My Catoosa Life Column

It’s cold outside.
It’s also windy and wet and gray.
Gray. Gray. Gray.
I feel like a lookout on a Viking ship, plowing across the stormy, frigid North Atlantic.
There are whispers of spring.
People talk about it. I think about it. Sometimes it’s all I think about.
When I was younger the winter didn’t hit me this way. It was more fun. But not so much now.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older.
There are signs starting to appear.
My wife turned 40 the other day. I never expected to be married to a 40-year-old woman. Two 20-year-old wives, maybe. But not a full-fledged 40-year-old.
For Christmas, the old lady — I believe that’s her official title now — bought me some furry slippers to wear around the house. Furry slippers? I’m not a furry slippers kind of guy. But they’re warm and comfortable and I wear them every night now.
I bought a puzzle and worked it. And I don’t mean some 200-piece puzzle a monkey could assemble, a full-fledged 1,000-piecer. If my old buddies knew this I would get laughed out of town. A puzzle? What’s next, bridge? Crochet?
In my defense I would mention the fact the image on the the puzzle is a battle scene from the fall of the Alamo. What red blooded American male — young or old — wouldn’t proudly assemble a puzzle showing Davy Crockett blazing away at Santa Ana’s hordes?
I’ve completed the good part of the puzzle — the guns, the old missionary building, etc. The only thing left to complete is the starry sky, which does not strike me as nearly masculine enough to piece together as Crockett’s coonskin cap.
Like a lot of other old men I watch loads of TV this time of year. The other night I watched a couple of men sloshing around in three feet of water in a bat-laden cave so deep in the ground they had to worry about methane poisoning. They also had to worry about snakes — huge reticulated pythons, the pursuit of which was what brought these fellows into the cave.
When I was a kid my mom and aunt would take my cousin Jeff and me on their blackberry hunting excursions. We would wander around the backroads of Chattooga County until we found some blackberries. Inevitably, the delicious morsels would be in the middle of a thick patch of brush — mostly briar bushes.
My aunt and mom would then order us to crawl into the brush to get the blackberries, but not before warning us to “look out for snakes.”
Snakes?
You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to wallow around in cold, nasty water in a methane-gas drenched cave full of irritated bats and murderous snakes.
Unless my mom made me.
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What winter is good for is reading.
Lots and lots of reading.
History. Science fiction. Thrillers. Horror. Mysteries.
I love them all and there’s a big stack of books on a table at my house. That’s my winter reading assignment for this year.
Hopefully, this issue of Catoosa Life Magazine is on your reading list.
Emily Patton has two stories in this issue, “For Pets Sake” and “The Designing Women of Ringgold.” “Designing Women” takes a look inside the door at Kudzu Interiors on Nashville Street in Ringgold. “Pets” is about the Animal Medical Center of Fort Oglethorpe and the Ringgold Animal Hospital, veterinary practices which see to the health needs of local critters.
Victor Miller authored a profile of former county commission chairman and countr historian Bill Clark, who has spent years gathering information about local people and events. Check out “From Politics to History.”
There’s more local history on tap in Bill Mitchell’s feature “How It became Taylor’s Ridge?” Bill fills us in on the history of Dick Taylor, the part Cherokee who left his name on the dominant geographical feature of Catoosa County. Bill, whose family is from the Woodstation area, grew up in the shadow of the ridge in nearby Chattooga County.
And while we’re talking about the Cherokee, Charles Oliver’s Southern Bookshelf this issue is about Jon Meacham’s biography of Indian fighter and U.S. president Andrew Jackson.
I may add that one to my winter reading list.

Jimmy Espy is editor of Catoosa Life and executive editor of the North Georgia Newspaper Group.