LETTER TO THE EDITOR: In this COVID-19 crisis, we have to protect ourselves and others
Protests to eliminate all “stay at home” orders are growing. No government has the right or the authority to make them stay at home. Their lives have become chaos, confusion, anxiety and frustration. They can’t provide food or shelter for their families. They are angry and fighting to survive. They want and demand their freedom. They can’t rage at the invisible killer, coronavirus; they can only rage at government. Are the “stay at...
Living on the West End: The Old Mill
Editor’s note: This is a reprint of a Bill Shepard column that was published last year. By Bill Shepard I remember the old mill! How could I forget? For as long as I have a mind to remember, I will remember the Old Giant and the part it played in my life. I remember the sound, early in the morning, coming from the old mill. It was like a fog-horn on a ship, lost at sea! It was so loud that it rattled the window panes in our small...
Had Harry sat here
By Tom Poland Rain, rain and more rain. It hasn’t been a biblical 40 days and 40 nights but sure seems like it. A record sopping-wet winter has creeks running high, swift and heavy with silt. Pockmarks dapple a drift of rain-pelted sand, and more rain’s coming but that old fisherman’s chair refuses to be swept downstream. It holds wayward limbs and leaves, and for me, memories of a youth spent fishing. This creek would have suited a...
High as a Georgia pine
By Tom Poland The South and its vernacular, love it and never lose it. Seems to me, we have the finest, most colorful expressions. Yes, Southerners have a flair for talking with flair. I was in Dad’s saw shop on a blazing hot Saturday when a man stumbled in drunk. He wore striped overalls like some train engineer. When he stumbled out Dad said, “That man was as high as a Georgia pine.” Similes and colorful archaic words don’t get much...
When days are dark
By Bill Shepard (“When Days are Dark” is a timely message to my readers. I have sent this message into many homes over a long period of time. (It recently entered my thinking to share it with readers of my column in this paper. No one would disagree that we are experiencing dark days, and some no doubt more and differently than others. (We are a people groping in darkness, searching for answers to questions never asked before. Those...
LIVING ON PURPOSE: Dropping the stones, searching within
By Bill Holland Those who have never experienced an addiction can seem unsympathetic and uncaring. Why? There are several reasons, like thinking that self-inflicting destruction does not deserve compassion, or maybe it’s the arrogance of thinking they themselves would never be so blind to let something like that happen to them. I feel the greater consideration would be, “Is becoming captured in the dependency of a chemical more of a...