Sunday, January 18, 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).

The next afternoon after this tragedy, a beautiful autumn day, I was pleasantly surprised to come home and find our little Amish neighbor girls, Anna and Lizzie, here in our back yard, picking up walnuts as we had told them they were welcome to do.

In a perfect world, we'd never print another article like Tony Nicoletto's page one story about his miraculous recovery from a farm accident.

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.

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.

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.

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.