Without a tractor, I’d been unable to work the crop residue and weeds into the ground from our sweetcorn, watermelons, etc., and the lambsquarters and pigweeds were rearing their ugly heads and waving them at me defiantly in the autumn breeze
Posts published in “Essays”
Outside the robins are gobbling hawthorn berries, one after the other. The tree will be bare in another day. Hawthorn berries contain the same antioxidant, oligomeric procyandins (OPCs), as grapes, as well as the flavanoid…
In Newton, Iowa, from the 1940's through 1970's, there was a diminutive man who hung out at the barber shop around the corner from the Maid-Rite hamburger joint. His name was “Buttons,” which was obvious…
“I hate my hair!” Who hasn’t heard a woman utter this grievance at one time or another? In prison, it’s a universal complaint, a woeful acknowledgement that, whether curly, straight, kinky, or gray, most women…
It started out as a simple enough road trip plan. We were going to drive to Oregon to ride on two tourist excursion railroads we’d never ridden before. It ended up being a 2,100 miles…
Recently listening to fascinating interviews with Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange, I was struck by their repeated use of the expression American Exceptionalism. The expression as they used it had geo-political connotations, but I think American Exceptionalism also captures the essence of the most popular operating system of the individual American psyche.
I was born in western Pennsylvania, in McKeesport, a steel mill town outside of Pittsburgh. I was the youngest seven kids and my dad was in the ice business, delivering ice to homes and businesses for their “ice boxes”. That was a business clearly headed for obsolescence. Shortly after I was born, he sold the ice business and bought a Mobile gas station.