Back in May of 2013, I was asked to write a piece for IndyWeek on the best hidden treasures in Durham for parents and kiddos. It was a particularly hard time in my life but I was determined to make the article happen. Why? My daughter was in the hardest part of her "failure to thrive" era, and this deadline came as she was getting surgery for her gastronomy tube so she could get nutrition. I created SoDu Parents Posse just 1 year earlier, and members numbered around 600. (For perspective, in May of 2017 we were over 6,000.) Life for me was in upheaval. But I needed something to concentrate on, and I couldn't fix my daughter's inability to eat but I could write.
Old Durham Bulls Stadium, Wikipedia So I put together a list of what I thought were places that people might not think of immediately when they take their kids somewhere. By this point I had been a "Stay At Home" mom for a year. Ha - "stay at home". The term itself is outdated. As is "homemaker". Can we come up with a new term for us moms "who don't work full time outside the home" already? Well speaking of outdated, my article is just that. Things change. But in Durham, things change even faster.
My grandparents lived in SoDu back in the 80's when I was growing up, in a little brick rancher off Garrett, which thirty years later I would drive past four times a day on my way to my kids preschool and back home. Durham wasn't doing so great back then. During all our visits, the only part of downtown I remember going to was Morgan Imports. In fact, we would go every Christmas Eve and I would gaze at all the trees all fully decorated. I hazily remember drinking sparkling apple cider as the adults sipped champagne and I felt that all those twinkling lights and the mysterious stairs up to the second floor (that we couldn't go to) meant that this was the secret entrance to the North Pole. For a girl growing up in Tennessee, North Carolina felt north enough for it to make sense.
Northgate Mall was the place to visit, where my grandpa always treated me to Orange Julius. The rest of Durham seemed to be a lot of empty storefronts to me, but I definitely remember loving Another Thyme in my new days as a cliche vegetarian teenager. Then there's the time I went to a Bulls game with a guy I was crushing on. By then my family had moved to NC, but we lived in a small town in the mountains, so Durham seemed big league, even though the team wasn't. The game was in the old stadium that still holds a special place in my heart, with it's turret entrance, a field open to the sky with but a few bleachers and a wide lawn past the bases. My crush caught a home run from just underneath the "Hit A Bull" sign, and I snapped a photo of him with the 35mm camera I borrowed from my high school. Being the high school newspaper editor had its perks. I certainly never imagined I'd one day live here, but if nothing else, life is serendipitous.
My grandparents lived in SoDu back in the 80's when I was growing up, in a little brick rancher off Garrett, which thirty years later I would drive past four times a day on my way to my kids preschool and back home. Durham wasn't doing so great back then. During all our visits, the only part of downtown I remember going to was Morgan Imports. In fact, we would go every Christmas Eve and I would gaze at all the trees all fully decorated. I hazily remember drinking sparkling apple cider as the adults sipped champagne and I felt that all those twinkling lights and the mysterious stairs up to the second floor (that we couldn't go to) meant that this was the secret entrance to the North Pole. For a girl growing up in Tennessee, North Carolina felt north enough for it to make sense.
Northgate Mall was the place to visit, where my grandpa always treated me to Orange Julius. The rest of Durham seemed to be a lot of empty storefronts to me, but I definitely remember loving Another Thyme in my new days as a cliche vegetarian teenager. Then there's the time I went to a Bulls game with a guy I was crushing on. By then my family had moved to NC, but we lived in a small town in the mountains, so Durham seemed big league, even though the team wasn't. The game was in the old stadium that still holds a special place in my heart, with it's turret entrance, a field open to the sky with but a few bleachers and a wide lawn past the bases. My crush caught a home run from just underneath the "Hit A Bull" sign, and I snapped a photo of him with the 35mm camera I borrowed from my high school. Being the high school newspaper editor had its perks. I certainly never imagined I'd one day live here, but if nothing else, life is serendipitous.
I went to North Carolina School of the Arts, our state's public arts conservatory, for senior year of high school and two years of college. Ah, the big city of Winston-Salem - the place so grateful to Reynolds cigarettes that we named ourselves after them: smooth smoking Winstons and Old Salem of course, where I worked as a tavern wench in full costume. But the college I grew up loving, the reason my parents moved back to NC from TN, that Old Well, she was calling me. September 11th happened and like many of us, I reevaluated things. My boyfriend and I moved to Chapel Hill for me to complete my degree at UNC Chapel Hill. Right after graduation day, he proposed and we started looking for places to get hitched. Nothing felt right. Why not look in Durham, we thought. A year later, I ended up walking down the aisle at Duke Gardens on a hot day in June. We learned our first dance at 9th Street Dance and killed it on the floor at our Durham Arts Council reception, where a movie about us that my husband made played in their theater for our guests. The after party consisted of us bar hopping from Jo and Jo's to Devine's that humid night, amid construction and somewhat dangerous streets, and as we laughed ourselves silly singing karaoke I couldn't help but also fall in love with the town I just tied the knot in.
Parkwood, ducks and all farmland, circa 1960, courtesy of Parkwood Neighborhood Association We bought a house in South Durham in 2007 right before the housing market crashed, and boy, do I love our neighborhood, Parkwood. Smack dab in between my alma mater and the capitol, with a fantastic old school pool, great neighbors, and trails for miles to walk with the inevitable kiddos. It's a neighborhood that according to the News & Observer in 1963 was the nation's introduction to a modern subdivision, having been created for workers at the new RTP. The article's author gushed, "Parkwood is unique for North Carolina – for the region, and to an extent the nation." Parkwood, they noted, is notable for it's cluster planning technique with cul-de-sacs and "Few houses are without a green area in the rear or elsewhere, assuring residents of plenty of park and recreation space." What's true then is true now. It's a lovely place, and people take a lot of pride in living here, before SoDu boomed and Southpoint was built.
