Down Homers
. . . Tar Heels You Ought to Know —
HEATHER COMES HOME
Heather Ross Miller has many
talents . . . not the least of which is
being able to make the world’s best iced
tea. She serves it in a thick glass with
a pottery coaster, huge chunks of
lemon and her own special sugar.
The Miller living room at 40 Elm
Street in Badin. North Carolina is a
comfortable place of Queen Anne
chairs, a mirror over the piano,
polished coffee table with some favorite
books of the family beside a huge
Triton's Horn shell found by Clyde
Miller when he was in Hawaii with the
Navy, and a dandelion paperweight
given Heather by some Pfeiffer stu¬
dents.
Outside the house and across the
front lawn is a dying apple tree that
has served as a banquet for woodpeck¬
ers. At the end of the street, beyond
some Kudzu covered woods, is a steep
overlook to Badin Lake, where eleven
year old Kirk Miller spent his summer.
"He lived in that lake," laughs Heather,
“I thought he was going to turn into a
tadpole."
Heather's desk, a monstrous oak
one. blocks the front door. "Nobody
ever used that door anyway," says
Heather. "They all take the sidedoor
next to the driveway. Besides, this spot
was well lighted." She points to two
windows to the right of the desk which
is amazingly neat and book stacked.
She is currently working on her seventh
book ... a novel, and has only recently
finished reading and reviewing twenty
five manuscripts for the Poets and
Writers Association in New York.
Heather is the East Coast representa¬
tive.
Five of Heather's books were writ¬
ten while she lived in Bladen County
at Singletary Lake State Park where
her husband was superintendent for
twelve years. She also kept a nature
journal. Coming back to Badin seemed
a natural thing for Heather to do. "We
moved in the dead of winter. There was
no greeting committee. I had a cold
house, several hundred boxes, and a
teaching job at Stanly Tech to start in
three days."
” Badin and Stanly County have been
the setting for all her novels. "It’s
home," she says. "It's always been
home."
The large white two-storey house
where Heather grew up is down the
street from where she now lives. Her
HcolKfr Rom Mille» and ton Kifk’t dog Som.
( photos by Don Corrick I
Father. Fred Ross, who wrote Jackson
Mahaffey. which won a Houghton-
Mifflin Literary Fellowship award,
built the house on the corner. "I lived
there until 1 went off to school."
Heather attended the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro and
studied under Randall Jarrell. She still
prefers to call it "Women’s College"
. . . "UNCO sounds so ugly." she says.
Last year. Melissa, who’s a tall,
blonde fourteen, and Kirk, attended
Heather’s old Badin school. Now only
an elementary school. Heather went
twelve years there and was a cheer¬
leader (among many other activities.)
"When I took my children in to regis¬
ter, it brought back a lot of memories.
Some of my old teachers were still there
and they hadn’t changed a bit . . . or
seemed to have gotten any older. It
was like stepping back in time."
Badin. the town itself, was the setting
for Heather's book, Tenants of the
House, which won the 1966 Sir
Walter Raleigh award for the best fic¬
tion by a North Carolina writer.
Cedar Grove, a section in southern
Stanly County was the home of her
Ross grandparents, and the setting for
Edge of the Woods, her first novel,
published when she was twenty one.
It was well received and widely ac¬
claimed.
Heather has a drawing of a horse
done by her Grandmother Jenny Ross
when she was eleven. "She w’as the
artistic one." Heather says, "She saw
THE STATE. March 1975
27
