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Category: Essay

  • June, The Moon of Weeds

    June, the month, should be renamed “Weed” to better understand its place in the realm of the farm summer. According to farm cosmology weeds come in two forms: noxious and evil.

  • On Overlanding: Why Americans Should Get on the Truck

    The nights we bush camp it feels like we are having an authentic African adventure. Helena spends her time looking for creatures. She fawns over beetles and moths, cooing about how beautiful they are. Tiny lightening bugs send yellow bursts of light through the forest making it look enchanted.

  • On Overlanding: Why Americans Should Get on the Truck

    We finally found a restaurant selling chicken, rice, beans, and chips. Just as we tucked into some beans and chips, thunder clapped and it began to pour.

  • On Overlanding: Why Americans Should Get on the Truck

    Every morning before we left camp, Dave filled two thermoses with instant coffee. The caffeine kept him on high alert as he guided the truck down pot-holed roads that wound up into the mountains between Malawi and Mozambique, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

  • SETI

    SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has fallen on hard times with current federal cutbacks to space science and research. The downside of these cutbacks is they come at a time when new detection strategies enable us to discover planetary bodies around stars to a distance of about a thousand light years.

  • Hi Sally!

  • The Creamery

    By rights it should have been bulldozed. Farms are like this, when old stuff gets in the way, when sheds don’t fit the tractors any more, when barns don’t fit the cows, when fields and woods don’t fit center pivots.

  • Where Else in the World? – Part II of II

    We are given walking sticks that double as distraction tools in case the lions develop an interest in one of us. You throw the stick on the ground next to the lion and maybe he pauses to investigate and forgets about you.

  • Three Stones

    She handed them to me like they were precious – three stones. She is Grace, my granddaughter, and the stones were random bits of gravel from the farmyard she thought valuable because “they glittered.”

  • Old Guys

    It is with a certain regularity we collect each other. So common is this procedure a diagnosis is available for those who collect people, what for want of a better word to call it friendship.

  • Autumn Colors

    A point in the year passes when the outdoor report no longer mentions the fall color encouraging the tourist to visit the north woods. The index here is fashion-show colors, Crayola box colors, those lit-fuse colors of October, not November colors.

  • Considering Mister Dillon and Miss Kitty’s Profession

    Once our beloved aunt gave my brothers and I a present, a thing she thought farmboys had need for…in hope of turning them into civil farmboys. Ms. Vanderbilt’s extensive 300-page deadweight, ore-boat of a tome titled Etiquette For Young Men.

  • Golf

    I have taken up the game of golf out of self-defense. In America not playing golf is a bit like not contributing to the United Way or something equally antisocial.

  • Party Line

    Aptly named for it was called the party line and in its way did predict the Blackberry and the text message. The party line telephone was grandmother’s entertainment in the leave of afternoon soap operas being it was some years yet till television.

  • The Poetry of Frogs

    I found a pen on the floor of a coffee shop this morning. I’m a believer in signs, and it seems to me that this was clearly a sign. As if someone was saying all right, you have the pen, now I’ll give you something to write about…
    Later, high noon at the Ridges…on one of the first glorious spring days, a friend and I head down Deer Lick Trail, eastward between swales, trekking through the pages of time. A large sun dog says rain is coming, but for now it’s warm and clear.

  • Full Flannel

    Going full flannel is like going full monty except in the opposite direction. The farmhouse closet is divided in half, if not quite in half because Wisconsin is slightly more Mars than it is Venus.

  • Somewhere It Is Snowing

    “Somewhere it is snowing.” That phrase came to mind while I was splitting wood on a mild January afternoon, air temp 21 degrees, so windless the snow drifted nonchalantly, if arguably, elegantly.

  • An Adventure in the Snow

    A snowshoe adventure at Newport State Park with a couple novices.

  • Sphagnum Moss Beats John Glenn Into Space

    Remember John Glenn? Alan Shepherd? Yuri Gagarin? The victim heroes shot into space aboard an oversized bottle rocket. It was an age when children dreamed of being treated likewise…shot into space, what to do there was indeterminate.

  • Apple Pie, Wild Apple Pie

    Like most females, she didn’t want to. Which is you see the whole darn problem. I mean the problem between us and them, no matter which side you are on; one does, the other doesn’t, for which there is no possible cure. Save – saith Will Shakespeare – but to try…romance. Beyond this the male […]