“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
For audio version click here : On all points of the compass, sixteen barns over one hundred years of age are laid out within easy two mile walks of my home. One hundred years ago there were only sixteen stone houses, two of them tiny tenant houses, along the curves of the two roads which intersect at our corner. A few of the barns are enormous – 35 feet or more to the peaks of […]
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For audio version click here On a Sunday in late March the vet discovered the tumors that filled his chest cavity when one burst and incapacitated him. He treated the pain and gave us the certain news on Monday. Pete had a week left, maybe two. For three and one half days after that, he seemed his old self — comfortable, watchful, a runner and a leaper. For almost ten years he had traveled with […]
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For audio version click here I’ll tell you a story or two or three. One: I knew a senior wrestler whose father suffered from a debilitating disease. Before every match, this young man would cradle his father in his arms and carry him from a car, into the gym and then gently rest him on the bleachers. He was a good wrestler. He won match after match, but the tableau I best recall shows his […]
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For audio version click here Everywhere along the road side where no one has bothered to mow are whole lines of chicory, its lavender blue flowers precisely defined to the eye during these last few days of lower humidity and a cleaner light. In its book on North American Flowers, the National Audubon Society describes chicory as used to “prevent scurvy, as a mild sedative and for skin irritations (146).” It does well in “waste […]
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