Oswego
Entries 501
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One of the best memories I have from the decade of the 1970s after I had moved from New Orleans to South Carolina, was heading out to the rural countryside outside Columbia with two new friends t...
Back in pre-Internet says, there were only three broadcast networks from which people got their nightly TV news, and the daily newspapers in most of the larger cities. I remember highly anticip...
I picked up an old photo album I hadn’t looked through in quite some time tonight, and was transported back to a trip across the country and through the Midwest in the Spring of 1985. The album ...
When Julia Ridley Smith’s parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques...
I wondered today, walking slowly along the road, how it was that so many simple things give me such exquisite joy. I saw a gray cat curled up on a window ledge in the morning sun, and stood look...
There are times when I feel most connected to life in the awareness of fleeting experiences that come to me in little epiphanies during the day. It doesn’t matter where I am. They are predicated ...
A walk down Chestnut Street in Daydreaming on the Porch
It doesn’t have a single chestnut tree on it, this street in a very special city in South Carolina that I once visited often and wrote about frequently. That place is Sumter, where my mother g...
Junior high memories revisited in Daydreaming on the Porch
Years ago, as part of outreach duties at my job, I found myself in a local middle school at a rescheduled career-day presentation that morphed into “social studies night” for parents coming to pi...
The Songs of Our Lives: Alone Once Again, in Daydreaming on the Porch
Not long ago I posted an entry about a favorite song from the summer and fall of 1972, “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts. There were four other songs that last year of college that have staye...
Ageless in Daydreaming on the Porch
This is a poem I wrote three years ago in April 2021, not long after the peak of the of the Covid pandemic with its lockdowns, solitude, and extreme distancing from others so as not to be infecte...
Secrets of life in Daydreaming on the Porch
Secret 65: we should not complain, but always enjoy, and be grateful for the good fortune we still possess. About the secret: In an undesirable situation, or confronted with a loss, the inferior ...
We don’t meet people by accident. Everyone is meant to cross our path for a reason. Kathryn Perez From a letter to my sister and brother-in-law, September 29, 1990: It’s late at night, and I’v...
See the curtains hangin’ in the window, in the evenin’ on a Friday night. A little light a-shinin’ through the window, Let’s me know everything is alright. Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, ...
Creature of the night in Daydreaming on the Porch
When I can’t chase the stories through the night, they escape and get lost. Franz Kafka Diary entry, June 4, 1915 At long last it has come to me. This is what I will write about: the middle of ...
This is the first day so far this year in Charleston that it’s felt like summer. I noticed that “hot heat” all of a sudden.” It’s as if you walk outside and it’s instantly summer. The air sort of...
We do not see Nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. William Hazlitt Come forth into the light of things. Let Nature be your teacher. William Wordsworth It was a typ...
Close encounters of the reptilian kind in Daydreaming on the Porch
Growing up in Louisiana, I’ve always been fascinated by alligators. There is something about these ancient, dinosaurian reptiles that strikes both cautious fear and wonder in me. And now where I...
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...
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 peo...
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 r...
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 wi...
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...
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...
This past Thursday on a cool March day in early Spring, I wandered transfixed by the beauty of azaleas in bloom at Middle Place Gardens, one of the most beautiful and historic public gardens in ...
Awe and wonder can be experienced everywhere in Daydreaming on the Porch
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 ...
