February 10, 1981: It was a dark and stormy night. George Stuteville and I were seated at the Press Table, half bored out of our skulls. He was the newspaper reporter; I was with the local radio station. We’d each been tasked with covering the regular school board meeting in Tell City, Indiana. There was nothing exciting on the agenda, just paying bills, accepting resignations, negotiating teacher contracts. As the meeting wound to a close, I whispered: “Hey George, are…
September was a month of reading three novels from the 1800s and two from the 1900s. When, in the more contempory book, the characters were on social media and making video calls, it was quite a shock. But the biggest shock of all was to discover that Agatha Christie mystery on my shelf … wasn’t. Book 1: What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge Here’s another children’s book I somehow missed as a child. This novel is set in the 1860s…
Have you ever gotten that weird feeling that you were being watched? Turns out, it wasn’t just a feeling. Farmer Gary and I were enjoying our morning tête-à-tête in the sunroom, when he froze – sort of the way a bloodhound does – and intently squinted out one of the east-looking windows. “There’s a squirrel in the tree. He is surveilling us.” Sure enough: Gary calls him Sylvester, after a pet squirrel his cousin Renus had as a child. I…
Remember Edgar from the movie Men in Black? Gary and I thought of him the other day as we read up on the brew that must be mixed before it is carefully poured into a hummingbird feeder. “Sugar … in … water” is all he wants. And so, our first hummingbird carries the name E’gar. When I chose this particular hand-blown glass hummingbird feeder, it seemed like the decent thing to do. According to the online description: Blue: Represents resilience…
By sheer coincidence, all of July’s reads are also available as films or TV shows. From Where the Crawdads Sing to Hillbilly Elegy, they all moved from the page to screen. Which is better? I’ll probably never know, as I’d rather read than watch. But since I’m a member of “the book is always better than the movie” society, you know how I’d vote. (The one generally accepted exception, of course, being Jaws.) Book 1: Benjamin Franklin: His Life As…
I heard from Mom’s cousin Patty this week. She lives in New Hampshire and emailed that they were under a weather alert to watch for tornados. Tornadoes in New England. Crazy stuff! Here in southern Indiana, we had some wicked thunderstorms a few days later. It’s been very hot and those pop-up storms came and went all night. “That Mother Nature – she’s sure in a mood!” I might have said to Farmer Gary more than once. As a Tiller…
Confession: If you’ve followed these blog posts through the years, you may remember that 14 months ago I started reading Charles Dickens’ Bleak House following the author’s original monthly-installment schedule from 1852-3. His novels didn’t get released as a complete volume until after his readers had endured many months of three- or four-chapter installments trickling to them in magazine form. As much as the concept of following the original schedule, and stretching out Bleak House over 20 months appealed to…
This morning, between rowdy thunderstorms, I heard an odd sound. Gary and I were sitting together in our sunroom, gazing into our backyard, which – after all the recent rain – looks like a jungle. The noise was pitched high enough that Gary couldn’t hear it. Years of high-frequency milking machines will do that to you. It almost sounded like an alarm: two tones in fairly rapid succession and then silence. By late afternoon, I’d forgotten all about it. Then…
In the last few days before today’s total solar eclipse, I couldn’t resist checking to see if Mom had ever written a poem about this all-too-rare occasion in nature. Sure enough, she had. But, as often as she wrote about the moon, that’s not what this poem from 1971 was about. Eclipse I saw two wagons passing by the sea:one full of letters from my love to me.The other held a cargo of such strange designthat I could only pray…
Now that we have a sunroom, Farmer Gary and I notice daily we have several new patches of disturbed earth outside. It’s time to decide what to plant there. We brought up the topic while visiting with John, Aubrie, and Cameron last week. Aubrie loves to garden and is always great with gentle advice – be it regarding fruit, vegetables, or flowers. It’s always fun for John and me to observe our spouses dig in and discuss fertilizer, alkaline levels…