And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.
— Simon and Garfunkel
The shortest day and the longest night approach as the winter solstice arrives Saturday. It is what Noah Kahan, a young energetic singer/songwriter from my beloved New England, calls “the season of the sticks.” That’s a Vermont name for the time before official winter. It comes just after all the foliage has fallen, leaving the bare limbs hanging in the air like abstract sculptures created by amateur art students.
Here in East Texas, stick season arrived just a few days ago. Leaves skitter along the driveway, fill the backyard....
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I had a semiannual physical exam a while back. Everything checked out well, I am happy to report. A few weeks later, I received an email from the health-care provider’s office, asking me to fill out a survey to ascertain how satisfied I was with the visit. Since I was not given a grave diagnosis, nor ordered to immediately lose weight or otherwise change my habits, I considered the visit a success. I ignored the survey request.
That resulted in several more requests, including one that announced the deadline to fill out the survey was fast approaching. Or what? I wondered. Will my prescription...
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Man plans and God laughs.
– Yiddish adage
Thanksgiving break was supposed to provide time to get chores done around Three Geese Farm, after we all fattened ourselves up on fried catfish and all the high-cholesterol accessories – in a break from traditional turkey and trimmings. Brother Gregg arrived on Black Friday not to shop but to help service Little Red – primarily an oil and filter change, tightening some leaky hoses and connections, etc. Thanks to my inability to distinguish between quarts and gallons, that oil change turned into a bit of disaster that required...
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I was on my own the weekend before Thanksgiving, as my Beautiful Mystery Companion paid a visit to daughter Abbie in Denton. I was entrusted with critter care and used the time to tackle some outdoor tasks. The weather was almost fall-like, though as I dug a large hole it was time to quickly shed my hoodie. Sweating in November is just part of living Behind the Pine Curtain.
The hole, dug in soil made soft thanks to the constant invasion of moles burrowing beneath its surface, was dug to plant a tree purchased once I left work at the library at noon Friday. Autumn is a fine time to plant trees...
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Twenty years ago, the Boston Red Sox were on the cusp of elimination from the playoffs once again by the New York Yankees. The Yankees had won the previous season’s American League Championship Series in seven games – another heartbreaker for my beloved Red Sox. And it looked like another season of frustration was about to end ignominiously as the Red Sox trailed the Yankees three-games-to-none in the American League Championship Series in October 2004. I watched Game Four while staying at the Holiday Inn Town Lake in Austin, holding little hope and a glass of wine. No team in Major League...
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I set off into the woods astride Little Red, our tractor, a few weeks ago. Nearly two months of no rain made it possible to bushhog around the fence lines at the back of Three Geese Farm without fear of getting stuck in the mud. It is largely bottomland acreage there, a chunk of it in a 100-year flood plain.
The weeds were above my head, making mowing rather exciting. I had no idea what I was about to run over and often hopped off the tractor to visually check before forging ahead. I have a healthy fear of getting stuck out in the Back 40 and having to sell a kidney to pay someone to tow Little...
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HEART MOUNTAIN, WYOMING — On Feb. 19, 1942, a little more than two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched America’s entry into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. That order resulted in nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — most of them American citizens — being removed from their homes and sent to 10 concentration camps They euphemistically called them relocation centers. One of those camps was built in the Wyoming desert, 12 miles north of Cody in the shadow of craggy Heart Mountain. At an elevation of 8,123 feet, Heart...
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In the spring of 1942, landscape photographer Ansel Adams stood on the roof of his Pontiac with its wood-paneled doors, peering into his 8x10 view camera, mounted on a tripod with its lens aimed at the craggy peaks of Wyoming’s Grand Tetons. The Snake River formed an S-curve below. In his photograph, the peaks were nearly covered in snow above the timberline, as they were when we briefly visited in mid-October.
I stood next to an outdoor display of his photographs at the site where Ansel made his famous image of the Tetons and Snake River. Of course, I attempted to create my own highly inferior...
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CODY, WYOMING – We booked Room #12 at the Irma Hotel, built in 1902 by William Frederick Cody for $80,000 – about $3 million today. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, called it “just the sweetest hotel that ever was.”
A wooden sign on the door of #12 proclaims we are indeed staying in The Buffalo Bill. Col. Cody, as he was usually called, maintained two suites and an office at the Irma. We are staying in one of those suites, which is about the size of a small one-bedroom apartment. It has a spacious living room with a soft leather couch and a nice view of Cody (the town) from the suite’s...
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As most of you know, I made my living as a community newspaper publisher for more than three decades, starting in 1982 in San Augustine, down in Deep East Texas. I had just turned 27. Running The Rambler for five years (I ended up buying it) provided a valuable hands-on education. One of my teachers was Ambassador Edward A. Clark, a San Augustine native who became a prominent Austin attorney and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “key man in Texas,” as biographer Robert Caro termed him. Clark was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Australia when Johnson ascended to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s...
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