Posts tagged as “essays”

Winter hovers outside; the month of December in the Ohio Valley turned out mild and dark with drizzly overcast days and almost no sunshine.  It's the time for reflection, I tell myself as I recline…

In retrospect, the transaction was kind of strange. But then again, aren’t they usually a bit odd when they originate from Craigslist? It certainly wasn’t strange enough to tip me off that $160 of the…

I found myself on the grassy series of knobs headed uphill into dark woods, the old stage coach route which picked out a somewhat more precarious path along the coastal bluffs than the present highway,…

Marcia and I are standing in line at See’s Candies in Santa Rosa, two days before Christmas 2014. See’s Candies is owned by billionaire Warren Buffet and has more than two hundred outlets throughout the west, most of them in California. Some of my earliest memories are of chocolate caramel lollypops from See’s. Hard as rocks and long lasting, those delicious teeth-rotting suckers were two for a nickel when I was a little boy—gateway drugs to a lifetime of chocolate addiction. Warren Buffet did not own See’s when I was a boy, and when he bought the business from the founders, he was wise enough to retain the winning formula: rich chocolate candies sold by matronly women in shops reminiscent of small-town bakeries.

During my periodic visits to Anderson Valley in recent years, I often told recently arrived residents they had not yet experienced a true Anderson Valley winter, one with big storms that lasted days, came often…

It's sad when people die, especially when they are taken violently or unexpectedly. I don't like it when this happens to people I know and I don't like it when I'm forced to participate via…