“That’s my youngest son, Jeffry, and his oldest son Jonathon.”
Mrs. Rebecca Thornton handed me a photograph and I looked down into the faces of two grown men, beaming at the camera and wearing Confederate uniforms the color of cannon smoke.
“They’re reenactors?” I asked, returning the grin of the two soldiers as I handed the photo back to her.
“Just that one year. Jeffry was in the uniform tent before the reenactment and the merchant asked him if he’d be able to stand in for a friend of his who couldn’t come at the last minute. Jeffry jumped at the chance and Jonathon joined him. They had a lot of fun.”
Mrs. Rebecca Thornton and I were sitting on the couch in a comfortable sitting room at the back corner of her home, one wall of which was mostly covered with bookshelves. Several lamps lit the corners of the room and a television sat dark and silent over to one side. Mrs. Thornton had told me upon entering that this was the “relax room”, implying it’s the room where she comes to chill out and read. She’s a self-professed bookworm.
“I’ve got a stack I’m trying to work through now,” she said. “And I’ve given away who knows how many.” I knew I had found a kindred spirit, owning more than seven bookcases full of books myself.
I had arrived at The Dwelling Place, Mrs. Thornton’s Four Oaks bed and breakfast just three hours earlier. She was unloading grocery bags of fresh produce from her car as I pulled in and parked. I jumped out to carry a watermelon and follow her into her kitchen. As I walked in, I was immediately smitten.
Wood floors and a wooden table with ladder-back chairs coexisted harmoniously with beautiful granite countertops and a fireplace I wanted to light, despite the 80-degree temperatures outside. This was a kitchen for biscuits and preserves, late-night talks, and early-morning breakfasts to fuel long days of work. I deeply inhaled one of my favorite smells: that of a house with history of family, food, and persistent, loving cleaning. It’s a smell I want my house to have one day.
“Just sit that right down there,” Mrs. Thornton said, indicating the watermelon I held and the hearth of the fireplace. A painting of a white two-story farmhouse above the mantel had Psalm 90:1 written near the top: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.”
I followed her through the kitchen, into the dining room, and across the hallway to the door of a spacious bedroom. “This is your room here”, she said.
A four-poster queen-sized bed covered in a white bedspread with embroidered pillows and backed by lace curtains invited me to drop everything and relax. An antique chair sat next to a fireplace and mantel, over which hung a framed needlepoint sampler with antique sconces on either side. Next to the chair was a marble-topped table and nearby, a mirrored wardrobe stood just outside the door of an adorable private bathroom. Striped wallpaper, sconces, a nightlight, and fresh towels and toiletries awaited me.
Could I move in permanently? I suppressed the desire to ask and instead took Mrs. Rebecca up on her invitation to join her on the Dwelling Place’s spacious wrap-around porch. Rocking chairs with floral cushions lined the porch and a swing hung at one end. We settled into wicker chairs on the opposite end of the porch, toward the garden.
“This end of the porch is the coolest place here,” Mrs. Thornton said. “There’s a good breeze. This was my daddy’s favorite place to sit.”
I could easily understand why. If I closed my eyes, I could have been sitting on the porch of an eastern North Carolina beach house, enjoying the near-constant buffeting of a soft breeze. Mosquitoes didn’t have much of a chance.
“I’ve had several people to say, ‘If you see me out there on the porch with a sandwich, I’m taking my dinner break.’ I said that’d be fine.” She smiled and looked out toward the garden where six young chickens were pecking around an azalea bush. She had let them out of the coop not long after my arrival, tempting them away from the organic vegetable garden and into the main part of the yard with leftover watermelon rinds. Their high-pitched peeping created a backdrop for our conversation that often made me smile and look around the back of my chair to see what they had found to get into. Amazingly, they never left the yard. But then again, who would want to?
Flowers bloomed everywhere. Three peach trees stood outside the vegetable garden, already full of yellow-green, golf ball-sized fruit.
“Those little peach trees came up from seed,” Mrs. Thornton said when I remarked on the number of peaches dangling from the branches. “Every year, they make enough peaches we don’t have to buy many.”
