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. 

Five eggs waited on the kitchen table, warming in the morning light beside a cup of milk and a stainless steel bowl into which three cups of flour — Swans Down, always Swans Down — had already been sifted, piled into a small white mountain.

On this day, my grandmother would be making a pound cake. Not for dessert — that was usually pie, chess or chocolate meringue — but the kind of cake reserved for company, an offering of appreciation for anyone who stopped by.

There were never berries on this cake. No dusting of powdered sugar. No whipped cream. No icing at all. My grandmother’s pound cake needed no gussying up. Its beauty was in the crumb, tight-grained and tender, a texture beaten into being, the batter climbing up the sides of the Mixmaster beaters she always handed to me to lick. The taste of my childhood.

I hadn’t seen a cake like that in decades. Then, one morning at the office, Debbie Rumley, one of our circulation representatives, walked in carrying a pound cake — a simple gesture on an ordinary workday. The sight of it stopped me cold. Same height as the one I remembered. Same browned, crisp edges where the top met the pan. Same perfect, tight crumb — my grandmother’s cake exactly, somehow reborn from Debbie’s well-used church cookbook from Fairfield United Methodist in High Point. One bite took me straight back to my grandmother’s kitchen.

Debbie has been at Our State for more than 22 years. She met her husband, Mark, on a mission trip, and together they raised three children — years shaped by church suppers and school schedules, those everyday details that hold a family together. When the children grew older, Debbie was ready for something new, and that’s when she walked through our doors.

At the magazine, she’s the voice so many readers hear when they call about subscription renewals, missed issues, changes of address, stories that stirred something in them, articles they clipped years ago and can’t quite locate anymore. She opens envelopes, too, stacks of them, many holding handwritten notes from readers who prefer pen and paper to anything online.

She answers dozens of calls a day and speaks with each person as if she’s known them forever, signing off with her gentle “bye-bye,” soft as a lullaby. And suddenly, I’m elsewhere — in another house, another time.

My grandmother had three telephones in her small home: one by her bed, one on the kitchen wall, one by her favorite chair. She was always ready to answer, always rising to meet a ring, always eager to open the door to a neighbor or someone from church. She lived her life in a state of welcome.

I think about her often as I travel North Carolina, catching glimpses of the quiet acts of kindness and hospitality that shape this state. I see her again in people like Debbie, who carry forward the everyday grace my grandmother practiced without effort, the kind that lets someone walk in with a pound cake and, for a moment, make a whole room feel like home.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief