SHREVEPORT — The Shreveport Municipal Auditorium has somehow escaped my notice all these decades. I drove over from Longview for concerts a few times with high school buddies, but they were held in the spherical but unremarkable Hirsch Coliseum next to Independence Stadium right on I-20. I saw Black Sabbath there, and other bands whose names escape my memory. It is certainly a useful multi-purpose arena, noted, perhaps apocryphally, for being the place where, in 1957, the phrase “Elvis has left the building” was first uttered.
The Municipal, on the other hand, is a beautiful example of Art Deco...
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Even though until recently it has rarely rained here at No Name Farm — and in nearly all of Texas — for months — the goatweed continues to grow. It sprouted everywhere the land was mulched last fall. Goatweed likes loose, sandy soil of which we have an abundance as a result of the mulching, building a pond and spreading the soil out from the pond to create a nice drainage system when it does actually start raining again. Conditions have not been conducive for planting grass seed, but I hope to disc up the mulched land and plant ryegrass when it cools off. Until then, I pull out the tractor...
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Even though it has rarely rained here at No Name Farm — and in nearly all of Texas — for months — the goatweed continues to grow. It sprouted everywhere the land was mulched last fall. Goatweed likes loose, sandy soil of which we have an abundance as a result of the mulching, building a pond and spreading the soil out from the pond to create a nice drainage system when it does actually start raining again. Conditions have not been conducive for planting grass seed, but I hope to disc up the mulched land and plant ryegrass when it cools off. Until then, I pull out the tractor and bushhog the goatweed...
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It crept up out of Mexico, touching first along the brackish Pecos and spreading then in all directions, a cancerous blight burning a scar upon the land.
Just another dry spell, men said at first. Ranchers watched waterholes recede to brown puddles of mud that their livestock would not touch. They watched the rank weeds shrivel as the west wind relentlessly sought them out and smothered them with its hot breath. They watched the grass slowly lose its green, then curl and fire up like dying cornstalks.
Farmers watched their cotton make an early bloom in its stunted top, produce a few half-hearted...
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I am looking at an Allen wrench on my desk, placed there because I forgot to take it out of my pocket. It was poking me in the leg as I sat at this computer. On the next trip to the shop, this lowly Allen wrench will join a host of others collected over the years while putting together various pieces of furniture.
Once again, July became moving month, except this time it was getting daughter Abbie to Denton, where she begins graduate school at the University of North Texas this month. This involved buying her a bed and couch, selling her old bedroom suite, giving away another bed frame to brother...
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