January 20, 2025

We drove by Plains, Ga., a couple of years ago as we headed north through the state from Gulf Coast Florida. We were on our way to Milledgeville to see the home of writer Flannery O’Connor, like Jimmy Carter, a diehard Peach State native. At the time we didn’t seriously consider a detour through Plains. I’d like to see the place.

The Carter funeral last week was a dignified final point of a dignified life, a few days before today’s Trump inauguration, which promises, putting it mildly, a far different approach to government.

Before passing the Plains exit we spent the night in Valdosta, a modest I-75 stop just above the Georgia-Florida line. The next intermediate marker was Macon, where we left the interstate and weaved through backwoods central-east Georgia into pretty Milledgeville, home of the oddly named Georgia College and State University.

We walked a bit downtown then stopped at the O’Connor home. We got the house tour and watched the pet peacocks, which strut free across the yard. The drive home took us winding northeast through deep rural country, woods, small farms, and tiny settlements like Sparta, Culverton, Warrenton. The plan was to get to Athens then hit I-85. The more direct route became rural backroads that eventually crossed the Savannah River.

The Peach State, like the rest of the old Confederacy, recalls tragedy. Georgia was the second state to secede from the Union, in January 1861, a month after South Carolina, when the governor declared that Lincoln’s election would end slavery in the United States. The rebels defeated the Yanks at Chickamauga in September 1863. But the major Civil War benchmark is Union General William T. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and march to the sea in September 1864.

Georgia, the largest state in land square miles east of the Mississippi, is a Southern anchor, the gateway to Florida.  Atlanta is a monster city encompassing parts of five counties. It’s home base for Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Delta Airlines, and other big companies. A few years ago Mercedez-Benz North America moved its headquarters to Atlanta from New Jersey.

There’s Atlanta, then there’s Augusta, home to the Masters, the aristocracy of the pro golf tour. Then there’s the rest of the state, captured by novelist Erskine Caldwell’s title, Tobacco Road.

On the east coast I-95 crosses the S.C.-Georgia state line and passes through miles of wetland into Savannah, famous for its gorgeous homes and suffocating humidity. Another 80 miles south are the Golden Isles, Sea Island, Saint Simon, and Jekyll Island, pseudo-tropical seashore retreats for retired tycoons and honeymooners.

Beyond Jekyll is the King’s Bay Naval Base. Golden Isles dreaminess ends abruptly there, where the Navy docks ballistic missile submarines. Suddenly you’re at the Florida visitor’s center, which is usually crowded with old folks on pilgrimage to the sunshine.

The other near-interminable Georgia byway is I-75, which descends from Upper Peninsula Michigan all the way to Fort Lauderdale. It passes through Georgia’s share of the Blue Ridge at the southern end of the Great Smokies and the 860,000-acre Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest.

Dalton, the first big Georgia town on 75, is a hub for carpet manufacturing. It’s the center of the district represented by firebrand Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who actually hails from Milledgeville.

About 40 miles east of Dalton on U.S. 76 is Ellijay, the “apple capital of Georgia,” tucked in a gash in the mountains. Further east, still on 76 is Blairsville, nestled under a scary ridge called the Dragon’s Spine, six or eight jagged peaks rising from the national forest. Nearby is Vogel State Park, the start and finish of the 100-mile Cruel Jewel trail race, which requires climbing Dragon’s Spine twice. Runners get 48 hours to finish the course. Many don’t.

Awhile back we went to a nephew’s wedding in Ellijay, then drove to Atlanta. On the way we climbed seven miles of sharp switchbacks on a narrow gravel road to the day-hike parking space for Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Later, I met a friend at nearby Amicalola State Park, site of spectacular 730-foot cascading Amicolala Falls. We climbed the rocky stairs alongside the falls for a hundred-mile view.

Years ago I drove I-75 to Sea Island for corporate meetings. At Macon you begin a straight shot east on I-16 to Savannah. The route is a punishing 160-mile, three-hour trip through small-farm counties, an archetype of the isolated backcountry South. Suddenly the interstate ends at downtown Savannah’s lush parks and gardens draped with Spanish moss.

The city’s riverfront stroll is a soothing couple of hours, quiet, shaded block after shaded block of beautiful places that beckon at a retreat from the hard side of life. But much of the rest of Georgia is the hard side, both the rugged north along U.S. 76, and the dusty, wide-open south.

The people of the out-of-the way settlements many miles from Atlanta are the Southerners that Flannery O’Connor wrote about. O’Connor, the daily Mass-going Catholic who suffered from debilitating lupus and died at 39, crafted austere, haunting tales of down-and-out mill workers, dirt farmers, and hustlers and their fierce Protestant fundamentalism. She told somber, resonating truths about the small-town South. 

Sandy has family and friends near Atlanta. She made the drive a few months ago, down I-85 for 100 miles, then turned north on local roads. It was a rough four hours each way, the highway wracked by endless construction, the lanes narrowed into chutes, traffic choked with 18-wheelers.

The relatives are part of our Georgia connection. In 1978 we spent a few days at Sea Island on our honeymoon, before the place started charging five-star rates. Three years ago on our anniversary we camped at a state park on Lake Hartwell, the giant resort spot on the S.C.-Ga., border and had a nice lunch in Livonia.  

We should see more of the Peach State. Our daughter Marie suggested visiting Helen. It’s a tourist town done over as a Bavarian village and only a couple of hours’ drive, a short haul in that giant state. We’ve never been to Bavaria, or Helen. Maybe sometime soon. Then we’ll head down to Plains.

January 13, 2025

We looked down at a winter wonderland from the aircraft as it approached Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Back on earth we saw a winter nightmare, a panoramic view of “Snowmageddon” stretching across northern Virginia.

It was February 2010. We attended my boss’s daughter’s wedding in Florida, and for a couple of days enjoyed gentle sunshine and a side trip to the Kennedy space center. At home, friends and neighbors shivered in their homes, getting out only to shovel. Four storms, two of them more than 20 inches, fell on NOVA from December 2009 through February 2010.

Twelve years later, in Upstate South Carolina, a storm swept in from the southeast. The area had plenty of warning, schools and many businesses closed. It snowed through the night, thick enough for a while to block our view of the trees behind the house.

In the morning the neighborhood was silent in white. A chill wind purred. We heard the whine of tires spinning on the street as a driver gunned his engine on a snow-covered ice patch. Eventually he quit and walked away.

We walked down to the main road, kicking through six inches of white stuff.  Tire tracks showed a few drivers had escaped their subdivisions. TV news reported I-85 was snowbound, a few vehicles crawling, others pulled onto the shoulder and abandoned.

By mid-morning neighbors appeared here and there and scraped snow from their windshields. I found my garden shovel and plowed the driveway, row by row. The woman across the street was using a piece of wood. No one around here owns a snow shovel.

Around noon the sun appeared, the cloud cover broke up, showing blue sky, the temperature rose. Traffic churned the snow into channels of slush. Kids built snowmen and threw snowballs. By mid-afternoon patches of brown grass were showing.

The mercury slipped back below freezing that night, turning the slush to ice. In the morning it melted into sloppy rivers, splashed by impatient drivers into heaps on lawns. A large tent at the YMCA had collapsed under the snow’s weight.

This was the 2022 South Carolina blizzard, serious business for rural folks and for those who lost power for more than a day or two. But this isn’t lake-effect snow country. We don’t have Nor’easters, or those 100-inch snows of the Rockies and northern California that skiers love. I built a snowman and got a photo. Then it was gone.

Last winter South Carolina was the only state in the country to report no snow. Even Hawaii and Florida got some. Our daughter in Wyoming sent a photo showing four-foot depth from her front porch out to the horizon.

Fifty-plus years ago my New Hampshire college erected slat fences across the grassy quadrangle in the center of the campus and around buildings to hold the winter drifts. When the blizzards came the fences vanished beneath walls of white.

Last week while the country watched the news coverage of the horrific Los Angeles fires, Upstate folks anticipated a “weather impact day,” the phrase used by the local forecasters. Temps dropped to the upper 20s for a few early morning hours then rose in bright sunlight.

