Saturday, November 7, 2026

When I think back to my trick-or-treating days as a kid, my memories strike a contrast with the door-to-door invasions we think of today.

Dianne Shoemaker and I have been sharing this Dairy Channel column since 1997, I think. That's a total of about 130 Dairy Channel articles for each of us.

Show me the contents of a person's wallet and I'll outline their life. My skinny wallet, for example, holds just two credit cards (likes convenience, hates consumer debt), a grocery store discount card (cheapskate), a driver's license, voter's registration card and fishing license (name, address, age, dull life) as well as a blood donor card (O Positive).

When I was a little girl, a common advertising icon was Reddy Kilowatt. He was an electrical sprite of undetermined origin who flittered about representing the magic of electricity.

Tragedy. The nerve-jarring news of any school tragedy is difficult to take in. But the horror in an Amish school house in a bucolic part of the world where violence is nonexistent proved to be more than we could grasp.

We settled on a bench across from the pond in Salem's Waterworth Park. Several varieties of ducks and geese floated leisurely across the water.

As fast as time usually passes, it seems to pick up even greater speed in the fall. Corn and soybeans, like maples' leaves, appear to turn golden one day, brown the next and, at least so to me, are gone the next.

The lyrics of the old song made popular by the soothing voice of Eddy Arnold have spun through my head numerous times during this past week as news reports brought the horrific news of yet another school shooting in our homes.

Nothing makes you feel as inadequate as not being there for your kids when they call you and they're in trouble.

Leaving a backlog of work it clearly had no appetite for, a deeply divided, very worried Congress skedaddled out of Washington at the end of September to make its re-election case to an equally divided, equally worried electorate.