Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of 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. 

Before we learned our times tables or how to make a proper cursive capital Q, we learned the Pledge of Allegiance, 20 of us first graders in saddle shoes and plaid jumpers, standing at attention before the American flag in the corner of our classroom. 1976. The year of the Bicentennial.

We didn’t yet know all the states. We couldn’t yet tell time. But we knew how to go quiet. We knew how to press our palms flat against our hearts, how to keep our eyes on the flag and recite the words together.

Years later, I’d swing into the high school parking lot, racing the bell, and I’d notice the flag above the brick facade as I rushed past, a constant on its pole. At baseball games at McCrary Park, when the loudspeaker crackled and the first notes of the national anthem rose tinny over the field, a hush moved through the bleachers. Ball caps came off. Everyone stood. No one told us to stop talking; we just did.

I think about the places across North Carolina where the sight of a flag causes us to pause. To stand still. To look up.

At the Carolina Field of Honor in Kernersville, American flags flank the walkway to a soaring granite obelisk. At Chimney Rock State Park, a 475-square-foot flag unfurls from the top of the mountain, as much a landmark as the stone monolith beneath it. Last year, on the Battleship North Carolina in Wilmington, 250 flags were raised to commemorate the anniversaries of the Marine Corps and the Navy — red, white, and blue, bright against the warship’s haze gray.

I see flags lifting along the waterfront in Beaufort, New Bern, and Southport, fabric seeming to rise and fall with the tides. In Asheboro, Shelby, and Roxboro, flags lean from porch posts, family heirlooms catching the first light. Outside high school stadiums on Friday nights. Beside Little League fields. In front of courthouses with columns and clock towers. At car dealerships and feed-and-seed stores and church cemeteries set amid old oaks and pines. I see small flags poking up from the ground beside gravestones.

From my home in Greensboro, the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park isn’t far. In the spring, when the dogwoods begin to bloom and the light lingers longer in the afternoon, I walk those quiet paths and try to listen for the sounds that once split this air. The thunder of guns and horse hooves, the shouts and scrambling of men. The landscape where I often spot deer and listen for birdsong looks gentle now. It was not always so.

Two hundred and fifty years is a long stretch of road, a long measure of time. Longer than the Blue Ridge Parkway as it curves past overlook after overlook. Longer than any summer we were sure would last forever.

This state has watched mills rise and shutter, rivers flood and recede. We’ve heard tobacco warehouses ring out with auctioneers’ chants and then fall silent. Textiles have given way to tech, fields turned to factories, factories to research parks.

And still, at a ball game, at a memorial, in a classroom somewhere, we raise our hands to our hearts.

We were children when we first spoke those words.

But here we are, 250 years on, still rising to our feet. Still looking up. Still believing that this red-clay, salt-air, mountain-shadowed state — one patch in a field of 50 — is worth our full attention, our full gratitude, our full devotion.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief