Commentary on Current Events of Interest to Columbus, and the Surrounding Counties of NC
Editor’s note: Bladen County Board of Education member Steve Kwiatkowski published this opinion piece on his personal social media this week. It is shared here with his permission. On this page, I spe...
I happened to catch maybe two minutes of the Country Music Awards the other night. For reasons I cannot fathom, a bunch of the new stars were singing Phil Collins song. I wasn’t even one of Phil’s son...
I crumpled gratefully into my grandfather’s chair, and moaned a little as I took off my shoes. I had to wonder how many other men in my family had done the same thing through all the years that chair...
I was on an already unpleasant errand when a friend called with the words that would shake the coldest stone statue. “There’s a little kid been shot,” he said. It did not matter that I had heard the w...
I got my digital hands slapped the other day because of my choice of words when I identified an animal track. Some friends were sharing pictures of their camping trip, and during the night they were r...
In the woods beside our house is a half-forgotten colony box for martins. It was knocked into the trees and vines during one storm or another, and restoring it to service is somewhere down around numb...
When I was a kid, there were words that would get your tail torn up, and words that might, in some families, mean you were never seen again. Maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but I did see a classmate i...
On the road the other day, I glanced at an old farm I’ve watched for years, but this time there was nothing left to see. The first house on the farm was built sometime before the War Between the State...
I saw my mother the other day, despite the fact that she went to Heaven 20 years ago. There was a pretty, intense and somewhat frazzled young mother holding hands with a handful of a little boy. He wa...
I hate February. It wasn’t even February yet when I had my latest reminder, although the scurvy, splintered, spindly, slimy Month of Gloom loomed ominously omnipresent across the calendar and anything...
The rainbands were still blowing across the long lane to our house, more reminiscent of a late summer storm than winter. I was thinking to myself how we had dodged a bullet: no major power outages, o...
In the Winter of 2007 I was hunting a two-year-old Walker hound named Kate. She was extremely hard-headed to say the least. She was a bit trashy and would miss from time to time, but she had drive. I&...
A deadbeat young mother goat and a few other needs sent us on a semi-emergency trip to town the other night. It was a Saturday, which means dress codes are not enforced at Valhallasboro, plus the tri...
Today is January 6, the anniversary of the protests, riot, insurrection of whatever you want to call it that rocked Washington DC and led to a shameful witch hunt by politically weaponized federal age...
Note: this commentary is a partial transcript from the Columbus Connection with Managing Editor Jefferson Weaver. The Connection is broadcast every Saturday at 10 a.m. on WTXY and is available on Spot...
I was skeptical that the wood would be too damp, but since it was New Year’s Eve, I needed a fire. It took a few minutes, but the leaves, pine straw and a suggestion of fat lighter overcame their resi...