🗞️ Kernersville Medical Center just delivered its 1,000th baby

🗞️ East Forsyth shut out Glenn, and the defenses decided it

🗞️ The blood drive that comes to the garden

🗞️ A man was sentenced to more than 36 years in a 2022 killing

☀️ Sunny | High: 86°F | Low: 60°F

Monday opens the week with nothing at all in the way. Look for full sun, a high near 86 and a light northwest wind, with rain nowhere on the board. Monday night eases down to around 60 and turns partly cloudy, which is another good night to leave a window open. Tuesday holds the pattern at sunny and 85, and Wednesday climbs to 87 before it finally breaks: a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms arrives after 8 PM Wednesday, and Thursday carries a 60 percent chance with a high near 86. Three dry days first, though, and we will take them.

A baby boy born Friday night arrived with a round number attached to him.

A baby born Friday, Aug. 21 at Novant Health Kernersville Medical Center was the 1,000th delivered since the hospital's labor and delivery unit opened in March 2024. Baby boy Siddharth arrived at 9:57 p.m., weighing 7 pounds and 0.2 ounce and measuring 19¾ inches long. His parents are Janki and Crisp Patel.

A thousand deliveries in about two and a half years is a real pace for a unit that is still fairly new. It is also worth noticing where the Patels came from. They live in High Point, which is a good half hour down the road, and they came here to have their son.

The milestone lands in a busy stretch for the hospital. We wrote yesterday about the state hearing held here on four competing Certificate of Need applications for 103 new acute care hospital beds, one of which is Novant Health Kernersville Medical Center's request for up to 40 more. Those are acute care beds rather than maternity beds, so the two matters are separate — but they point at the same building, and at a hospital that keeps getting busier.

Congratulations to the Patels, and to a unit that has now had a thousand of these mornings.

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The crosstown game moved up a day, and then almost nothing moved at all.

The visiting East Forsyth varsity football team beat Glenn 13-0 on Thursday night in what The Kernersville News called a defensive battle between the crosstown rivals. The game had been rescheduled from Friday because of predicted heavy rain.

The yardage is the story. East Forsyth held Glenn to 35 yards rushing on 34 attempts, which works out to about a yard a carry, and to seven yards passing on nine attempts. The Eagles also came away with an interception.

Glenn's defense was not far behind. The Bobcats held East Forsyth to 146 yards rushing on 34 attempts and 83 yards passing on 20 attempts, forced a fumble and picked off a pass of their own. Thirteen points is a thin return on all that field, which is rather the point. This one belonged to the units that do not score.

The two schools do not have to wait long for a rematch of sorts. Glenn plays at East Forsyth in volleyball tonight at 6:30. On the football side, East Forsyth hosts Northern Guilford on Friday at 7 for its home opener, and Glenn hosts Parkland on Sept. 4.

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There is a shortage on, and one of the prettiest rooms in town is opening up for it.

The American Red Cross is holding a blood drive at Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden on Monday, Aug. 31, from 11 AM to 3 PM. The garden's own announcement is two sentences long and does not waste either of them. "The American Red Cross is experiencing a blood shortage," it reads. "Help save a life by donating blood." You can book an appointment ahead of time through the Red Cross, or you can walk in on the day — the garden says walk-ins are accepted.

It is worth pausing on the venue. Ciener sits at 215 S. Main St., a few steps off the middle of town, and it has quietly become one of the rooms Kernersville borrows for things that have nothing to do with plants. In the next two weeks alone the garden hosts a free Kindermusik playdate for children up to age 5, a free evening lecture, and this. A botanical garden is not the obvious place to give blood. It may be the pleasantest.

If the drive gets you through the gate for the first time, the garden has a full early September. Growing Awareness, a free talk on how ozone gardens let us see the air we breathe, runs Sept. 2 from 5:30 to 6:30 PM, asks you to register and has limited seats. Storytime in the Garden returns Sept. 8, and a basic sketching class with Amy Cruz follows Sept. 11.

Giving blood is an unglamorous errand. This one comes with a garden attached, which is about as good a trade as an errand is ever going to offer you. The drive runs the full four hours.

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A case that has been open for four years closed last week with a guilty plea.

Jason O'Dell Billings, 48, was sentenced Thursday to more than 36 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the 2022 death of Thomas Francis Cummings V, 62. The Kernersville News describes Cummings as the Kernersville-area man "who provided him a job and a place to live."

Billings also pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon and to possession of a controlled substance on jail premises.

Beyond that, the account available to us is thin. It does not describe how Cummings died, name the court, or set out the terms of the plea, and we are not going to fill those gaps in with guesses. What is established is the shape of it: a guilty plea, a second-degree murder conviction, and a sentence of more than 36 years for the death of a man who had taken Billings in.

The death was in 2022. The sentence came last week. Four years is a long time for a case to sit, and it is easy for one to slip out of view in between, which is reason enough to note it when it closes.

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