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 [...]
The rows of green salad bowl and buttercrunch lettuce that I’d planted in the shade of a line of hard maples and shagbark hickories are growing faster than the red salad bowl lettuce out in the sun. I’d planted the red in the sun because otherwise, when I’ve tried to grow red salad bowl under [...]
Grandpa and Grandma stopped by our little homestead, rolled up the driveway in their luxury sedan, all spiffed up in Sunday duds to offer my teenaged son, Craig, and I a ride to church. “Lupe, get back!” I hollered at my blue heeler bitch, while hanging up a load of laundry on the line in [...]
Across the table sat Grandpa in the straw cowboy hat he has to wear these days on account of the skin cancer that developed on his pointy German ears from working out in the sun in those baseball caps all the farmers switched over to decades ago when the hybrid seed corn companies started handing [...]
The watermelons are ripening almost on time in spite of the unusually cold and wet spring that delayed planting by a month, thanks to a July that saw no more than half an inch or so of rain depending on location, nighttime lows barely dipping to 80° Fahrenheit. The unique sands of this river valley [...]
Here it is eight in the morning, and I’m actually seated at a desk in our farm house with a light bulb illuminating ink on paper. Lightning cracks across the dark sky. This is my first day off since I can remember. My employer, Grizzly, bothered to call at 7am to tell me not to [...]
All those years in Boonville I pined for the excitement of the April storms in these here Kentuckiana hills. It’s an annual reenactment of the civil war, confederate flags flapping in the balmy breath from the South, the frigid logic of the blue bellies blasting across the Great Lakes, the battles lighting up the night [...]
