By now, you’re getting a bit panicky. When you put last year’s Christmas “away,” where did you put the list with all the names of friends who get cards or gifts or coffee cakes? And what about the red and gold banners you stick on the pasture gate and the cemetery fence with green duct tape (which gives you a fit when you try to remove it come summer)? At least you remember where the rolls of red plastic ribbon are that turn the porch’s white pillars into candy cane look-alikes when it is spiraled around them.
In these very troubled times – national troubles, global troubles, financial troubles, violence troubles, climate and weather troubles, energy troubles, war troubles, strike troubles, health troubles, ad infinitum – there are many families who will surely have trouble being thankful this Thanksgiving Day.
From Washington D.C., the telegram is addressed to Mr. Harry Thompson, St. Clair Avenue, East Liverpool, Ohio.
For me, Christmas morning can’t hold a candle to one of these rare October dawns when the sun is not quite up and the dew is heavy on the grass and contrails play tic-tac-toe in heaven’s splendid blue vault.
Even above the 6 o’clock newscast I could hear an insistent voice – that of a chickadee calling over and over, and loudly, from the back porch.
Decisions! Decisions! Which of more than a dozen jottings gets the lead paragraph for this column? And suddenly, Mother Nature makes the decision with a dazzling offering on the sunny last day of summer as a friend and I admired the just-mowed pasture.
It wasn’t even Labor Day yet when Halloween decorations, cards and other gimcracks appeared on store shelves.
Getting ready for Canfield Fair was always a rite of passage in bygone days, and it was surely less complicated then than it is today.
Anyone who fancies himself a writer always reads and critiques other writers’ efforts, sometimes with disdain and sometimes with admiration while saying to himself, “I wish I’d written that.
To think I am being held hostage by a half-ounce bird! Outside the kitchen window, the wisteria vine is headed for the roof, hulls from oil sunflower seeds are piling up, venturing to the trash can elicits a loud scolding, and even filling the bird bath is a challenge.
There is an old but tried saying that you can’t fight City Hall. I have found it indeed true. In fact, because I have been fighting a utility instead of city hall – but it is the same thing – I may be in jail by the time you read this.
“Take nine eggs, one-half pound of butter or a tea cup of olive oil, three cold cooked chickens or one medium-sized turkey, two or three bunches of celery .
It would seem that summer has settled in for the long haul. Already the locust blossoms that saturated the sunlit afternoons and the evening breezes with their heady perfume have withered away and the orange blossoms have scattered their petals like snowflakes.
She is Winnie. And she is Ori and Little Sister, and she is Pelly and Polly and Duchess, and she is Sally and Spotty, and she is Missy and Shamrock and Olivia, and she is Maggie and Barney and Brud.
They are together again, Ori and Little Sister. Never before has this house been utterly silent. Never before has this house been virtually empty except for Lisa who misses her friend almost as much as I do.
Mother Nature has pulled some not-so-nice tricks this spring and the one she came up with this past week convinced me that indeed the whole world, including some of its furry creatures, had gone mad.
Actually, it was Shakespeare who made the decision whether or not I would ride a borrowed horse on my 85th birthday.
Twenty years ago on April 4, I awakened to a white glare outside the bedroom window, realized the glare was from snow, laughed aloud, burrowed back beneath the covers, and snoozed for another 30 minutes.
If there is a whopping blizzard on the Thursday this article appears, it is all my fault, because this Thursday (March 22) I unplugged the heat tape in the barn.
March is certainly being March, at least in my area, where there is great bluster with huffing and puffing and white-outs one minute, benign sunshine the next.
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