If you’ve eaten in one of the 90 restaurants across the state that use cheese from Goat Lady Dairy, you’ve probably sampled Carrie’s work. As a cheese maker for the Climax farm, she starts her day at 6am to produce the 40,000 pounds of cheese Goat Lady sells each year, from the fresh garlic-chive Chevre to the mold-ripened Camembert. Yet the lifelong Climax resident admits she’d never tasted goat cheese when she started with the dairy 12 years ago, first helping with the monthly dinners and then as an intern. The former stay-at-home mom and accounting student learned her craft from Ginnie Tate, the original Goat Lady, and today shares a bond with the Tate family that transcends the boss-employee relationship. “You have two types of family -- you have the family that you’re born with and the family you get to choose,” she says. “We kind of chose each other.”
 

Imagine wanting what you already have.”

Her words stop me cold, freeze my deep and purposeful breathing.

“What,” I think, “did that crazy hippie lady just say?”

I try to resume the assigned task, mindfully inhaling the chilled air of the fitness center and balancing my sharp sitz bones on a borrowed blue cushion. I will my swirling mind to settle softly like a leaf to the ground. But Mary Love continues to hijack my piss-poor attempts at being in the now.

Need your dog walked, your kitchen organized and your business promoted? Call Leigh Anne and Paula. The owners of You Time Solutions (youtimesolutions.com) coined the phrase lifestyle logistics to describe their array of services, which cover everything from adjusting a chair to helping launch a nonprofit. “We are the solution for people’s busy lifestyle,” says Paula, who founded the company in 2007. “We’re the way to get them from point A, which is ridiculously busy, to point B, which is relaxed.” Adds Leigh Anne, “We make time for what they love to do.” From helping an Alzheimer’s patient get dressed to preventing a house fire, the pair strive to bring order to chaos, and at a price that’s budget-friendly. But for these ladies, it’s a labor of love. Says Paula, “We have this ridiculous passion, and I would say it’s absurd, to just make people’s lives easier.”
 

When I picked up Lori Gottlieb’s book, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, which came out in February, it was with skepticism. I have spent the last three years interviewing dozens and dozens of single 30-something women around the country for Seeking Happily Ever After, a feature-length documentary that I’m making with Kerry David about this generation’s struggle to redefine the fairytale. We look at why the number of never-married 30-something women in the U.S.

When we were engaged to be married, back in the halcyon days of early 2001, my husband and I participated in an elaborate mating ritual that has taken hold deep within American culture. We registered for gifts. Daily cutlery, heavy silver forks, All-Clad pots in several different sizes, formal china for all those state dinners we would be serving, gravy boats, nesting mixing bowls and a much-longed-for salad spinner that retailed for $25.99. Among this orgy of conspicuous consumption was a set of everyday dinnerware from Villeroy and Boch.

Paparazzi
Battleground Avenue
336.282.5629

This cuff bracelet was a gift from my 13-year-old stepdaughter Victoria, who has very good taste. She bought it at Tranquilities in Greensboro.
Nancy, photographer