As we embraced suburbia, we had our own kiddos and no sooner did I have my 2nd child than I found myself without a job after the preschool I worked at closed suddenly. I was a - wait, there's that unremarkable and totally inaccurate phrase again - "stay at home" mom, something I had not planned on being. I had a 9 month old and 3 year old and was totally and utterly alone. My husband worked in Cary, and I didn't know what to do to fill my days. I met a couple friends at parks and started to private message them on Facebook. It seemed to work at first but then I realized it would be easier if I just created a group. Now SoDu - there is a phrase I *do* like. I am not the creator of it, people had said it before me I later found out, but when I created it among my group of friends I was inspired by how hip New York's Soho sounded, and also realized that using the correct pronounciation of Durham meant that the word would sound too close to soda, so "doo" it was. I also wanted dads to be a part instead of having a mom only space. I had met some cool dads at parks too, and just like us moms, they were trying to figure out how to raise kids, manage a house, and still feel like a person outside of parenting without a job to define you. Lastly, I just liked the alliteration of "posse". That's it. That's how it started, with maybe 10 people. They know who they are. It went from there, all the way up to where I started this, my article in the IndyWeek. Now SoDu as a phrase has become widely popularized, which still gives me a kick, and we're known triangle-wide now, thanks to a recent win. More on that in a minute.
As we embraced suburbia, we had our own kiddos and no sooner did I have my 2nd child than I found myself without a job after the preschool I worked at closed suddenly. I was a - wait, there's that unremarkable and totally inaccurate phrase again - "stay at home" mom, something I had not planned on being. I had a 9 month old and 3 year old and was totally and utterly alone. My husband worked in Cary, and I didn't know what to do to fill my days. I met a couple friends at parks and started to private message them on Facebook. It seemed to work at first but then I realized it would be easier if I just created a group. Now SoDu - there is a phrase I *do* like. I am not the creator of it, people had said it before me I later found out, but when I created it among my group of friends I was inspired by how hip New York's Soho sounded, and also realized that using the correct pronounciation of Durham meant that the word would sound too close to soda, so "doo" it was. I also wanted dads to be a part instead of having a mom only space. I had met some cool dads at parks too, and just like us moms, they were trying to figure out how to raise kids, manage a house, and still feel like a person outside of parenting without a job to define you. Lastly, I just liked the alliteration of "posse". That's it. That's how it started, with maybe 10 people. They know who they are. It went from there, all the way up to where I started this, my article in the IndyWeek. Now SoDu as a phrase has become widely popularized, which still gives me a kick, and we're known triangle-wide now, thanks to a recent win. More on that in a minute.
Durm Tobacco Shirt, Runawayclothes.com By the time I wrote my article, Durham had definitely changed since my grandparents lived here, and was unrecognizable to my wedding guests. My granddad would be proud and puzzled by the resurgence of the tobacco leaf logo in hip clothing by Runaway, as he worked for Lucky Strike in its heyday, witnessed Big Tobacco's decline, and yet lived long enough to hear me talk about how Mad Men made it cool again. In 2013, restaurants were popping up everywhere, breweries too. Festivals and live music were aplenty, with tons of activities for kiddos. That definitely helped me find my footing as a mom, but it wasn't easy. My son had just been diagnosed with a deadly allergy to tree nuts after an anaphylactic reaction, and my daughter refused to eat and lost a lot of weight, hence the g-tube. Still we made it out of the house every day, to try and keep the kids happy and my mind busy. And I chatted on SoDu, asking for advice, giving advice, laughing with others, and planning playdates and moms nights out. It was my safe place, where I could go to be surrounded by my community, and I found out happily that others felt the same way.
When I wrote the article four years ago, so much was new to Durham, like the SoDu Farmer's Market and the revamped Old North Durham park, with it's super cool rope structures. Many of my favorites I wrote about are still around and yet since, much has changed. Stay and Play Snack Cafe closed down because at the time there wasn't enough downtown business to sustain it. Northgate doesn't have the same attractions it once did, and the Marry Durham movement of 2011 has (like many marriages) settled down, with nary a facebook update since 2015.
When I wrote the article four years ago, so much was new to Durham, like the SoDu Farmer's Market and the revamped Old North Durham park, with it's super cool rope structures. Many of my favorites I wrote about are still around and yet since, much has changed. Stay and Play Snack Cafe closed down because at the time there wasn't enough downtown business to sustain it. Northgate doesn't have the same attractions it once did, and the Marry Durham movement of 2011 has (like many marriages) settled down, with nary a facebook update since 2015.
As far as what's new for families? Well, after having been proudly profiled in Durham Magazine's Annual Women's issue, I'm happy to say I'll be writing for them in coming months, and taking the questions of Bull City parents for our new Q&A column. SoDu will continue with our blood drives, parent education on school choices, and community outreach with local charities like No Kid Hungry to make a difference in this city we know and love.
So many good things are ahead, and I'm very excited to share them with you. Because you - the reader, the posse member, the blog sponsor, YOU are the reason we were just voted BEST LOCAL FACEBOOK PAGE in IndyWeek's Best of the Triangle 2017. WE couldn't be the posse without YOU. What's the best hidden treasure of Durham? The smile as a parent connects with another for the first time, online or on the playground, and that's what I'm proud to help make happen.
So many good things are ahead, and I'm very excited to share them with you. Because you - the reader, the posse member, the blog sponsor, YOU are the reason we were just voted BEST LOCAL FACEBOOK PAGE in IndyWeek's Best of the Triangle 2017. WE couldn't be the posse without YOU. What's the best hidden treasure of Durham? The smile as a parent connects with another for the first time, online or on the playground, and that's what I'm proud to help make happen.
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