Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of six Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

Because it would be good for me, they said, my parents sent me off to Camp Cedarwood in Asheboro, where I spent the first few days stumbling through activities I’d never master: fumbling with a bow that sent every arrow into the dirt, circling endlessly around a tetherball pole, bouncing stiffly on a trampoline. At the end of the week, a well-meaning counselor hoisted me onto a horse, an enormous creature with dark, soulful eyes that seemed to see right through me.

The horse clomped forward, the counselor gripping the reins, while I clung desperately to the saddle. My throat tightened, my face burned, and, before I could stop them, tears — hot, stinging — poured down my face. The horse was too tall, the moment too much, and I cried until they let me down, until my feet met solid ground, and I begged to go home.

Some 40 years later, I tried again. At a dude ranch in Burnsville, I climbed onto another horse, willing myself to focus on the trail ahead, on the cadence of hooves on packed earth.

People don’t talk much on horseback. Silence surrounds you, but it isn’t empty. It’s layered and alive: the faint creak of saddle leather shifting with each step; the slow, measured exhale of the horse’s breath; the brittle crack of twigs snapping underfoot. Those small, certain sounds steadied me, and I settled into the moment.

I never quite became a lover of horses, but I fell in love with the landscapes they inhabit, places marked by a quiet grace. I’ve found this calm in Southern Pines, where sandy paths carry the region’s equestrian history. I’ve felt it in DuPont Forest, where hikers and riders share wide trails and the land itself sets the pace. And I’ve found it again in the Foothills, where the land rises gently, where horses graze with the ease of creatures unburdened by the press of time.

These places remind me of home.

In rural Randolph County, where I grew up, pastures lay unbroken, absorbing the noise of the world. Evenings were filled with small, quiet sounds: the low call of a whippoorwill at dusk, the faint hum of a tractor in a far-off field.

I was quiet, too, as only children often are, content to sit and listen, to watch and wonder.

My father was quiet in his way, attuned to the rhythms of his day. In his workshop in the garage, surrounded by scent of sawdust, he sat for hours, smoothing the edges of a wooden birdhouse with sandpaper. In the mornings, he stirred his coffee slowly. In the evenings, he stood at the back door, hands in his pockets, his gaze drifting across the yard, watching as the light fell long and low over the grass.

My grandmother was the same. Her quiet was patient, cultivated over a lifetime. In her garden, she moved lightly, her hands sifting the soil. She rocked gently in her chair, her needlepoint resting across her lap. She spoke softly. She prayed wordlessly.

Silence, I’ve come to understand, is not absence but presence. It makes room for small things to speak.

In these still spaces, I think of those who taught me silence, who showed me how to listen. And in the quiet, I can still hear them.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief