Column Archive

Pickin’ Up Coke Bottles Tom Poland Posted 08.19.2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net I didn’t call them pop. I didn’t call them sodas. I called them Cokes. Cokes could be Pepsis, Fantas (remember those?), Orange Crush, or RC Colas. Tossed out windows, Coke bottles waited along dirt roads, gravel roads, and...

Class “A” Pass Tom Poland Posted 08/03/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net Each August I think of my father’s service in Japan, specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Recently I came across one of his base passes that had been hiding from me all these years. Dad was stationed in Yokohama. The date...

Who Has Seen The Wind? Tom Poland Posted 07.28.2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net When I see photographs of Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park I want to explore a desert right then. Until I do, the fragile deserts along the Atlantic Ocean will do just fine. Wind, it shapes the...

Something In The Grits Ain’t Gravy Tom Poland Posted 07.21.2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net Down South we have sayings for every occasion. “Something in the grits ain’t gravy” is a way of saying you smell a rat. Take wrestling. It started as an ancient martial art. Then show business climbed...

Bring Back Seersucker Tom Poland Posted 07.15.2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net Seersucker. A cool word, and cool is the word. Before AC came along, a Southern gentleman worth his salt wouldn’t be caught without a seersucker suit. Just one gentleman back home wore seersucker. With his crisp white shirt, bow...

Reader’s Digest, My Boyhood Read Tom Poland Posted 07/06/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net I read my mother’s Reader’s Digests from cover to cover. It’s hard find one today, but if you do, it will take you back to another era. And it just might shock you. Back in 1964 Reader’s...

All Along The Watchtower, Structures That Command the Eye Tom Poland Posted 06/29/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net In my journeys across the South, Georgialina, in particular, I take note of clock towers, watchtowers, and steeples. How can I not. They command the eye. They set me to thinking. I’ve written...

The Country Store, The Soul of the South Had Everything Tom Poland Posted 06/23/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net “Where should I send you to know the Soul of the South? I’ll send you to the Mast General Store.” So wrote Charles Kuralt in a 1986 column. Do you miss the...

Puttin’ Out The Fire, Sometimes It’s Healthier Not To Tom Poland Posted 06/22/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net “As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world.” —William Gay, Provinces Of Night. “In the draws the smoke coming...

Small Town Trains, Hope For The Future? Tom Poland Posted 06/16/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net The road looks just like one on Granddad’s farm running into hardwoods where a spring bubbled in shade. Come sundown in Granddad’s battered old car, we’d ride that road through trees to pastures where white-faced...

The Civil War Changed Funeral Customs Tom Poland Posted 06.09.2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net A do-it-yourself casket for a pet is as close most get today. I’ve heard of people paying a carpenter to build a casket for a dog, and I get it. Just placing a pet in the...

The Deadly Silo Tom Poland Posted 06/09/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net I’ve always looked at silos with wonderment. Silos fill me with a sense of mystery. Just how do they work? Then I began to notice nearly all of them seemed abandoned. What’s the deal here? First, let me say...

Jackson Station Rhythm & Blues Club Tom Poland Posted 06.02.2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net October 1977—April 1990 Where The Music Died Now and then a kind of gravity draws me to an old building. I’m driving south on SC Highway 25 near Hodges. Hurrying to get home before dark when...

Remembering Sacks, Wagons, Indians, & Leather Tom Poland Posted 05/28/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net I visited the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina in Pendleton a few weeks back. If you’re a product of the rural South as I am, the museum takes you on a long walk down...

A Chain-Smoking Cat Saved My Life, Maybe I Saved Hers Too Tom Poland Posted 05/12/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.netSummer 2022, St. Simons Island, I’m sitting around the pool when my niece, Harper, and her friend, Stella, ask me to tell them a story. I had seen a photo of a...

A Disastrous Revolutionary War Battle Tom Poland Posted 05/08/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.netOld battlefields seem more like parks. Trying to imagine cannon and cries of the wounded? Difficult, but not always. Farmers’ plows unearthed so many Minié balls at Shiloh, the soil turned white. Shiloh was of the Civil War....

Memory—The Good, Bad, Ugly & Sad Tom Poland Posted 05/08/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.net“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” Cormac McCarthy’s words. Lord knows I’d like to forget some things, namely certain people I’ve known. Memory is a blessing and a...

Get Some Windshield Therapy Tom Poland Posted 04/24/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.netIf you need to escape life’s ills, put some glass in front of your eyes and forget your worries on a back road. You’ll discover the bones of the land, the DNA of real life, and surprises. I do....

Shiloh Waits for Help Tom Poland Posted 04/17/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.netI call it the Roll Call of The Waiting. Inactive churches in need of friends. Friendship, Dothan Methodist, St. Simon’s Episcopal Church, Halfway Creek, Workman Methodist, Graham’s Methodist ... the roll goes on, and now I add Shiloh, a...

A Curious Battle For Independence Tom Poland Posted 04/13/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.netIt’s a battle Britian claimed to have won, and yet it sent the Redcoats to Charleston and back to Britian ending their presence in the Carolina backcountry.I have visited six battlefields: Civil War battlefields Gettysburg and North Carolina’s...

Bookhardt Cemetery Tom Poland Posted 04/09/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.netOn a cool, windy day I drove Old Number 6 through farm country. You’d a thought wild horses had kicked up the pollen-yellow dust drifting over the coastal plain, which runs flat as an ironing board. Distant forests edging fields seem...

Real Lizard Earrings Tom Poland Posted 04/02/2026By Tom PolandA Southern Writerwww.tompoland.nettompol@earthlink.netI called it a green lizard. I couldn’t pronounce Anolis carolinensis back then. Heck, I hadn’t even heard of the term. But now something catches me flatfooted—I’m told little girls wore lizards as earrings in my day. Live lizards dangling...