Seven years ago I moved into the off grid house I designed in the subdivision of 135 ten-acre lots called Rancho Navarro. Every morning I listen to songbirds while strolling among the redwoods. On April…
Posts published in “Essays”
J.S. Bach’s two musical confrontations with taxes span his career composing and performing cantatas. Nur jedem das Seine (To Each His Own!), BWV 163, dates from 1715, the year after Bach had been promoted from…
A long road paved with good intentions has brought Mendocino County to a hellish land of marijuana cultivation called Covelo. Those good intentions were mostly lies, but well-intended ones. Maybe. After all the years of…
Support for a traffic roundabout at Bush and Low Gap seems confined to those who work in government, which is sufficient cause for skepticism among the rest of us. City officials recently resurrected plans for…
What is about Jews and marijuana? That’s what Richard Nixon asked H. R. (Bob) Halderman 50-years ago, on May 26, 1971 to be precise. The White House tapes recorded Nixon saying, “There’s a funny thing,…
In his autobiography, I, Claud…, Cockburn describes being recruited by the Daily Worker in late 1936: “It was about this time that Mr. Pollitt, Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, whom I had never met, was…
We are a family of Tolkien geeks. It all started in Comptche back in the early 90s. As a newlywed couple my ex-husband Mike and I moved onto Flynn Creek Road to build a retirement…
I live between a gorge and a graveyard. The gorge just to the south began forming some ten thousand years ago at the end of last Ice Age, and its northern rim is moving inexorably…
The Mendocino Outlaws murdered Tom Dollard and William Wright on Wednesday, October 15, 1879. By the weekend Sheriff Jim Moore arrived in Mendocino City with a posse of four other men. Moore had sent a…