Recent Entries

• Advice for any age: “Be young, be foolish, but be happy”

  April 20, 2024

  It’s only April 20, but it feels like an early summer day when those sweet memories of sun and fun at the beach come back to me from more carefree times. Back in the 1960s, we never thought that summers of unimaginable heat would await us in a few decades because rhe planet is quickly…

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• Charleston is one of America’s most beautiful and livable cities, but it has a complex and shameful legacy that should never be ignored or forgotten

  April 16, 2024

  I’ve written often about a special place very near and dear to my heart, Folly Beach, located on the Atlantic Ocean about 10 miles from where I live. It’s a diverse and eclectic hodgepodge of people, architecture and businesses, all bound up in common hopes and dreams of finding that close-to per...

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• Remembering Aunt Bee: A fictional character in a TV series became as real and beloved as she was unforgettable

  April 11, 2024

  AUNT BEE: Remember, first you eat the sandwiches, and then you eat the apple pie. Not the apple pie and then the sandwiches. Do you understand? OPIE: Yeah, I understand, even if it doesn’t seem right. AUNT BEE: Why doesn’t it seem right? OPIE: Well, if you get full before you finish, I’d sure rat...

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• Poof, it’s gone: The recent temporary loss of internet service took me back in time to an early computer blowou

  April 7, 2024

    Now they say phone addiction is leading to all kinds of mental health problems among young people. Which is probably true. They spend multiple hours a day scrolling TikTok shorts; keeping up with friends on Insta (Instagram; full disclosure, I have an Instagram account); frenetically langu...

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• A tribute to Eliot Porter, the Nature photographer I most admire

  April 4, 2024

  I mark the summer’s swift decline;
The springing sward its grave-clothes weaves.
 Oh, could I catch the sounds remote? Could I but tell to human ear The strains which on the breezes float And sing the requiem of the dying year! From the Journal of
Henry David Thoreau Of all the books I have treas...

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• My Origin Story: How My Parents Met one Fateful Day in the late 1940s

  March 25, 2024

  The meeting story of my mom and dad in Charleston in 1947, when he was in the Merchant Marine, is legend. My mother was quite beautiful and refined. A Southern girl through and trough from a good family. They were rather poor, but highly regarded. My grandfather was one of the pharmacists in the ...

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• Middleton Place Gardens offer the perfect retreat to an intimate world of wonder and beauty that is especially inviting in Spring

  March 17, 2024

  This past Thursday on a cool late March, early Spring  afternoon, I wandered transfixed by the beauty of azaleas in bloom at Middle Place Gardens, one of the most beautiful and historic public gardens in the country, dating back to 1740. The timing was perfect for peak bloom, and I took many pict...

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• Awe and wonder can be experienced everywhere

  March 14, 2024

  When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to…

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• Second Mill Pond Revisited

  March 8, 2024

  It is late at night and I’m tired, but I want to record some thoughts I’ve been mulling over lately. They deal with the subject of memory. I’ve been thinking a lot about that word and all that it means. It is freighted with so many layers and contexts of meaning. It seems that now…

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