Tom Poland
Writer at Freelance
A Southern writer who grew up in Lincolnton, Georgia, and lives in Columbia, SC.
Articles
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1 week ago |
pmg-sc.com | Tom Poland
’ve long felt that two South Carolina community names ascend to prettiest—Silverstreet and Lone Star. Those names, evocative and wistful, charm the ear. One conjures up biblical streets of gold; the other brings to mind the Alamo, Davy Crockett, and that independent state, Texas. At long last I saw Lone Star. It’s a spot in the road that awakens feelings and memories. The bottle caps pressed into earth in front of an old store’s vanished gas pump?
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1 week ago |
pmg-sc.com | Tom Poland
“Cocaine,” JJ Cale wrote it. Eric Clapton sung it. Clapton described the song as anti-cocaine and that seems to be the case, if you read between the lines. There’s another addictive drug out there. Another huge hit. Caffeine. JJ Cale should have written “Caffeine.” Allow me to edit his lyrics. “If you got bad news, you want to kick them blues, caffeine/When your day is done, and you want to run, caffeine.” Run is right. The world does not run on fossil fuels, solar, or nuclear. It runs on caffeine.
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1 week ago |
blufftontoday.com | Tom Poland
In my youth we had a daily newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle. What we didn’t get every day was local news. That’s what made The Lincoln Journal special. Farmers, grandmothers, country storeowners, housewives, and others pulled news about people they knew from their mailbox. “The Smiths ate Sunday dinner with the Jones. The fried chicken was delicious.” “The Browns drove through the Smokies.
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1 week ago |
indexjournal.com | Tom Poland
A reader and friend, Zilphy DuRant of Florence, South Carolina mailed me a letter and clipping from The Post and Courier about an architectural feature I’d never heard of, rain porches. In the clipping, Seth Taylor wrote about the Pee Dee being the “birthplace of a porch unlike any other.”Driving back from Chapel Hill, I saw a road worthy of my ramblings.
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2 weeks ago |
lexingtonchronicle.com | Tom Poland
Long did Grandad’s fiddle hang on my mother’s living room wall. I could never walk by it without wondering, “What’s its story?”Best I recall, my mother didn’t know its provenance, that fancy word for something’s origin. My mother, in a pleasant sense, lived in the past. She talked often of her family and upbringing in a remote part of Georgia. Well, remote back in the 1930s, before men dammed rivers and paved roads and sliced up the land and the world came calling to buy lots.
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The Hometown Weekly https://t.co/u1HlbgAzg5 Historian Avery Craven said reading Southern country newspapers was like “sitting down to a meal of turnip greens, black-eyed peas and corn bread, with a glass of buttermilk on the side.” I agree. https://t.co/Xsyoa0q7Su
Southern Exposure—Caffeine https://t.co/7TypuCX15y https://t.co/vVS39CVcPN
Southern Exposure—Places ... Yet another place that didn’t anticipate how changing farming methods and transportation would render it lonely. https://t.co/h5B46bA63F https://t.co/eCBPya0D9V