The Bear Hunt

The Bear Hunt

Elizabeth pulled an apple cake from the oven and set it on the table. It was beautiful and it made the whole house smell good. She glanced out her kitchen window at the cloudy spring day and did a double take.  A bear! A bear was waddling quickly into the woods with two small cubs […]

Grandma Bohannon

I remember a story my mother told me a long time ago about a sign of spring she and her family always looked forward to when she was a child at Etta Bend. As surely as the new wildflowers popped up, a small figure with wispy gray hair would appear on the road leading to […]

In the Last Century

Come with me for a trip into history and delve into a 1921 issue of The Etude, Presser’s Musical Magazine. I’m not sure where I bought this magazine but it’s fascinating because it’s from a much different era of America. Woodrow Wilson was President that year; that is, until March 4 when Warren G. Harding […]

Head of the Family

His hat hangs on a peg in my hallway. It’s not the Stetson he wore on special occasions. This one has sweat marks, and a small spot of oil. It’s the one he wore every day as he mowed lawns, drove to the sale barn, or any time he went out the door. He never […]

A Land of Many Springs

A Land of Many Springs

My mother was born in 1906. She had many memories of Cherokee County, the way it was when she was a child. One of the things she remembered was the abundance of fresh, clean water. These are her words, her story as she told it to me: Green country used to be a land of […]

A Century and a Half Ago

Dignity in defeat and graciousness in victory. I’ve often wished, if I could go back in time, that I might have been present that day, April 9, 1865, in the parlor of Wilmer McLean of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. I would have liked to see General Robert E. Lee, tall, erect, and dignified, dressed in […]