Nearby stood a tree covered in stunning orange blooms. This was a pomegranate tree, she informed me, though it yielded no edible fruit. It didn’t need to as far as I was concerned.
“Things in these flower beds all bloom at different times,” she commented as I pointed out the variety of blossoms in the brick-edged beds. “There’s usually something blooming out here all the time. And most of the time, I can find enough flowers out here to make a bouquet in several of the rooms.”
I’d seen at least two of these flower arrangements inside. Their simple beauty added to the house’s atmosphere of warmth and comfort.
The house itself is a two-storey bungalow, built in 1936. There is one bedroom for rent downstairs (the room I currently occupied) and one upstairs, both with their own private bathrooms. There are gorgeous hardwood floors throughout and charming antique décor.
“When did you and your husband buy this house?” I asked.
“We bought it from my parents in 1987,” she replied. “They bought it, I think, from Elijah Strickland and lived here 25 years before we bought it.”
“So when did you open as a B&B?” I asked.
“We opened in 1996. Four Oaks didn’t have a lodging place in it, except this. Still doesn’t.” She looked thoughtfully out toward traffic passing on highway 301 in front of the house. “The people of Four Oaks don’t use it much. It’ll usually be somebody from somewhere else.”
She and her husband, Ken, a well-loved Baptist preacher who passed away five years ago, had made the decision together to open their home as a bed and breakfast.
“We talked about it and we’d always loved people,” Mrs. Thornton said. “We’d been to bed and breakfasts several times and we kind of thought we’d like to try it. We had the room.”
There was a slight pause before she continued. “I’ve had people even recently to say ‘I didn’t know we had a bed and breakfast in Four Oaks’. I think more people know we’re here since Caleb (her grandson) made the sign.”
We looked out toward the handsome, cream-colored sign with black letters standing by the road in the front yard, next to a small lamppost.
“I had a little metal sign that hung on the lamppost when we first opened, but it got torn off several times by a storm and the last time, it was just ruined. So that’s when I asked Caleb if he’d make me another one.”
“How did you come up with the name?” I asked.
“My daughter Beebee and I were riding to Henderson one day and she said, ‘Mama, you’ve got to hurry up and get a name for the place,’ because she knows I usually name everything – lizards and frogs and everything else around here.”
We laughed and looked over at a large red hen named Little Red, currently pecking around at the foot of the porch steps, before she continued.
“And I said, ‘I can’t decide what I want it to be. I want it to be warm and inviting but I don’t want it to be silly.’ So Beebee said, ‘Whenever Grandma and Granddaddy would go somewhere, after Granddaddy had stayed as long as he thought they ought to stay and they were ready to go home, he would always say ‘Lela, let’s go to the dwelling house.’ So she said, ‘Why don’t you name it the Dwelling Place?’
“So that’s how it got its name,” she said. “And there’s also the verse of scripture (Psalm 91:1) that says ‘He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty’.”
There was another thoughtful pause as we watched Little Red and listened to the younger chickens in the shrubs behind me.
“That’s kind of been what I’ve trusted the whole time to keep us safe,” she said. “That the Lord’s presence would be here. I’ve had a lot of people say they’ve never stayed in a Christian bed and breakfast before. And even though we are a Christian establishment, we do not push our faith on people.” She smiled. “But we usually eat with our guests and we always have a blessing.”
Earlier, I had flipped through the Dwelling Place’s guest notebook where guests can leave their names and addresses and often left notes of gratitude for the Thorntons. I saw entries from people all over the country and was curious about how people find her. I had noticed in the weeks prior that she didn’t have a website.
“Most people now find me by GPS,” she explained. “They used to find me by telephone. That was in the days before the Internet and I chose not to do the Internet – I know I’m behind the times.” She waved a hand dismissively.
“Do you stay pretty busy?” I asked.
“It’s funny,” she said. “Sometimes you’ll have a whole lot of people and then you might go a long time and nobody’ll come. But I know if I was on the Internet, I’d probably have somebody every night. At my age, I can’t do all the things I used to do when we first opened up.”
