The week after Christmas the boys, my second ex, and I stayed in the home of Luke and Emily Frey, in Redwood Valley. “The Frey winery?” my mom asked, over the phone. “Howie, Spec’s staying at the Frey winery!” They made me promise to take a bunch of pictures. Turns out my folks, who are [...]
Over the two weeks I was fortunate enough to stay with friends on maybe half a dozen farms or ranches in Mendo, I visited as many folks as possible during the days. Because I was not driving, rather relying on pure hospitality, and this was the winter holiday season, some farms and ranches I really [...]
“Never go in Kincaid Holler after dark,” they always warned us. The Kincaids reinforced the frightened prejudices of the German farmers. From the other side of the river, the farmers they regarded as invaders of their native soil, no doubt, as Grandpa, his brother Alvin, and Uncle Huck had purchased most of the neighboring valley’s [...]
Saturday morning I was trying to sleep in, but the phone rang about eight. It was my current employer, Mort O’Henry. “Spec?” “Man, I didn’t think we were working today.” “No, I’m down at my grandma’s farm. Guess who’s here with me.” I knew it had to be my 14 year-old son, Craig. “Craig and [...]
Let my faithful blue heeler bitch, Lupe, spend the night in the house on Friday night, since son was spending the weekend at a friend’s house. The first thing she did in the kitchen was start cleaning, eating all the food particles that my son and I had squandered to the floor. When that job [...]
For years I always joked that my blue heeler bitch was going to leave me for a guy who had a pick-up truck. I was only half-joking, though, and always harbored a deep anxiety that it could easily happen — any time some friend with a truck stopped by the farm in Boonville to pick [...]
The weather turned out sunny and gorgeous, if a bit breezy, for the 43rd annual “Old Verona Days” festival, this past weekend. Judging by the town’s name, you might think it was Italians who first robbed the land from the Shawnee people, but it was actually a group of French monks who named the place, [...]
The country roads in our valley are decorated with blowing cornhusks and broken pumpkins, remnants of crops not intended for human consumption, as the autumn harvest is in full swing. I get a tour of the fields on Sunday mornings when Grandpa and Grandma faithfully show up in their luxury car to offer my son [...]
A steady mist descends from the vague cloud cover, preventing me yet again from ascending the barn roof to repair the flapping, corrugated steel. “You should let me do it,” my teenaged son, Craig says. “I have better balance.” I have to admit that he’s right, though the idea of watching him climb around on [...]
A week of unseasonably cool weather reminiscent of summer days on the Mendo coast blasted through southern Indiana at twenty miles an hour out of the north, with Canada geese in their V-formations. The prevailing winds in these parts are from the southwest, and the rusted, dangling sheets of corrugated metal on our barn roof [...]
