Thanksgiving & Georgia's On My Mind

GEORGIA FOLK AND FARM LIFE - I’m writing this from a quiet room along Lake Texoma, just a few miles from where my great-great-grandparents settled after leaving Tennessee for Texas. My family is gathered nearby at a lakeside cabin for Thanksgiving, but I’ve exiled myself thanks to a winter cold—the kind only a man can get. A full-blown, world-ending, buy-one-of-everything-in-the-pharmacy sort of cold. And when you’re out of town and can’t find your glasses, you just take one of everything and pray it doesn’t finish you off faster than the illness.

Feeling better this morning—victorious, really, after cheating certain death—I set out to visit the places my people once walked. I’m the first Jolley in two generations to live on land again; our renovated family farm back in Georgia dates to 1905, and I love that place dearly. But being this close to the old homeland tugged at me, so I went looking for the farms I’d only heard about growing up.

I found both houses still standing. One still looks across at a working farm. The other—my great-grandfather Jolley’s—was subdivided years back. Both slipped out of the family in the 1970s, but seeing them again felt like shaking hands with my own history.

Great-Grandpa Jolley farmed turkeys, and every Thanksgiving I wonder what it would’ve been like to have one of his birds on the table. I imagine they tasted a little more like the man himself—honest, hard-earned, and raised under a Texas sky.

I wear his wedding ring, and I still have his old wash pot—the one he kept simmering over a fire all day to render whatever needed rendering. Their old rocking chair, the same one that once creaked beside their fireplace, now rocks beside mine nearly a thousand miles away. Those ties to the past matter to me, like they do to many of you. I’m thankful that even though the land didn’t stay in the family, a few of the things did. Today they’re with me on our new family farm—the next chapter, a Georgia chapter.

And this afternoon, I stood in his knotty pine living room—the very room my dad helped build as a young boy alongside his own father and grandfather. It was there Dad first held his .410, and it was in that same room my grandfather stood with that gun just before he passed it down. Now, all these years later, that rabbit-killing scatter gun hunts our place in Georgia, this time in the hands of my son.

Those gifts and heirlooms are treasures because their hands once held them—their memories, hopes, and dreams wrapped around the same wood and steel. In a world that moves fast and forgets easily, those pieces matter more than ever. It’s not the stuff itself. It’s what it lets us hold on to. It’s all we have down here to remind us of the ones we miss and love so much up there. Earthly reminders of loved ones gone ahead.

Later, standing at their graves, those old “what might have been” questions showed up again. What if I’d stayed in Texas? What if the roots had tugged a little harder? But the Lord has a way of answering you when you’re not expecting it.

Even as the man cold was trying to squeeze the life out of my lungs, we rolled through Honey Grove—the very place my great-great-great-grandfather first climbed down from his wagon—and that same feeling rose up. And right then, Stevie Ray Vaughan came through the Suburban speakers with his soulful version of Georgia On My Mind.

So, as the turkey hits the table, know that Georgia is on my mind—even here in the old homeland, sick and homesick, grateful for the long road that ties both places together.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Matt