PETIT JEAN STATE PARK, ARK. — We spent the final two days of winter tramping the trails of the oldest state park in the Land of Opportunity. The park is about an hour west of Little Rock, near Morrilton. Petit Jean Mountain sneaks up on you, rising out of cropland that still lies fallow, the irrigation rigs standing sentinel under a 180-degree sky. We begin winding our way upward to the top of this modest mountain, elevation 2,441 feet.
The mountain is named, the legend goes, after a young French woman who died following her true love across the ocean disguised as a boy. He had come to explore...
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Spring has been angling to arrive for a few weeks, but winter just hasn’t wanted to leave East Texas this year. It has enjoyed its stay with snowstorms, temperatures in the teens, howling winds and all manner of ridiculous behavior. One day I checked the weather app on my iPhone, and it was colder in Longview than it was in Boston. Now that is just messed up.
So it was with great relief that we all got out of the car last Sunday week on the way to church and noticed the tulip trees had exploded on the courthouse lawn. They are the Sentinels of Spring in East Texas, with gorgeous pink blossoms...
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At TrueFields farm, Grey Face, Freckles and Girl ally vie for the attention of David Sanders, their human minder. David not only provides food in the form of outdated organic onions, carrots and other produce from area grocery stores. He also gives belly rubs to the 300-pound sows that live the good life on this organic operation.
TrueFields has been located on 850 acres near Hallsville since 2008 but is in the process of moving to a place northwest of Jefferson. My fiancé and I managed to squeeze in a tour from David, who is both an investor in True Fields and an employee, on the last weekend...
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So here is what happened. My lovely fiancé, aka my beautiful mystery companion — which is a line from a Jackson Browne tune — and I were slated to attend the Maya Angelou lecture at Northeast Texas Community College last Friday night. What a treat, this famed poet and lecturer here in East Texas. Alas, Ms. Angelou became ill and postponed her appearance until April. As a consolation prize, we headed to the movies.
I bought the tickets while my BMC was engaged in conversation with a couple of acquaintances that had spotted her. We rarely go to the movies, being recluses when not at work....
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I stole an hour the other day and went to the library to look at microfilm of our paper from 1962. I’m working on a long-term research and reporting project. Some of the nation’s large newspapers — New York Times, Wall Street Journal — have been digitized and can be searched online. But if you want to look at issues of the Longview newspaper from 1962, that means slowly scrolling through microfilm a page at a time.
These trays of microfilm tell the story of this community nearly five decades ago, the rough draft of our history. I often wonder in what manner historians will access our paper...
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The Boys Scouts of America turned 100 years old a few weeks ago. My family’s involvement in scouting doesn’t go back quite that far, but it does go back more than 75 years. It continues to this day, thanks to my youngest brother’s volunteer efforts and that of his son, a third-generation Eagle Scout.
I don’t tell you all this to brag, being no great shakes as a Scout. I made it to the rank of Life, which is the one below Eagle, but I was nowhere close to reaching that rarified echelon when the lure of girls, earning money working at this newspaper to put gasoline in Suzuki motorcycle...
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First time I met Charlie Wilson was in 1978, inside the motor coach that served as his portable campaign office. I was a photographer for the Nacogdoches paper. He was running for re-election to Congress, something he did every two years from the time he was sent there in 1972 until he retired in 1996. Despite his well-earned reputation for drinking, partying, squiring around beautiful women and saying outrageous things, “Good Time Charlie” was handily re-elected every time by the voters of his district in Deep East Texas.
I covered Charlie’s return trips home for most of the next two decades,...
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“I can’t help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight.”
—Lynne Truss, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”
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I trust Ms. Truss is manning the barricades in her native Britain, where in Birmingham the city elders have decided to drop all apostrophes from street signs. An Associated Press story says officials concluded the pesky little tear-dropped symbol is “confusing and old-fashioned.” The phrase sparks the image of a slightly loopy aunt, perhaps too fond...
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I stopped by the nursing home early last week to tell my mom I would pick her up the next day, to take her to lunch to celebrate her 80th birthday. She looked startled at the news.
“Jeez, I’m old,” she said.
Three years ago, my mom spent her birthday in Good Shepherd Medical Center, bouncing back from once again having received the Last Rites. At the time, I wouldn’t have taken 10-to-1 odds that we would be heading to Cotton Patch Café on a sunny winter morning to mark her birthday with a plate of fried catfish.
She is a tough old bird. That will be her epitaph, in my mind if not on the actual...
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Although the weather has thawed out considerably since the Great Freeze of January 2010, it is still the Indoor Season. The sun disappears early so yard work is on hiatus. I find nothing better than settling near a fireplace, listening to soft music and escaping into a good book. Here is a quintet of recently published selections that I have read, or nearly finished, since winter began. Perhaps you will find something of interest here to curl up with as well.
• “The Help,” by Kathryn Stockett. If you read just read one novel this year, this is the one. It is the story of a young white...
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