March 2022

Pocahontas has a rich history. While national heroes are important, the most overlooked cornerstones are often the local heroes & heroines.

Some guy walking through my neighborhood the other day stopped and said, Jean I saw in the paper that you went up in a spaceship or something like that. Told him that I had actually seen an unidentified object once upon a time and sure enough, it was flying, a UFO! Indeed, I had but very quickly I learned not to talk about that incident at all. People looked at me strangely, plus they did not believe any of it. But I tell you this today, of a truth I saw what I saw, though I do not know what it was exactly. I do know what it looked like, and how it moved through the sky there just in front of me, maintaining the same distance and the same height, once it got close to the road, I was traveling, almost as though it attached itself.

Stories told and retold will again be our subject matter. My long term memory is excellent as to the details of a vast store of anecdotes, but my short term memory has gone south badly. In other words, I can accurately tell the stories but may not remember which ones I have already told. In my father’s phrase “old age is the most inconvenient thing I have run up on yet.”

I am hesitant to write this but here we go…I think spring is finally here. However, as I write this, we are under a frost warning. I should have checked the weather sooner because I moved some of my house plants outside. Oh well, hang in there plants! And I dare say, the season of the pandemic is drawing to an end. Spring is the season of hope -- that things will get better after they were worse. The river will “flow again after it was frozen,” Ernest Hemingway wrote of spring in “A Moveable Feast.” And the English poet, Anne Bradstreet wrote, “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant.” We’ve been in a season of social distancing, shelter at home, mask wearing, political strife, to vaccinate or not, death, war, and a thousand other things that have completely broke our hearts.

Located near the Current River, just north of Cherokee Bay, in the northeastern part of Randolph County, the town of Biggers, founded by B.F. Bigger, was developed and grew around the turn of the 20th century. Scattered settlements and farms were present in the region prior to this time, but the development of the plantation of Thomas Drew, who later served as governor of Arkansas, was in the area of the modern site of Biggers.

Energy Markets Continued Last week we discussed the workings of the energy markets and how the price you pay at the pump is a result of actions in the underlying commodities market. Today we will continue with this topic and discuss other types of energy that we use in our everyday lives.

What’s in a name? Take for example the Pocahontas Redskins. A logical fit or maybe not. Let’s look at the history, how the school’s athletic teams got the name. It had nothing to do with Indians.

I had a man call me about a property that went under contract yesterday. He called me every day for 4 days talking about it but not quite wanting to pull the trigger. Today he called and I had to tell him it was gone. His wife called me a little later telling me if it fell through to call him back. I said “We talked every day and he had the opportunity but he waited until it was sold. Why?” She laughed and said “So he can walk around all day and say he wished he hadn’t missed out on that one!” Just like a man…