We are moving into winter gardening now, our first killing frost last night, a little over a week before Thanksgiving this year in north central Virginia. November rains settling the dead vegetation had seemed only to encourage the flowers and hardy vegetables that continued to greet us with color and friendly bites to eat; it…READ MORE >
I climbed down out of the Crow’s Nest and spent a recent Saturday afternoon worrying a pile of knotty red oak rounds with a maul and wedge, whittling them down to size for the wood stove. As I split them open, I enjoyed seeing the beautiful swirling grains in the wood, exposed to the sunlight…READ MORE >
Each morning on the way to the barn we walk under the hanging limbs of the great beech tree that stands by the corner of our house. Names and dates carved long ago on the smooth, gray trunk are dark and distorted, barely legible. The tremendous number of beechnuts that grow on a tree this…READ MORE >
Since the spring flooding in the Missouri/Mississippi watershed, I have been haunted by an image I saw as a televised news flash: a farmer, a clean-cut white man in work clothes, standing on sorely cracked red clay ground. The news story was about flooding, from the picture we were to see that the farmer lost…READ MORE >
Back in the day, when my friends and I were young and eager to be out sharing poetry and music, the coffeehouse beckoned. Public, legitimate, no age limits, no alcohol licensing requirement, coffee houses in the Chicago area often had a stage as well, many with hours scheduled for drop in performers on the “Open…READ MORE >
I remember one day in a Waldorf school in a big city where I worked as a class teacher, finding my way down long hallways and flights of stairs to a basement room, with a door, that held a couch, a bookshelf, and a small table with coffee supplies. A colleague was sitting on the…READ MORE >