The city began shutting down, with announcements of closings: doctors’ offices, church services, civic and sporting events, and so on. School closed, but kids still had to get up and log on for “e-learning,” which deprives them of the snow days they used to hope for. I taped insulation around the outside faucets.

Friday dawned bleak and gray, the flakes began fluttering down around mid-morning. The afternoon was sloppy and wet, the temperature fell again into the 20s, damp and bone-chilling. We settled in after a final grocery run. We had candles, a camping lantern, batteries.

Snow fell for a couple of hours. Freezing rain fell into the night, coating the landscape with ice. Greenville made The Washington Post’s “winter storm impact” report with an 8 of 10 rating, which credited two to four inches, but really more like one to two inches. In the morning the street was a sheet of ice.

The weather reporters worked overtime, repeating forecasts in scrupulous technical detail that backed up looking out the window. The town stayed mostly closed through the chilly weekend. The sun rose, the ice melted a bit, then refroze at night.

Our little storm moved north, bringing power outages and hardship elsewhere. The California fires kept spreading, following the monster blizzards in the Great Lakes border states; and before that the devastation of last fall’s hurricanes, Helene and Milton. Some victims still live in public shelters.

The high melodrama of our once-every-three-year’s storm faded. This town got a one-day snapshot of nature’s jagged edge, a faint hint of New England or Chicago. The inch of snow and ice stayed for the weekend through the bleak January sun. Yankees and Midwesterners surely are smiling.

The South’s booming cities, like this one, have their pockets of need remote from downtown’s shopping-and-restaurant vibe. This spasm of winter in this temperate place lingers for the victims of life’s other traumas.   

The locals are back on the roads, back to the downtown shops, the fitness classes and church services. Suddenly the temperature dipped to the teens. Our winter is still our winter. Some here pay the price of endurance, of hardship. They still are with us.  

January 6, 2025

Sunlight beamed through the tall windows of Cosmic Rabbits Tea Company on the second-last day of the year. A man sat at a front table, silhouetted in the light behind him. Three young women and a little girl were at a table nearby, the women sipping their tea.

It was strangely warm, mid-60s, the shop door was open to the street. At the counter someone chatted with Tracy, who has run the place since she and her daughter Allie opened it on McBee Street eight years ago. Tracy says the name is a connection to the local Swamp Rabbit Trail, the asphalt path that extends 20 miles from downtown Greenville to Traveler’s Rest. “Cosmic” is tacked on, I take it, for the sake of off beat originality.

Their idea is that “tea fixes everything.” So, seven days a week folks drift in for a cup or two. Nearly all stay an hour or more.

Half the room is a curiosity shop offering exotic teas from various places, high-end knick-knacks, elaborately painted teacups, mugs, teapots and pitchers, kitchen decoratives, and so on. Walls are arranged with original paintings of landscapes and wildlife, along with old newspaper frontpages like “Man Walks on the Moon,” and a NASA logo.

A collection of non-working clocks, all showing different times, covers part of one wall. A shelf stocked with books and board games is set in back, next to two loveseats. You can sit and stretch your legs and page through old history texts. I didn’t see any magazines, no old LIFE or Time, or National Geographic, or People, which would suggest a doctor’s office and the impatience and irritability that go with it.

The place was quiet, as we guessed it is nearly always. Drinking tea is a quiet activity, whether it’s the black, high-caffeine yerba mate, oolong, formosa mango, almond moon cake green, zero-caffeine rooibos, or any of dozens of others. There’s no food. You show up, you drink tea. You sip and if you’re inclined, ponder the direction of your life.

The shop does have a website, featuring a quote from children’s author Aprilynne Pike: “As far as her mom was concerned, tea fixed everything. Have a cold? Have some tea. Broken bones? There’s a tea for that, too. Somewhere in her mother’s pantry was a box of tea that said, ‘In case of Armageddon, steep three to five minutes.’”

Tea is associated with good manners, gentility, serenity. We may borrow that notion from old British melodrama Those may be qualities we wish we saw more of in ourselves or in others. Or not.

We may drink tea because it doesn’t have the caffeine kick of regular coffee. I’ve read that one eight-ounce cup of coffee contains 96 milligrams of caffeine. The same size cup of black tea gives you only 47 mg, and green tea just 28 mg. We may drink it because we’ve read that tea can provide health benefits, like anti-oxidants, which lower cholesterol. 

