’s birthday, and it was … Continue reading Idylls of the Queens: Three Girls After My Own Heart<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3937"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3966,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937\/revisions\/3966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}