By this time, most schools have begun their new year or soon will. We've been unable to ignore the resumption because of the ubiquitous back-to-school ads and store displays, which have cluttered the aisle since shortly after school was out for the summer. It's that time of year again! Also, I've been involved in conducting three in-service training sessions for teachers during that recent week. So I've been thinking about, planning, and preparing those workshops since late May. This year was...

While on a recent visit to attend the Summers family reunion (my mother's side of the clan) in the community where I grew up, I began reminiscing about the stores my parents patronized during my childhood. The closest one was a small country store on the corner of Hill Road and Fort Sumter Road. My maternal great grandparents (Harvey and Lula Graybeal) and later my paternal grandparents (Blaine and Omega Peterson) operated it. The original Graybeal-Peterson country store at the intersection...

My wife and I recently took two of our grandchildren to an amazing exhibit of life in miniature, the HO-scale model railroad layout of the Apple Valley Model Railroad Club in Hendersonville, North Carolina (https://avmrc.com). The 1902 Hendersonville train depot We had taken three other of our grandchildren there several months earlier. They had enjoyed it immensely, and we thought the other grandkids would, too. They certainly did. (I did, too. It made me antsy to build another layout of my...