You can get tea at Starbucks, but Starbucks isn’t about tea. You can’t get coffee at Cosmic Rabbits.

We were in no hurry. We walked in and looked around. Tracy was brewing a cup for a takeout customer. The guy by the window was reading a book. We browsed the displays of tea-related stuff and glanced at the oddities on the walls.

It was a slow point in a slow business week. I guessed business is better at breakfast? Cosmic Rabbits doesn’t open until noon, 1:00 PM on Sundays. Somehow Tracy and Allie make it work.

We sprawled on one of the loveseats. The late December sunlight filled the room. Pedestrians strolled by outside.  The three women talked quietly. I sipped my tea. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, then thirty. My 16-ounce cup was still half-full. The tea was hot, then warm, on this warm South Carolina day.

As I stretched my legs toward the sunlight, the year came back, the visits to friends and family, the goodness of the holidays. I recalled the New Hampshire forests, the rugged mountains of Northern Virginia, East Tennessee, and Western North Carolina, the warm sunlight of Hawaii, the scrub plains of South Texas, the chaos of Nashville.

Cosmic Rabbits is a kind of piazza, an urban refuge where life’s stresses and strains can be dismissed for a little while. We’re not in Paris or Rome or New York, where busy cosmopolitans will stop to drink, talk, laugh, dwell on the meaning of their lives, and dream great dreams. But in this inconspicuous city in the northwestern corner of a small Southern state, we can settle in at this quiet side street shop and think those same thoughts and dream those same dreams.

I thought of our adventures, trooping in the van around the country. Then too—it was unavoidable–of the sadness of loss, the trauma of illness of family and friends, of the opaqueness of the future. Then calls not made, letters not written, the rush of days, weeks, months that appear then disappear, obligations not met, promises not kept.   

I stared at the lifesize cutouts of Princess Leia and a Storm Trooper near Tracy’s brewing station. Cosmic Rabbit somehow reminds us that much of life is about imagining, finding beauty in the real world, making dreams come true, finding the good we can find around us. Family and friends are doing things we’ve never done. The grandsons are widening their horizons.

The serenity of the moment may be exaggerated by the seasoning in the tea, but still may carry us through winter. Somehow we don’t stay with the doubts. We can look ahead and find a promise of hope. Maybe there’s a tea for that.

December 30, 2024

After three years in this subdivision we still don’t know most of the neighbors, but the young woman across the street has a nice way of dropping in to visit. She stopped by and introduced her fiancé and showed us her engagement ring.

We knew she has cared for him through cancer recovery the past two years, planning and preparing his restricted-diet meals, getting him to his appointments and therapies. This is love, I thought. We said congratulations and “Merry Christmas.”

Her son is studying at a local college. She worries about her sixteen-year-old daughter, who just got her driver’s license. I think they’ll be fine.

We arrived at the Holiday Promised Land of Santa hats and bright sweaters.  But amid all that we wonder, some of us wonder, why we have Christmas, the primal lodestar of Christian belief. We understand that the human mind seeks constantly to believe. Believe what? That our existence, or the existence of existence itself, has a cause, which we may call God. We may call it truth. We may call it love.

The Christmas story, the charm of the manger, the angels, the star, is a starting point, a beacon through doubt, confusion, ignorance, the darkness of unbelief. We light our Advent Candles, if we don’t forget, and ponder the Gospel message of that cataclysmic event.

Long ago, for years on Christmas Eve, we encountered the crowds at the Children’s Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. Michael and I wore ties, Sandy and the girls dressed up. First stop, the poinsettia display at the National Botanical Garden, where we took pictures with real cameras. Second stop: Johnny Rocket at Union Station for hot chocolate and French fries, and a walk around the giant electric train display.

Sandy recalls with a frown 1998, when President Clinton was impeached on December 19. We were at Union Station when he and Hillary showed up for their Christmas shopping trip and greeted thrilled Democrats. Bill leaned forward, smiled, and shook Michael’s hand.

