Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque nineteenth-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our south the creek builds momentum ever hour as the thaw…
Posts published in “Essays”
Vaccination is one of history's most significant health advances. But California has had outbreaks of measles and pertussis in the past year. California also has a rising number of children not vaccinated for such diseases.…
My name is Brett McFarland. I was born to Mike and Gayle McFarland on October 28th, 1984 in Sioux Falls SD. My father was a high ranking officer in the United States Army and my mother worked nights as a pediatrics intensive care unit nurse.
One of the old-time industries in Anderson Valley and the North Coast was peeling and shipping of tan bark. It was a big thing in its day and created a living for many people. The…
This April puts us five years short of the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe's popular novel about an island castaway is thought to have been inspired by the experiences of…
I met Peter Matthiessen once when the Friends of the Library were selling books at the Koret Auditorium in 2001. Matthiessen was featured speaker at a program in the “Writers of the Land” series sponsored…
We can't see the city of Decatur from inside this prison, but at 9:30pm, we hear the city's sirens wailing in the distance, alarms that signal the worst disasters: floods, fires, plagues of locusts, nuclear attacks, and, of course, tornadoes.
A “Second Chance,” after 25 years of absence and silence, was recently offered Shepherd by Assumpta. Her email arrived from Europe to his farm. We met in Barcelona in 1988 and have had no contact during the last quarter of a century. I answered her email within 15 minutes of its sending, without thinking, but with a deep feeling of connection.
I walk to town most every day rather than drive my truck for the same reason I decided in 1967 to create a life for myself independent of automobiles, something I’ve managed to do for most of the last forty-seven years.