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Sand in My Shoes Down Home Press It was a romantic vision that brought Katharine Ball Ripley and her dashing, ex-army officer husband, Clements, to North Carolina's Sandhills in 1921. I could see a long, low house with a terrace wall, and a saddle-bred horse, and me standing there ready to put my foot up in the stirrup. Late summer afternoons, and Clem and me galloping down a sand road together .... "Work in the fields together." Roll the phrase around on your tongue. Doesn't it sound romantic? A pale yellow smock, a big sunhat, and a basket of red peaches worth—well, maybe not their weight in gold—swinging on my arm. It just didn't work out that way. But this warm and wonderful book, first published to great acclaim in 1931, did come out of the seven years the Ripleys spent trying to get rich growing peaches. The first book in Down Home Press' Carolina Classics™ series, it is a charming and entertaining chronicle of a memorable segment of Sandhills history. After leaving the Sandhills, Katharine and Clements Ripley moved to Charleston, where her father was editor of the News and Courier. There she wrote a second non-fiction book, Sand Dollars, as well as a novel, Crowded House. Clements Ripley became a popular novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter. Katharine died in 1955, a year after her husband.
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