We had a Christmas Eve tragedy in 2001, when a nephew died in an accident that morning. On the 26th we left on a 600-mile drive to a funeral. That day’s pain has never faded.

Twenty-three years later and two states away the churches are packed with regulars but also with the once-a-year faithful who don’t seem to recognize what is going on in front of them. We got there early and found seats in front, but retreated when we noticed the “handicapped” sign. We squeezed into the last pew. Later, the road home was jammed with traffic from a half-dozen other churches.

Last week we were still unwinding from the hard mid-month Tennessee mission. We left I-75 in North Georgia near the Lake Alatoona exit, staying on U.S. 20 east through Canton, then got off course. We passed through the cute village of Ball Ground, then obscure places across the state into Gainesville, then Gillsville and Maysville, to I-85, then north to home.

This late in the year, the cold and gray highway horizons render the small towns and exit outposts tedious. We passed through them impatient to get beyond the sudden drops in speed limits, watching for sheriffs in patrol carts. The streets in those places, Marshall and Hurricane, N.C., then Del Rio and Newport, Tenn., seemed deserted and bleak.

In mid-December the cold moved in, mid-twenties. Even then the place still had the threadbare look of extracting itself from Helene. Since October the public-works crews piled storm debris high at our intersection with the main road, blocking the view of eastbound traffic. I hacked away limbs and branches with my carpenter saw for a couple of hours. Folks paused at the stop sign, I saw a few thumbs-up, a few smiles.

Meanwhile the festivities were building. The excitement started early downtown with outdoor booths at the Grand Bohemian Lodge, just off Main Street and next to the Reedy River. We joined the crowds wandering through the lobby, which is decorated with Native American art.

Habitat for Humanity conveyed the deed of a new home on Greenville’s Sturdivant Street to a new owner, Matrice, a mom with two boys. The Foothills Philharmonic played classical arrangements of Christmas tunes at a nearby Baptist church to standing ovations. Local kids performed piano pieces at their recital. We met young people marching forward in hope and enthusiasm, working to make their marks.

On Main Street downtown, a twenty-five foot fir gleams in front of the M. Judson bookstore. Folks sit on the steps to admire it and snap photos. Inside, readers of actual books browse the stacks of hardcovers. The place does a good business in Southern Literature.  Further along, kids and adults try to skate at the little public ice rink, most, it seems, for the first time.

The legacy of 2024 is Helene. On the way to Nashville we passed through Hot Springs, N.C., which sits alongside the French Broad River. The stains on buildings showed the level the water had reached. Storefronts and homes were boarded up. Tree trunks lay across lawns. Heroic men were clearing wreckage, at it still in this third month. Hot Springs is being transformed.

It is the Season of Hope, for kindness, compassion, faith, the mystical miracles of Christmas, for those close to us and, as the song goes, to men of good will everywhere. I remember Matrice and her new Habitat house, our neighbor and her kids and fiancé, the hurricane victims, those selfless people who support them, in our prayer that Christmas 2025 will bring joy to all.

December 23, 2024

The affair was the Senior Holiday Potluck at the local Y. The “member experience director,” Brent, sent an email spelling out the details: bring a favorite dish or a donation of $5.00, and a $10.00 gift to exchange after the lunch.

Our local YMCA puts on lots of activities for old folks. It supports Medicare’s Silver Sneakers fitness program, which enables seniors to use the gym and pool and participate in fitness classes. The Y sponsors an Active Senior Adults group, which holds monthly potlucks with bingo. The past year the group took bus trips to the casino in Cherokee in western North Carolina, the Biltmore estate in Ashville, and Lake Lure. 

Despite the marketing, we understand Christmas isn’t just for kids. The Season that for Christians commemorates the birth of Christ is for everyone, including the white-haired set. They were once kids, after all. But it doesn’t play out that way. The stacks of toys and video games at the malls are pitched at anxious parents playing Santa. Everything else: the clothes, the electronics, the pickup trucks are aimed at middle-agers earning paychecks. You don’t see ads targeting folks on Social Security.

