Year: 2021

As the new year quickly approaches, there is much consternation across the land. The diagnosis of the past year and prognostications for the next year have already begun. Political pundits, left and right, are in fine form spinning the future favoring their ideological and partisan views. Cocksure and arrogant with their solutions, the national malaise…

Last evening we watched “Don’t Look Up,” a December 2021 release, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett. It is a disaster movie that is an especially interesting satire on contemporary American society. The story line is about an unheralded astronomy professor and his young Ph.D student at Michigan State who discover…

This is Betty’s Christmas card for this year. It depicts what was a block of kiosks for local merchants here on St. Simons Island – a pet store, ice cream parlor, barber shop, jewelry store, hot dog stand and more. Recently the shops were relocated to make way for a museum of Western History and…

The fall season at Potlatch has been winding down for several weeks now as the weather has gotten colder and the trees shed their leaves. It marks the end of months of enjoying the woods, porch sitting and working the land. It’s not long until the dog’s water pail freezes over regularly and the heat…

Enclosed is today’s article by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, describing in detail how the Arbery case unfolded. Heather Cox Richardson Nov 27 On Wednesday, November 24, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, a jury found Gregory McMichael (65), his son Travis McMichael (35), and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan (52) guilty on 23…

The outcome of the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial in Glynn, County, Georgia, has brought both jubilation and cautious optimism for the future of race relations in the South. It was with a sigh of relief that I listened to the guilty verdict for the three defendants. Perhaps, the reputation of Georgia was burnished a bit…

It is a beautiful, crisp Thanksgiving morning here at Potlatch with the sun just starting to peep through the trees. It’s been cold recently for these parts with the weather hovering around the freezing mark. The flowers, especially the hibiscus and impatiens, have been dispatched for the season, but there has not been a hard…

The second week of the Ahmaud Arbery trial in Brunswick, Georgia, was both dramatic and enlightening. And as it has developed, the case has increasingly caught national attention with the story making most of the major cable and network broadcasts. The big news of the week was the testimony of Travis McMichael who shot and…

This past week the Ahmaud Arbery trial started in Brunswick, Georgia. For most of this time, it has been overshadowed in the news by the ongoing Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the case of a young man charged with the killing of two people in a Black Lives Matter protest. With a verdict imminent in…

The recent news of efforts to ban certain books about race and controversial subjects has been disappointing and reminiscent of past attempts to censor what we read. Today when I was running errands in Dahlonega, I was listening to an interview on my truck radio with authors and others about the issue which got me…