Category: Essay
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Autumn is to remember potato vacation. A time of one-room schools neatly scattered through the townships like jubilant watermelon patches. When kids walked to school, pumped the water and filled the reservoir, swept the outhouse, clapped the erasers before pledging the allegiance to the flag, and President Washington reigned over the alphabet strip. This, our […]
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Isherwood: How to Build A Bird
Grandparents have a critical role in a kid’s education. My wife and I disagree on gender lines exactly what this role is, you can surmise the details: fire, gunpowder and jokes about farts. For myself I believe a grandfather’s role can be summed up by the acronym SOTG, Second Only to God, this where I […]
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Holy Cow, and We Thought GMO Was A Tough Decision
First, a nasty little list: Zika, West Nile, dengue, equine encephalitis, malaria, yellow fever, chikungunya, Rift Valley Fever, Kyasanur Forest Disease. Second, a word, arbovirus; a term used by epidemiologists to refer to numerous viruses that replicate in blood-feeding arthropods such as mosquitoes, sandflies, lice, mites and ticks and are transferred to humans by biting. […]
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You know how it is, when science discovers something you knew all along. To know the Nobel Prize and a million bucks went to a scientist who wrote up the research about something you already knew, just hadn’t gotten around to getting it published in the Academy proceedings.
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A friend sent an obit that appeared in the Door County Advocate for one Lilly Velk. I did not know Ms. Lilly; still my friend thought I’d like the obit.
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Ingrid Burke of the University of Wyoming in a letter to the Academy of Science offered this lament, “I recently returned from the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America … This year’s conference subject was ‘Global Warming: The legacy of our past, the challenge for our future.
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Evening Milking: Visions of Life on the Family Farm
A farm kid comes of age by an alternate route than does the average kid. I remember classroom discussions about home chores, how urban kids described their chores: take out the garbage, mow the lawn, sweep the garage, vacuum the rug.
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March fourteenth, two thousand fifteen is pie day … an apple, a pear, a plum, a cherry, anything to make us all merry. March 14, 2015 expressed as 3.1415 is pi, or π.
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The source is late night BBC, not that listening to the radio is any cure for sleeplessness; it is a companion. They were discussing democracy and what constitutes the signals, the signs and the effects of democracy.
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Modern children have it easy at Christmas. The modern version of Santa arrives as that jolly old soul, cherry cheeks, robust laugh, nothing sinister or hungry.
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My grandfather tended a daily journal the same as he tended his evening kye, his plow, his morning fire. I have his collection of journals (they were called “daily journals” because that is what journals were supposed to tend).
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My mama, as her mama, had certain folk attachments when it came to cooking and kitchen sayings. Potatoes ought not be boiled in a copper pan. Cutting the throats of chickens as practiced by slaughterhouses, leaves an after-taste but chopping the heads off does not.
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When I am old I shall wear my shirts inside out, I shall wear my ties backward, my hat upside down, I will put my socks on after my shoes, I will eat dessert first.
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How writers come to be I’m not sure we know. To wonder if in the age of Google and Kindle the sense of book that has been with us for the last 500 years is about to be eclipsed.
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About drones? I’m glad you asked. 1956, the year when the Rattlesnake Patrol of the Boy Scouts of America got involved with drones. Honest, it wasn’t our fault.
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The boast of premium is on everything we buy. Premium says my recent package of brake pads. Premium says the six pack of beer. My work shoes it seems were made of premium leather by premium Chinese workers.
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Yutu…the Chinese word…references a thousand-year old folk tale of a rabbit who went to the moon via a magic chariot. Seems it isn’t only farmers who name their cows, their fields, their pickup trucks and tractors.
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I am an undiluted fan of porch noise, not to misuse here the word music. Once the porch was considered a major home appliance the same as the washing machine.
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During the Winter Olympics in Russia a story floated around the web detailing with some mirth a double-stall toilet at the Olympic site. Including the comment that the off-hand user had to reach across the neighboring toilet to access the paper spool.
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There are things that happen to which you must respond. You have no choice. They will not let you rest until you write. Something. And so you sit at the keyboard and begin.