By Tabitha Evans Moore
EDITOR & PUBLISHER

It’s Thursday, and I’ve popped by the Dollar General for a couple of essentials that got left off my weekend shopping trip. Behind me is a group of giggling senior girls each holding the largest and least expensive packs of the toilet paper the DG sells. I give them a knowing look, pay for my items, then slap an extra twenty on the counter.

“Your first value pack is on me,” I joke. “That’s protection money. You don’t know where I live.”

The group gives me a collective giggle and smile, then we each go our separate ways.

I spot my first one the next morning on my morning drive. A big hardwood out front, still dripping white, the early light coming through it in long ribbons. Somebody had done good work the night before — the rolls thrown high enough to drape the top branches, the kind of throw that takes a running start and a little bit of love. I slowed down the way you slow for something pretty. Then a crow in the middle of the road reminded me I had somewhere to be.

If you’re from somewhere else, you’d call it what it looks like: a mess. Vandalism, even. Somebody’s tree wearing a week’s worth of toilet paper, and somebody else’s Saturday about to be spent pulling it down with a rake and a garden hose.

But that’s not what it is. Not here. In a small town, a rolled yard is a love letter.

Ask around Moore County and you’ll learn the unwritten grammar of it fast enough. You don’t roll just anybody. You roll the homecoming queen and the boy who finally made the starting lineup. You roll the teacher everybody loved and the girl whose friends wanted her to wake up laughing. The yard that gets rolled is almost always the yard of someone who is, for a night, the center of something. It arrives in the fall, when the football schedule sets the whole town’s calendar, and it says — in the only language teenagers trust — you count.

There are rules, too, even if nobody’s ever written them down. You go at night. You don’t touch the house, just the trees. You don’t do real damage, and some unspoken honor code says the truly decent among us come back and help clean up, or at least own up to it with a grin. It’s mischief with manners. Trouble that knows where the line is.

When my dad was a kid, he and my grandfather battled with Tommy and Doug Price in a sort of tit-for-tat royale. One year, the Price’s got my grandfather’s house so good it looked like it’d snowed in October. My grandfather and dad meticulously picked up every piece, placed it in a large cardboard box, and gave it to the Price’s for Christmas.

As a teenager, my posse and I stuck up to my grandfather’s house on Valley View all set to whammy him. Apparently, teenage girls aren’t all that stealth. He flanked us from the side with the garden hose. We fled down Craig Street giggling to our getaway car without getting the opportunity to launch the first roll. I can still see the big grin on his face. When I came over for Sunday lunch, neither of us mentioned it.

One year, Chris Hinkle and his crew made trees to stake in my front yard to roll because we’d recently built the house, and it wasn’t yet landscaped. Chris distracted my mom out front while his buddy, Chris Hughes, entered from the side door they knew would be unlocked, and rolled the bathroom and my bedroom. I game home from cheerleading practice to a flabbergasted Linda Gayle and toilet paper spinning from my ceiling fan. I wasn’t mad about it.

I won’t pretend it’s all charming. Somebody has always got to clean it up, and it’s usually not the somebody who threw it. Wet paper after an overnight rain doesn’t rake — it comes down in gray strings, or it doesn’t come down at all and hangs in the high branches until a spring wind finally takes pity. There are mornings a rolled yard is less an honor than a chore with your name on it. Ask anyone who’s stood under a dripping tree at 7 a.m. with a leaf rake and a cup of coffee going cold on the porch rail.

And yet. The people I know who’ve been rolled mostly tell the story the same way — half complaint, all pride. They remember the year, the occasion, sometimes even who they’re pretty sure did it. The cleanup fades. The being-chosen doesn’t.

I thought about all of that driving past that dripping tree this morning, on my way to somewhere that suddenly felt less urgent. From the road it looked like a mess. But I know this town, and I know better. Somewhere in that house is a person who woke up, looked out the window, and understood exactly what it meant.

It meant somebody loves you. Now go get the rake. •

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