With the scary hurricanes and scary tornadoes and scary severe thunderstorms swirling all around us, we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, and hopefully by the time you read this, we’ll still be waiting.
Amidst all of this, I found a lovely quotation that should give us pause, and to realize […]
They were such an unlikely pair, but pair they were. Playing together. Sleeping together. Eating together.
They were Hamilton, 70 lovable pounds of boxer mix, and Winston, maybe 8 pounds of Jack Russell terrier, a bundle of lovable, feisty, endless energy. Winston was boss. No one ate until Winston finished his meal, not even Jesse, the […]
Long before November, the television’s remote or its mute button or both will self-destruct. With my help.
Witness the gag reflex for the explicit commercials for what should be very personal problems for men and women, invariably aired at supper time. Hit the button.
And now pre-election political come-ons for both parties are repeated over and over, […]
“A funny thing happened on the way to …” and it should continue “the Forum”, but in this case, it was the recycling center.
Happily, the center is only about a block from me, and I recycle everything possible, so I make the trip about once a week. (And I am always appalled at the terrible […]
If there is one thing that will get you off your duff, whether or not you feel like it, it is the impending arrival of out-of-town guests.
Suddenly, your reasonably clean house and reasonably tidy barn look filthy, your just-mowed lawn seems to have turned into a hay field, your adequate supply of food and beverage […]
These 8-1/2 acres I have managed to save from almost wall-to-wall development represent such a small refuge, but refuge it is, and I constantly marvel at the variety of wildlife that has found it.
Here I can blink back at the fireflies over the pasture at dusk so it resembles a trackless city. Here I can […]
Like a breaking floral wave, the locust blossoms frothed and foamed in the breeze, their inimitable fragrance beckoning bees whose humming was an audible drone.
In our back yard at home, when the grass stretched down the little grade to Yellow Creek, there were maybe six towering locust trees and when they were in flower, we […]
The extremely heavy book in my lap as I write this column is titled National Encyclopedia of Business and Social Forms and Embracing the Laws of Etiquette and Good Society.
Written by James D. McCabe and printed by the Home Publishing Co. of Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1882, it contains 838 pages. This particular copy, according to […]
No matter your opinion of the late but unmourned winter — since this is a family publication we’ll not offer our thoughts — it would seem that every flowering shrub, tree, bush and even traditional spring flowers believed it was the best ever.
Maybe we’re mistaken, since the winter seemed so endless, but didn’t everything […]
Every spring, this column is committed to bring you in poetry the scent of hyacinths as you read once again the advice of an old saying:
If thou of fortune be bereft
And in thy store there be but left
Two loaves: sell one,
And with the dole,
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul …
Now spring can really begin! And […]
