Author’s Note: After reading what our dear leaders now want to legislate regarding price gouging inflation, I penned this very rough draft to chase away the blues. We may be approaching ours, but they’re well past their expiration dates. Lord help us. -Marlow Every step these days we walk a fine line Your days are […]

Author’s Note: Drafted several months ago, this piece sat in my Drafts folder until now. For what it’s worth . . . -Marlow ********* Three of our friends, not just acquaintances but friends both younger and older than us, have passed recently in sudden and unexpected ways. Regardless of its pace, dying like American baseball […]

Editor’s Note: Marlow confided to us at Socotra House that he has been ‘diddling’ (publisher’s technical term for fine-tuning subtle rhetoric and smoothing flourishes) with this piece for some time. Given the bemusing state of affairs abroad and here at home, we were interested in his take on things delivered from his perch above the […]

That we were happy to be alive under any circumstances was the point growing up during the 50s. We were told to be so by our pandemic, world war and depression weary folks. Sometimes we were distracted and drove ourselves into a ditch and got severely bounced around, nearly buying the farm — missing a […]

Editor’s Note: Marlow lays it out, and it is still morning. The little pocket of writers in our backwaters, far from the tumult that made us and connects us forward and backward in swirling time. DeMille wanted to hold this for the big run-out of the story of all of us. Amanda the Attorney wanted […]

Author’s Note: This email should say at its bottom “Sent from my iPhone . . . after tapping it out while going 80MPH,” and that’d be true, but it required beaucoup laptop keyboarding corrections and editing to be legible. -Marlow April 18, 2022 Conversating Signs of Our Times W and I returned W’s mom to […]

With the Empire’s cooperative spring weather and good fortune, we took W’s mother out to lunch along Tybee Island’s North Beach. It was a splendid way to pass an afternoon on one of her last days with us here in the Empire. We added a brief side tour of the island’s funky junk stores. With […]

W and her mom had finished their Palm Sunday devotions and were raring to eat at a small place along Bay Street much beloved by locals — B Matthews. With tables scarce for brunch, we decided to spend our hour-wait strolling the park across the street. Overlooking the Savannah River, Emmet Park was renamed in […]

This is our sixth spring in the Empire. W’s side garden has been transformed, but not without many patience-trying times and serial plant failures. One example pictured below are the arbored yellow rose vines called Lady Banks. This plant was W’s third different specimen attempt in this small space to plant, grow, vine and flower. […]

Author’s note: This is not a serious war-war or a playful April Fool’s Day piece. It’s more in keeping with sharing tradecraft in the arts of grandparenthood and passing out indications and warnings in addition to the things that worked. -Marlow Way, way back in the days of yore — like the 1940s way back, […]