In coming days, landscape crews will descend upon this city and many others throughout Texas and the South, loppers in hand. The annual mutilation of crape myrtles will commence. When they have finished, assisted by well-meaning but deluded homeowners who think this is necessary, these lovely trees — they are trees — will be chopped down to ugly nubs. Eventually, summer blooms will disguise the nubs, but it is still mutilation. Arborists go so far as to call it “crape murder.”
Crape myrtles have boomed in popularity because they thrive in summer heat and bloom for months. They line...
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I bought a new iPhone on New Year’s Eve, after months of pondering whether I wanted to A) spend the money and B) deal with the inevitable pain of swapping out what is, in essence, my brain’s external hard drive. My actual brain’s disk is full, so without a smart phone I would be, well, even dumber than I am. The tipping point was that my four-year-old phone would not run the software for the drone I received for Christmas. More on that later. I’m still sussing through exactly how to fly this drone and use it to take photos and make videos.
Anyway, a phone upgrade required sacrificing...
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One of my favorite workout T-shirts says: BOSTON WICKED STRONG. I bought it in Copley Square on Boylston Street, the year after two pressure-cooker bombs went off in 2013 near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, just up the street from the square. The slogan (“wicked” is Bostonese for very) became the city’s rallying cry after that horrific event, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others. I remember watching on television, enveloped in a great sadness. I know and love this part of Boston intimately after a few dozen visits over the years. We return nearly every summer...
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I drive through downtown Longview most every weekday, headed to my day job on the south side. I almost always get stopped at the light at the intersection of High and Cotton streets either coming or going to work, sometimes both. On the northeast corner is a city-owned parking lot where the popular Farmer’s Market is held during late spring and summer. On that site once stood the scariest business establishments I encountered as a kid: Kelly Plow Company. In the late 1960s, when I began selling newspapers downtown at 13, one of my stops was this factory, built in 1907.
Kelly Plow came into...
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