Is anyone else old enough to remember when the worst epithet you could scream to someone on the playground who was bullying you was, “You think you’re smart!” and that would send the chastened bully slinking to the other side of the playground?
Today there is just as apt to be a shooting or a beating […]
If you are not a “dog person” you might as well turn the page.
But if you are one of those who consider your dog, be he or she a purebred or mixed breed, an important member of your family, you’ll understand the ongoing heartache of Tom Brugnaux of Poland/Boardman and Cindi Hamrock of Austintown who […]
As Punxsutawney Phil, sensing that his winter’s snooze is about to be interrupted, begins to twitch in his cozy man-made burrow, I implore you to pay no attention whatsoever to his publicity stunt Feb. 2.
He no more knows what he’s talking about than do any other of Mother Nature’s purported prognosticators, with only one exception.
Consider […]
Now is the time to gather up all the beautiful, humorous, thoughtful, pictorial, etc. etc. greeting cards you’ve received since the holiday season began.
Put them in a neat pile, pour a cup of coffee, select a few of the yummy cookies you’ve been given, and look at each card and read each note.
Marvel
Marvel at […]
Once again I’m sharing with you my mother’s thoughts of Christmas and even though you receive this week’s Farm and Dairy on Christmas Eve, most folks are certainly too busy at the moment to read all the interesting material it contains.
But perhaps after everyone has gone to bed, after everyone is taking a breather before […]
It’s been quite a while since I shared with you one of my columns written for Farm and Dairy by my mother, Berenice T. Steinfeld, who used the pen name “Aunt Teek” for her weekly columns form 1952 to 1965, the year of her death.
But going through the box in which she kept her columns […]
Oh how my sister and I hated Pollyanna.
Pollyanna — the heroine of a long-ago children’s book — was a symbol of relentless cheerfulness.
No matter how dire the circumstance, the “little glad girl” managed to find something cheerful about it.
The author who gave her birth — Eleanor H. Porter — in 1913 created a monster […]
Somebody — was it you? — really, really blinked from the time you were warned that if you did it would all be gone! — because since I issued that warning just two weeks ago it is indeed totally all gone!
And now that daylight saving time has also gone, the amount of light diffused by […]
Don’t even blink, or everything will be gone.
That fire-red inferno of a maple tree now ablaze in the front yard will be naked.
That birch tree whose fallen foliage will have already made a golden circular skirt on the still-green grass and its bared white arms will plead for a blanket of snow.
Blinding
That silver maple will […]
In August of 1976, Elizabeth Arrel Thompson and I strolled across her historic 200-year-old Arrel Farm on Arrel Road in Poland.
As we walked, bluebirds flitted around us, perching on fence posts, and we listened to them and to the quiet conversation of her royally bred Hereford cattle that grazed in lush pastures.
She quoted from Robert […]
