After the Storm
I hadn’t even heard of Hurricane Helene until a few days before it hit. That’s unusual. Normally, there is a week or more of weather reports saying something is developing somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean that may turn into a tropical storm or a full-fledged hurricane. We always pay attention to hurricane news, even though we live so far inland in Georgia that hurricanes usually don’t affect us directly. There have been some exceptions, of course, such as Hurricane Irma, [...]
A new candidate has a new agenda
During a visit with our daughter eight years ago, conversation turned to the coming election, and inspired a tongue-in-cheek column in which I appointed members of my family—myself included—to different government positions. Some of what I said is as relevant today as it was then, so I’m printing it again. I hope you enjoy it. The Department of Nice. That’s the federal agency I’m going to be in charge of after my daughter is elected president. My husband and I [...]
Time for a Change
Labor Day weekend is here. I no longer look at it as the end of the summer season, but as the start of the season of transitions. Kids and their parents are transitioning from summer to school. Depending on where you live, the weather is transitioning from unbearably hot and humid to—well, a little less so. And soon it will transition to comfortable, then to cool, to chilly, to cold, and finally to downright frigid. Trees start transitioning from their [...]
A Summer Social
“I feel like I’m in a Norman Rockwell painting,” I said. The lady behind the counter, the one dishing out homemade peach ice cream, laughed. “Boy, that brings back memories,” she said. I was at an Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Social sponsored by Eatonton’s Old School History Museum, whose tag line is “Preserving the past for the future.” When I first got to the event, I said hello to a friend who was handing out lemonade near the front door of [...]
On the Road Again
Although we’ve been home for a few weeks now, I’m still humming the Simon & Garfunkel song that starts out, “Gee but it’s great to be back home.” After three weeks on the road and almost 4,000 miles on the odometer, it was, indeed, great to be back home. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. In the three weeks we were gone, my husband and I visited with family in Chicago and Minnesota, then drove down to Dallas [...]