Photo: A stack of 1964 Reader’s Digests, a trip back in time. Courtesy of Brenda Bancroft. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net I read my mother’s Reader’s Digests from cover to cover. It’s hard find one today, but if you do, it will take you back to another era. And itContinue Reading
Photo – Winnsboro’s clock tower, the country’s longest-running clock By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net In my journeys across the South, Georgialina, in particular, I take note of clock towers, watchtowers, and steeples. How can I not. They command the eye. They set me to thinking. I’ve written many timesContinue Reading
By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net “As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world.” —William Gay, Provinces Of Night. “In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burningContinue Reading
Photo: A dirt road runs where an old locomotive steamed into Blackville. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net The road looks just like one on Granddad’s farm running into hardwoods where a spring bubbled in shade. Come sundown in Granddad’s battered old car, we’d ride that road through trees toContinue Reading
Time was, you could buy a casket from a country store. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net A do-it-yourself casket for a pet is as close most get today. I’ve heard of people paying a carpenter to build a casket for a dog, and I get it. Just placing aContinue Reading
Where a $20 bush axe killed the music. Jackson Station Rhythm & Blues Club October 1977—April 1990 Where the music died. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net Now and then a kind of gravity draws me to an old building. I’m driving south on SC Highway 25 near Hodges. HurryingContinue Reading
The one-room schoolhouse, legendary, and iconic. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net I visited the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina in Pendleton a few weeks back. If you’re a product of the rural South as I am, the museum takes you on a long walk down memory lane.Continue Reading
By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net Summer 2022, St. Simons Island, I’m sitting around the pool when my niece, Harper, and her friend, Stella, ask me to tell them a story. I had seen a photo of a tuxedo cat smoking four cigarettes at a time. I make up aContinue Reading
Photo: Beyond the fence, an open battlefield filled with longleaf pines in 1780e. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net Old battlefields seem more like parks. Trying to imagine cannon and cries of the wounded? Difficult, but not always. Farmers’ plows unearthed so many Minié balls at Shiloh, the soil turnedContinue Reading
Photo: Old Photographs By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net “You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” Cormac McCarthy’s words. Lord knows I’d like to forget some things, namely certain people I’ve known. Memory is a blessing and a curse but we areContinue Reading
Photo: Wilson’s Laundromat, The stories this place could tell. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net My first time home from college I took a bag of dirty laundry to Mom. She tossed it out the door. “You’re education has just begun. From now on wash your own clothes.” Thus didContinue Reading
No one hears the wind chimes. The parking lot stays empty. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net I call it the Roll Call of The Waiting. Inactive churches in need of friends. Friendship, Dothan Methodist, St. Simon’s Episcopal Church, Halfway Creek, Workman Methodist, Graham’s Methodist . . . the rollContinue Reading
By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net It’s a battle Britain claimed to have won, and yet it sent the Redcoats to Charleston and back to Britan ending their presence in the Carolina backcountry. I have visited six battlefields: Civil War battlefields Gettysburg and North Carolina’s Bentonville, Kettle Creek in GeorgiaContinue Reading
The white dorsal line means this is a female. No dewlap. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net I called it a green lizard. I couldn’t pronounce Anolis carolinensis back then. Heck, I hadn’t even heard of the term. But now something catches me flatfooted — I’m told little girls woreContinue Reading
By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net I never had time for golf, but I love the Masters. I never miss the Sunday round on TV. It almost always provides high drama. I speak for a lot of Georgians in the Central Savannah River Area when I say we take greatContinue Reading
Photo: More beauty lives in an old country store than the newest McMansion. By Tom Poland, A Southern WriterTomPoland.net Title my photo Struggle. Caption it: Dreams die along the back roads. First two sentences: Can’t even sit in a chair and look forward to better days. Stuck in reverse. AContinue Reading