Owning and operating a farm was his life’s dream. For years, my father worked for others. Then he worked for a dairy cooperative, serving those who farmed. Finally in 1957 the dream was realized with the purchase of 200 acres and a string of buildings tied together as one. The house stood at one end, …
Category: Along the Way
Aug 08
First Sunday of Retirement
Beloved One, this letting go, sitting back, putting my feet up thing is harder than I anticipated. What was I expecting? Do I not remember who I am or where I come from? Remind me again that I have already placed in your loving heart and capable hands the dear ones for whom I most …
Mar 31
Gone are the Old Ways
have you seen my comfort zoneit was wrenched away when I stared into the barrelof a video cameraspoke my pieceand released it into the wildwith hopes of nurturing the Body of Christ it retreated further in my failed attemptat conversation with colleaguesa tablet masqueraded as meand an invisible button denied methe ability to speak when …
Nov 26
Mending Wall
Dear Mr. Frost, Does it trouble you that people so freely credit you for having said “Good fences make good neighbors”? True, you penned those words, but these days people pounce on them and yank them completely out of context for their own purposes. We delight in latching on to the sentence, and then point …
Jan 22
Addiction
It all began with harassing phone calls and threatening texts. Or to be more precise, my most recent snapshot into a much larger drama began with harassing phone calls and threatening texts. While I was the one being harassed (a total of 16 phone calls, 15 texts and 8 messages before I got everything blocked), …
Nov 01
The Morning After
Okay, I admit it: I’ve never been a Halloween devotee. Sure, it was fun as a kid, but my memories are pretty dim (as is true in most categories). We lived out of town on a farm so we didn’t get many trick-or-treaters. Most years we drove into town and made the rounds of the …
Jun 08
What Can I Do?
WHAT CAN I DO? screaming at the television does nothing to undo the unthinkable allowing the poison of his lunacy to feed the lump in my soul erodes like acid and serves no good as for slinking in my seat while neighbors rail against elitist liberal crap fake news protection of our comforts and …
Dec 13
A Family Opening
A few weeks ago, a couple hung back as other worshipers left the sanctuary, and then stopped to talk with me when it appeared we were alone. They quietly told me about their nephew, how his young adult life went through a really bad patch, spiraling out of control in part due to alcoholism, during which time …
Jul 29
Orange Pie
It all started when he decided to share the secrets of the twenty-nine villages that exist beneath his underground garage. Twenty-nine individual little existences, each dedicated to some form of sweetness: a candy cane village, cotton candy village, ice cream village, birthday cake village, banana split village were some of the early revelations. When we …
May 10
Tending the Fire
When we bought our house more than three years ago, we found a burn pile waiting for us. Since then we’ve added leaves, pine needles, decaying bark, trimmed branches, rotten 2×6’s, dead window boxes and other random junk. A couple of years ago, we spent one day burning, but mostly the pile has just grown …
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