Carolina Born & Tar Heel Blue

Some colors are simply colors.

And then there is Carolina blue.

This year, Kenan Stadium celebrates its 100th season, and when I sat down to paint it, I realized I wasn't really painting a football stadium at all.

I was painting family.

Mother and Daddy were both Carolina alumni. Long before my sister and I understood what a university meant, we understood that Carolina was ours.

Chapel Hill wasn't simply a place Mother and Daddy had gone to school. It was part of our family vocabulary.

It was walking Franklin Street and hearing their stories along the way. It was knowing there were places we went because they had gone there. Traditions weren't explained to us so much as we were folded right into them.

And, of course, there was the Rathskeller.

Mother and Daddy would take my sister and me down those steps and into that wonderfully dark Chapel Hill institution for its infamous Bowl of Cheese—which, to the rest of the civilized world, was lasagna.

But at the Rat, it was a Bowl of Cheese.

And that was that.

Those are the things I remember.

Franklin Street. The familiar storefronts. The particular energy of Chapel Hill on a Carolina weekend. Generations of Tar Heels walking the same sidewalks. Traditions that somehow belonged equally to Mother and Daddy, to us, and to all the Carolina families who had come before.

We weren't visiting their past.

They were giving it to us.

I was Carolina born and raised Tar Heel blue.

And apparently, I carried quite a bit of Mother into the bargain.

Mother could make anything beautiful. She could take a travel package of Kleenex tissues, wrap it as a stocking stuffer, add just the right ribbon, and make you believe there might be a brick of gold underneath the paper.

That was her gift.

She saw possibility in ordinary things.

I think that's where my creativity began.

Somewhere along the way, her eye for making things beautiful became my instinct to pick up a paintbrush. To fuss with a ribbon. To move something a quarter of an inch because it isn't quite right. To take an idea in my head and keep working until it becomes something I can hold in my hands.

And eventually, it became B. Rowe & Co.

Even our blue tells that story.

Of all the blues in all the world, there was never much question which one would find its way into the heart of this company.

Carolina blue.

The color of Mother and Daddy's alma mater. The color of Franklin Street and fall Saturdays. The color woven through childhood memories of Chapel Hill and family stories told and retold until you aren't quite sure where their memories end and yours begin.

The color of home.

So, for Kenan Stadium's 100th season, I painted it the way Carolina lives in my memory—soft around the edges, washed in Carolina blue, and surrounded by those beautiful Chapel Hill trees.

A watercolor for a centennial.

But also a little love letter to Mother and Daddy.

To two little girls being taken to the Rat for a Bowl of Cheese.

To Franklin Street and traditions passed down without anyone announcing that they were being passed down.

To creativity inherited from Mother.

To the place that has been part of our family's story for generations.

And to the blue that followed me all the way from Chapel Hill into B. Rowe & Co.

Because for me, Carolina has never been just a university.

Carolina is family.

The things we inherit aren't always tucked away in silver chests or written into wills. Sometimes they're a way of seeing beauty, a family tradition, a table at an old Chapel Hill restaurant, a street you could walk with your eyes closed, and a particular shade of blue that tells you exactly where you belong.

And as Mother and Daddy would certainly understand, there is really only one proper way to end this particular Grace Note: 

Go Heels. Beat Dook.

With love, Carolina blue & a Tar Heel born heart,

Emily