She could’ve fooled me. She seemed at least as active as me, probably more. Her cooking and cleaning schedule alone intimidated me, yet she managed to keep everything running in tip-top shape at all times with ease. After all, you never could tell when an inspector would drop by, or what they’d check.
“I’ve had one fellow yank the covers off the beds to make sure they’d been changed,” she remarked with a grin. “And pulled out the drawers to see if the linens inside had been cleaned. One man even got down on the floor with a flashlight to check the crevice between the counter and the refrigerator.”
Yet she’s only been graded below 100 once. The first inspector to visit her was on his first day on the job and the only thing he could find to criticize was the water temperature in the kitchen.
“He said it was too hot,” she shook her head. “I told him we have to keep the water hot to wash the dishes, but he said it could scald a child.”
She adjusted the water temperature accordingly and has had no criticism since.
Mrs. Thornton has guests who return to stay with her repeatedly, sometimes year after year.
“Some of them keep coming back over and over and over,” she remarked. She went on to tell me of one guest who came to stay a week, then extended it to a month, then to six weeks. This woman, who came to be a dear friend, wound up staying at the Dwelling Place for six and a half years. Her name is Faye and she’s due to visit from Germany this summer. “She calls this home,” Mrs. Thornton said.
“Do you ever close or are you open year round?” I asked.
“I don’t close, even at Christmas time, because people need a place to stay at Christmas,” she said. “We just incorporate them in with our family.”
Later that evening, after looking at photographs and talking in the book-filled sitting room, Mrs. Rebecca, as I came to call her, offered me a treat before bed. We went into the kitchen where she sat a plate of strawberry shortcake with whipped cream on the table in front of me. She settled in with a plate of her own and we spent a while longer in comfortable chat before heading to bed.
I woke the next morning to the smell of bacon and coffee. Once up and dressed for the day, I wandered into the kitchen to find Sam, the second of Mrs. Rebecca’s three sons, at the kitchen table, making a sign for the upcoming town-wide yard sale Father’s Day weekend. He greeted me cheerfully and told me how, at yard sales in years past, he’d spent time walking his son Caleb’s basset hound, Samson, around to greet visitors.
Sam, Caleb, and Samson are all permanent residents at the Dwelling Place, contributing their gardening and maintenance skills. I had visited Samson the night before in the barn out back, his eyes meeting mine with a doleful gaze as I walked in. I’m not sure basset hounds have any other way to look. He had risen to his feet with his tail wagging and we soon became friends.
Sam joined Mrs. Rebecca and I in the dining room for breakfast, the table of which was beautifully decorated with lace over a rose tablecloth, flowers, and glass candleholders. It reminded me of a tearoom in Sanford I loved to visit.
Breakfast was Mrs. Rebecca’s special baked oatmeal with fresh-cut fruit, bacon, coffee, and orange juice. As someone who often gets breakfast through a drive-thru window, I was thrilled. We all sat down at the table together and, after Sam returned thanks, began to eat. Everything was delicious.
Later that morning, back out on the front porch, Mrs. Rebecca and I talked about a children’s book she’d written about the bed and breakfast.
“The name of it is Dorcas and Drucilla at the B&B,” she said. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“The first chickens we had were called Dorcas and Drucilla and it’s their story,” she continued. “Used to be, I’d read that story to everybody who stayed here. It’s the story of those chickens coming here to live and of the dog we had at that particular time. She’d look at us feeding the chickens and she seemed to be thinking, ‘Why aren’t they giving me some of those old collard scraps?’ So one day, we gave her a whole collard stalk, root and all.” She smiled at the memory. “She tried to get that collard stalk in her house and it wouldn’t fit. She pushed and turned, but couldn’t get it to go in. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
We shared a laugh over this mental picture. I had no idea what kind of dog was in the story, but I was picturing the mournful face of Samson.
There was a moment of quiet in which we both sat comfortably, composing our own mental pictures and just enjoying each others’ company. The breeze blew over us along the wide porch and birds sang peacefully in the nearby dogwood trees. I took a deep breath and watched a robin land on a nearby branch.
Mrs. Rebecca smiled once again and said, “The story goes on to say at the end that everything likes to be loved and that God has a special purpose for everything.”