Sandy and I attended the Seniors event two years ago. A rousing crowd of oldsters showed up, the Y hired a seniors’ jazz band to play old Christmas favorites (Crosby, Perry Como and so on). Feet tapped to the music, you could survey the room and see tears. We missed last year, it shot by us somehow. But the years now go by in a blur.

Sandy is a regular at the monthly Seniors potlucks, run by a dynamic lady, Cheryl, who’s younger than most of the crowd. She greets everyone, makes a few announcements, then steers the group to the potluck line, then bingo, a quarter a card. Usually 12 or 15 women attend who know each other from the Silver Sneakers programs. Maybe three men show up. I went a few times, then pulled back.

We started Seniors Week by driving 50 miles to Brevard, a touristy place a few miles north of the S.C.-N.C. state line, nestled in the wide Pisgah National Forest. The plan was to get a one-day change of scenery that might help confront family sadness. Somehow, the blur of passing forest, the sharp curves of mountain roads, the ghostly haze rising from Blue Ridge peaks, works. Brevard gets us all that.

We parked off Main Street near Rocky’s Grill, a breakfast place done up with a 1950s look—the bright green and red paneling of the lunch counter, the red leather booth seats, the prints of Babe Ruth and Marilyn Monroe, Elvis crooning in the background. We got eggs and coffee. We talked about old times, family, and loss.

But it’s Christmas, after all. We browsed at a few shops, picked up some things, looked north at the Pisgah peaks that seemed to begin at the end of the block. Turning onto Main, we noticed the Veterans Museum of the Carolinas next to the courthouse, open, admission free.

We stepped through the door. A docent, a slim, elderly gent who looked like a veteran, rose from behind a desk. “Welcome. I’m Joe. U.S. Army. Thanks for stopping in. Just follow the yellow arrows on the floor. There’s a room for each service branch and war starting with World War I. I’m here if you have any questions.”

We strolled through, the place was packed with military artifacts, uniforms, gear, insignia, photos of Carolina veterans going back decades, but also enemy stuff: mannequins of German and Japanese soldiers, fully equipped. I wondered about the collection of German Army propaganda photos. The place was heavy with infantry weapons, rifles, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, handguns. Par for the Carolinas.

A few other visitors, oldsters like us, wandered through. All the staff people were in their 70s and above, like me; old-timer veterans, also like me. Doing something they enjoy, something they fell important and worthwhile. Good for them, I thought. Seniors at work.

We moved forward to the next day’s Holiday Potluck. The Y staff had set up tables in the gym, decorating each with Santa-gnome centerpieces. Folks trickled in, some in bright red, some moving slowly, a lady with a walker, another in a wheelchair. They left their potluck casseroles, salads, and desserts on a table. Cheryl, in charge, announced, “Who’s got a December birthday? They get to eat first.”

We filled our plates and attempted small talk. I saw only a couple of familiar faces. The couple across from me seemed to speak only Polish, I think it was Polish. I glanced around. Down the table, ladies chatted about the food, grandchildren, health problems. I talked with one guy about road conditions since the hurricane. Things like that. A few folks rose and went back for seconds.

The attendance was smaller by half than at the previous Holiday Potluck. No band or caroling to summon the Christmas Spirit. A lady at the end of our table sat stiffly, staring forward, saying nothing.

Cheryl, in full leadership mode, roused the group to play quiz games. I won one of the Santa gnomes by scoring highest on the “Christmas music” quiz (which classic Christmas movie featured the debut of “White Christmas?” Answer: Holiday Inn). We did the “White Elephant,” each person picking a wrapped gift. I drew a sign saying “hope you like dog hair,” no doubt dredged from someone’s attic. Fortunately another guest who owns a dog took it off my hands.

The chatter picked up a bit as folks inspected their gifts. But it seemed we all were shifting in our seats, as if ready to return to the challenges that aren’t lifted by the Christmas Season. Some of the guests are dealing with complicated problems, health, family, finances, widowhood, the burden of living alone. For sure, all wondered whether they’ll be around for next year’s party.

Cheryl sensed the moment and thanked all for coming.  A few applauded, the applause spread. We pulled on our coats. I thanked Cheryl, as did a few others. “Thanks, hope you’ll come back and join us,” she said with a smile. “Have a wonderful Christmas.”