Ponderings by Dan Ponder

The slate blue cloth draped down her back almost to her waist.  It was framed by a background of black trimmed in red.  Originally it was a hood to cover the head in the wind and the weather.  Later, the colors began to tell a story, the story of an academic life.   The hat…

Returning last night to Auburn after an extended stay at Compass Lake, I walked the campus this morning.  Unlike my walks during the height of the pandemic, the campus was bristling with life.  Fall semester is about to start, one of the biggest annual changes in the life of any college town. I passed by…

I walked into the cavernous room not exactly sure what to expect.  I had a vague recollection of Nerf guns but having had daughters, these toys were not at the top of our list.  However, this was the occasion of the eighth birthday of my middle grandson, Will Faulk.  Make no mistake, he is all…

I fought it.  We all did.  It crept up on us slowly, almost like a curiosity.  This will never work we thought.  For some years we were right.  Then the powers that be, corporate America, decided enough was enough and fought back.  Today, they finally won. I was in one of the neighborhood Walmart’s.  It…

I have been a lifelong reader, but it is only since I started listening to audiobooks while taking long walks that I realized the number of chapters different books have.   Some will have 70 chapters and some just a few.  There is not a right or wrong way to write a book, as they…

Actually, I never had a Grandaddy John.  However, my mother has a great friend named Bonnie, who had a stepfather named John.  The children of Bonnie and her siblings called him Granddaddy John.  This is his story, sort of. This past week, I took my mother down to Panama City Beach to one of her…

The 4th of July is a very important date to my family for a variety of reasons.  First and foremost, we celebrate the founding of our country which has given our family generations of opportunity and success.  We celebrate those ancestors in our family that fought to secure that freedom we all cherish and occasionally…

It was the most unexpected of gifts, a certificate to a backpacking outfitting store.  My wife, Mary Lou, had heard me talk for years about my dream of one day hiking the Appalachian Trail.  Each time we crossed the “AT” as it is known, I would recount the story to my own kids about how…

My wife, Mary Lou, and I were sitting out on the front porch with our neighbors a few days ago. ML and I had been quite busy, having put up 20 quarts of field peas, nine quarts of fresh butterbeans, a dozen ears of fresh sweet corn and 12 jars of new crop Mayhaw Jelly.…

My wife, Mary Lou, and I headed to Compass Lake this past weekend for a few days.  We were expecting hot weather, but we still had a few things to do before our extended family comes down for the July 4th weekend.  All our children, along with our grandchildren and my mother will be joining…