Dinner in the Field and other stories

I find you can discover your strengths at any age.  For example, I find I’m a better writer than I am an editor.  I have a full-length draft of a memoir that I’ve devoted countless hours to, and it’s finally finished.  I’m anxious to move on to new material.  But finishing the book is not the same as completing the project.  Doing it right, I’m told, entails a less than...

It Takes My Breath Away

As much as I try to insulate myself here, withdraw after a career working with kids and families, the news sometimes takes my breath away. Sometimes it feels like the air is being sucked right out of this shack. I’ve turned off the e mail feed on my computer and stopped listening to the radio while writing. I check Face Book only on my phone now and have cut way...

Garden Report

So far it’s been a good year for the McClure garden up here on Fields Hill. I picked and ate way more asparagus than usual. I harvested stalks from our one rhubarb plant and baked a pie. Unlike most years, I managed to plant early rows of spinach, leaf lettuce and radishes. As I had hoped to do for many years, I got four Brussels sprout plants in the ground...

Oh Brother

We’d been planning yesterday for a couple of weeks, but the concept of being together again for a day like that was born a long time ago. My brother, who left Illinois for the last time in about 1967, moved home. It gave us the opportunity to see each other at more than weddings and funerals. It was a really good day. All my siblings lived in Illinois but my...

Tunes for the Old Crowd

Whenever I find myself mostly in the company of old people, I think of my Dad. Sometime long after I left home, when my parents were in their seventies, the little town of Danvers organized a Senior Citizens day when the community’s old people would gather each week at the fire station, do some kind of pot luck lunch, and play cards. My Mom was all enthused. My Dad, himself...

For Some, Winter Never Ends

I’ve been working on a project, writing the history of an old organization, which defies brevity. It’s taking a lot of time. So last week’s blog post was a shortened earlier YSB essay on mushroom hunting. I’ve been retired almost a year so I took the hook out of that story and simply ran with the mushroom part. I should have left it alone. In the original essay I used...

Mushroom Hunting

I went mushroom hunting yesterday. Ottawa had its Morel Fest, this year teamed with home brewed beer tasting, last weekend, just about a week early. Didn’t matter much though, they had a great turn out. We’d yet to have a really hot day, the kind that when they happen, in early May, make the mushrooms pop up. Morel mushrooms grow wild in the woods around here. I don’t go expecting...

Computer Hell

It started one morning when my daily e mail messages didn’t appear in Outlook. I quickly checked my I Phone. E mails were coming to my smart phone but not to my laptop. After repeated attempts at sending/receiving in Outlook I discovered an error message, 0x800CCCIA. When I googled the error message, Yahoo appeared instead. As I entered the search terms in the box a short video clip, constantly repeating,...

Katahdin Sheep

A Story for Spring

Tonight, for the potluck following my church’s Seder dinner, I’m cooking lamb. My church, an open and affirming UCC church here in Ottawa, has been having Seder dinners for quite a while. Until I attended one I was unfamiliar with the tradition of a Seder, believing it to be a Jewish tradition. And it is. It is a meal served to commemorate the beginning of Passover in the Jewish faith....

Independent Living

There is a Trailways bus that takes off from Burlington, Iowa every morning of the week heading east. It stops in towns along Interstate 80 before arriving at the bus station in downtown Chicago. You can get on the bus in Ottawa at the Dunkin Donuts in front of the North side Kroger at 4:30 a.m.. Dunkin Donuts is open twenty four hours a day so you can wait inside,...