Blonde Faith, Garden & Gun

I spent the day getting beautiful, not in Miss Truvy's House of Hair, but Miss Tracy's big chair for hair. I'm now blonder than I've ever been in my life, with a shorter, bouncier layered bob. Whenever I'm in Miss Tracy's shop, either for my self or my girls' haircuts, I pick up a magazine and I love that there's usually a copy of Garden & Gun around. I've read this magazine since the premiere issue in 2007, and it keeps getting better and better.

I must declaim right now that I'm not crazy about the title for several reasons - it's not really about gardens or guns, and the jobbers who place magazines on racks never know where to shelve it - with the gardening magazines, gun magazines, or outdoors stuff. It's never where it should be - with the literary mags like my other favorite mag, Oxford American. I guess if I had to describe G&G, it would be as the lovechild of Southern Living and Oxford American. Gorgeous photography, brimming over with sense of place, and absolute Southern-fried literary merit.

Back in Miss Tracy's, I tucked my foiled-up head under the dryer and prepared for some enjoyable reading. I have a quirk, reading magazines from back to front, and there on the last page I was treated to a delightful essay by Roy Blount Jr. that involved cameras stealing his soul, his enlarged pores, and two escapees from "Deliverance" named Caleb and Rupe.

After Roy, I skimmed the "Best of the South in the summer" feature and landed on Lee Smith's story about her mother wanting to make her into a lady. I've had a writer crush on Lee Smith ever since reading "Fair and Tender Ladies" a decade ago. About that time, I went to a bookseller's conference and got to hear her albino squirrel story from her days as a local newspaper reporter. My local newspaper reporter stories are not nearly as funny as the albino squirrel in a bag story. I got just two pages into Smith's saga of her parents' passionate relationship when my blonding time was up and I was on to rinsing, cutting, drying, curling, spraying and paying. Miss Tracy was a sweetheart and let me bring the magazine home but only if I promised to return it.

If you like a magazine you can get lost in, pick up Garden & Gun. And if you're looking for a great novel, pick up Lee Smith's "On Agate Hill," oh my goodness I could go on and on about that one.

I Always Judge Books by Their Covers

With a sniff and a sigh, I just finished "On Agate Hill" by Lee Smith. I've been away from novels for several years, but I've always loved Lee Smith and when I saw the book in trade paper, it all but jumped off the shelf into my hands. This was in Nashville at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, so my girls played contentedly with the Thomas the Tank Engine train table while I read the back of the book. Curled up in a mission-style rocker, which I coveted, I read the author's notes in which Smith describes the death of her adult son and her difficulty returning to writing while still grieving. I was wiping tears from my eyes when I put "Agate Hill" on my stack of "must buys."

Molly Petree is the heroine of "Agate Hill," and the story traces her life as an orphan in North Carolina following the Civil War clear through her adult life at the turn of the century. Molly is familiar in that she's the spitfire Southern girl I've always wanted either to be or have as my best friend. She reminds me very much of Cean in Caroline Miller's "Lamb in His Bosom" or any of the spunky heroines of Edna Ferber, or even Catherine Marshall's "Christy." The rural, pre-industrial North Carolina setting and characters spark to life like flint to steel.

Years ago, I attended a luncheon at which Lee Smith spoke. She told her albino squirrel story, which I would repeat, but I'm afraid I wouldn't get the details right. The story has to do with an albino squirrel that she wrote about on her very first day as a reporter for a small town newspaper. I laughed as tears of familiarity ran down my face. If you've answered phones at a small town newspaper, and interviewed the local citizens, the somewhat normal and the flat-out crazy, you'd know why I laughed.