Posts by Daryl Gay
Don’t Get Attached
When one makes his living with words, betimes there be exclamations or comments or phrases that simply leap out and grasp at one. Happens to me all the time. Doesn’t even have to be spoken; printed clauses jump right off pages. Especially mispelt ’uns. So I’m roaming from room to room a few weeks ago,…
Read MoreCharlton County’s Chesser Island
It lies, does the old homestead, on an island of its own. A century old now but even at that little changed, it is surrounded by the vastness of the Okefenokee Swamp. The alligators know the place well, as do the bears, the hogs, the deer. But not as well as Joe Chesser. Looking back…
Read MoreLanie Hutcheson Is Driven
So much to see, so much to do, so many places to go… When you’re 18 years old, expanding horizons is what you do. Not many, however, push toward new ones as steadfastly as Lanie Hutcheson. This extremely sharp, charismatic, vivacious—and BUSY—2023 Treutlen County High School graduate and current nursing program enrollee, who also maintains…
Read MoreAs Large As You Like
He was a good friend of my good friends, so they told me. I’d never met the guy, but was about to. “He won’t know who you’re talking to if you call him by his real name, and it really don’t bother him when we pick at him about it, so just call him…” Well,…
Read MoreSinclair Dock Fishing For Cats
A lazy, yawning, stretching sun is warm, finally, as it peers across treetops bordering Crooked Creek. Winter’s bite has clung on tenaciously this year. After months of chilling winds, rain and more rain, Lake Sinclair almost feels like home again on this Monday, the second week of April. The old faded vest that has weathered…
Read MoreFolks That Matter
Back when the world was smaller and closer together—we weren’t whizzing here, there and yonder strapped into the lap of luxurious motoring on a moment’s notice—it was a whole heap easier to keep up with the folks who really matter. You young bucks won’t know what I’m talking about here, but I had four…
Read MoreDamp Remembrances
The six Ps: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. Got it? Write it down, because if you’re anything like me, you’re certainly not going to remember it. What brought on this erudite educational essay you ask? Rain… “Man, I love that jacket,” old compadre Brad Gill greeted me as I back-stroked out of the flooded…
Read MoreRestoring Old Army Jeeps
GP. General Purpose vehicle. Believe that designation. Dane Schroff certainly does. And he has tens of thousands of miles bouncing behind the steering wheel to prove it. He also had a couple of barns packed with GPs. “It is,” as he says, “an obsession.” Today’s fancy new side-by-side vehicles—Kubotas, Can-Ams and Gators—have taken the outdoor…
Read MoreA Float With Jake
Jake lounged—his customary emplacement—on the pond bank, chewing sourweed and providing enlightenment concerning my schedule for the (hopefully) warm months ahead. It’s likely he was hoping the cork wouldn’t dip; too much outlay of his well-stocked and stored-up effort would be required reeling anything in…. “Us needs to take that thar float trip,” he philosophized.…
Read MoreEvans County PFA Keeps Getting Better
Being fairly level headed and tending to take things pretty much as they come, it’s not often that I do flabbergasted. But returning to this place for the first time in eight years was pretty much a shocker. What flitted through my mind, pretty much in order, was, “Where did the grass go? Where did…
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