BOONE, N.C. (April 9, 2026) — In the midst of this week’s madness — beginning, of course, with Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday tweet — I decided to wait until late Wednesday to write this column. I mean, if the world was going to end on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, why bother writing anything?
Since we’re still here — for the time being, anyway — I’ll go ahead and say my piece about how Timberley and I spent the hours that must have reminded folks older than us of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. I was three then, Timberley was two, and neither of us remembers it. Our knowledge of the world’s brush with nuclear war is secondhand, unlike what’s happening now.
Death and resurrection are funny words / to use when referring to honey bees — / how the hive declines in late autumn, / then comes back to life in early spring.
IN DAYS PAST, Easter bonnets were a big deal.
Workers live only six weeks in summer; / drones, two months if they don’t mate; / the solitary queen, two to five years, / because she’s the most important bee.
Or is she? Sure, she lays all the eggs, / but she had to tango with several guys / on her mating flight high up in the skies / in order to be the egg machine she is.
And the thousands of poor worker girls? / They do everything to keep the hive / clean and fed and safe and humming; / they literally work themselves to death.
So, the beehive stays alive all year; / it dies and resurrects itself over and over / in the expendable lives of its workers, / who — no doubt — are what the buzz is all about.
RUTHERWOOD, N.C. (April 1, 2026) — I’m embarrassed to admit that I nodded off Monday evening during the second hour of Henry David Thoreau, the Ken Burns- and Don Henley-produced documentary about my favorite philosopher.
MORE COFFEE in my mug made from Walden Pond clay might have kept me awake.
Then, last night during the conclusion of the long-awaited PBS presentation, I was so tired from helping wife Timberley plant four new bare-root roses yesterday afternoon that I needed to rest my eyes again midway through the hour-long show — or at least that’s what I claimed.
But Timberley is no fool — not even on April Fool’s Day — so she woke me up both evenings as soon as she saw that my eyelids were closed for more than a second. She knew how much I had been looking forward to the documentary and that I wanted to be awake for its over-the-air premiere.
MORGANTON, N.C. (March 25, 2026) — Last week I posed several questions that I promised to answer today: Should my “Southern heritage” — or anyone’s, for that matter — be preserved as something honorable? Should Confederate monuments, like the one on the Old Courthouse Square here in Morganton, stay or be moved? And were Rebel soldiers heroes or villains, or were they both at the same time?
THIS MONUMENT has stood on the square in Morganton since 1918.
As it turns out, my final answers weren’t all that hard to formulate. I got a little help from my friends — from my wife and writing partner, Timberley; from a former teaching colleague who also happens to be Timberley’s distant cousin; and from another old friend who offered a practical take on that last question.
MORGANTON, N.C. (March 18, 2026) – Last weekend we attended the funeral of my wife Timberley’s aunt at a country church where I’d forgotten that my own kinfolk had been members long ago.
MEMORIAL to my mother’s pater familias at Pleasant Hill Church
In the hillside cemetery next to the old church — established before the Civil War — I happened upon the graves of my maternal great-great-grandparents, my great-grandparents and other close kin.
This was in the Enola community about five miles from Morganton at the edge of the South Mountains. An old wives’ tale says that this community around Yellow Gap got its name — alone backwards— because it was so isolated and sparsely populated, and because there was nothing much to do there. It’s still that way.
GRAVESTONE of Grandpa Tom, Granny Susan and Uncle Dewey at Pleasant Hill
Yes, my great-great-grandfather Sidney Poteet, the pater familias of one whole Poteet/Poteat clan in Burke County, and my great-grandfather Tom Duckworth, who had married one of Sidney’s daughters and moved our branch of the family tree to the Hopewell community closer to town, are both buried there at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, even though they had been prosperous landowners and storekeepers in their respective sections of the county.
The fact that Grandpa Tom — all he was ever called around me — Granny Susan, and my great-uncle Dewey (who dropped dead at 31 while walking in the woods one day) were buried at Pleasant Hill and not at Hopewell Baptist Church or Salem Methodist Church did surprise me, but that wasn’t all.
SALEM, N.C. (March 11, 2026) – Yesterday I wrote more than a dozen paragraphs — around 750 words — about our lying president and the hypocritical evangelist who helped put him in office 10 years ago.
I trashed them both good — and I was only halfway done. But even writing that much wore me out.
So this morning I decided to trash that column and start all over — and to keep it simple this time.
One of our problems now is having to deal with the president and his men constantly “flooding the zone with shit,” as one stated years ago when this madness began. It’s overwhelming.
THIS POST on 3/1/26 doesn’t support the air attack but does suggest that the war is connected with the end of the world.
So today I want to address in simple terms just one thing that’s bothering folks — the idea that the war in Iran is the start of Armageddon, the last big battle prophesied in the Bible.
Even the aforementioned evangelist got in on the act last week by posting on social media his support of the attack that, among other things, killed 150 innocent schoolgirls in the Iranian city of Minab, nearly 700 miles south of Iran’s capital of Tehran.
