Bragg Family South

Lil' dirty face Stephen plays with Bella and Draco... As you can see in the picture above, we've continued to get considerable rainfall this month. This picture is at the Isgrig archeological site I've been working at, and each of those square depressions are excavation units we've been working (some more than others). The picture below is of a potsherd I found the other weekend, notable because of the handle on the rim (by my index finger). This is an unusual attribute to the pottery around here, making this an interesting find... My diggin ' isn't the only big even--Kenny FINALLY lost his final front tooth, after resisting our attempts to pull it for weeks. Towards the end, it was dangling by a thread, and Kenny was not eating properly because it was uncomfortable to eat. Finally, one morning in the guise of some play wrestling, I pinned him to the couch, and Hope raced in to "tickle" him, only to snatch that loose tooth out of his mouth! K...

You ever have one of those days when you just shouldn't have gotten out of bed and gone to work? I'm sure the skidder driver from the picture above wishes he had just stayed home the day he buried his skidder in the mud. I took the picture above today while driving around town following our recent spate of wet, stormy weather. After a largely wet summer (with the noticeable exception of 7+ inches of rain in July), we looked to be in for a dry fall, with little rain in August or the first couple weeks of September. However, since September 12 we have gotten over 18 inches of rain, including 4.2 inches of rain yesterday!! It was raining so hard that many local roads were covered in water, and they let Kenny's school out early to make sure kids could get home safely (especially for the rural bus routes). In addition, yesterday's downpour hastened the demise of the old building pictured below: This building (currently vacant) is on the downtown square, and I suspect...

Don't let the lushness of the picture above fool you--what you are looking at is one of the many scourges of the South--the infamous kudzu! This exotic legume (a plant related to peas and beans) was brought over from Asia decades ago to do what you see it doing here--it was used to keep areas from eroding away. It does this wonderfully, but as you see on the trees in the background, kudzu doesn't know when to quit. It grows rapidly and thickly, smothering out vegetation (even full sized trees) and covering buildings, cars, roads, etc. I took this picture along a highway in Mississippi, while I was driving to Georgia and Florida for my recent week-long business trip. Our first stops in southern Georgia (I was on a tour of southern forestry practices for silviculture instructors) focused on longleaf pine management. Below is a picture of some old-growth longleaf pine: Longleaf pine is an important species in much of the South, although it only covers a few percent of...