Several months ago, an arborist from the Texas A&M Forest Service came to look at one of the large water oaks in the front pasture, which had a deep crevice at its base and clearly contained decayed wood. He took a quick glance and said the tree was a goner. He said the good news is that if it fell, the water oak would fall away from the house. Patching the crevice with foam or concrete, as was common in decades past, would do no good at all. I decided to just leave it and let nature take its course.
Then in late March a fierce thunderstorm blew through, spawning a tornado that destroyed...
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I spent most of a recent afternoon talking on the phone to pleasant-sounding people with distinct French accents. We plan to take a trip to Canada in late June, to visit the villages of the Eastern Township, a picturesque region in Quebec just over the Vermont border. It is the setting for Louis Penny’s popular Inspector Gamache series, which both my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I are engrossed in reading. We are excited to take our first real vacation in nearly three years. And I’m looking forward to exploring the area where my mother’s family grew up, and which I visited as a child.
Crossing...
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For most of my life I have heard the expression, “Sure beats digging ditches.” It is used to compare a task, or job, to the alternative – shovel in hand, slinging dirt. I have used this well-worn phrase many times myself; for instance, when things got hectic or tense in a newsroom, as a hairy deadline loomed, the phrase helped remind me, or others, that there are worse jobs out there.
I often joke that a shovel handle simply doesn’t fit my hand. Shoveling remains one of my least favorite tasks, something I should have considered when we bought this timber-and-snake farm last summer....
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Thanks to a dear friend, my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I took a tour of the world’s largest sanctuary for chimpanzees last weekend and met – at a distance – Valentina Rose, the 10-year-old chimp our friend sponsored for my BMC’s birthday. She received an adorable chimp doll, a certificate, and a photo of her new “best friend.”
Chimp Haven is a nonprofit facility located on 200 acres inside the 1,200-acre Eddie D. Jones Nature Park in Keithville, Louisiana -- an unincorporated area about 20 miles south of Shreveport. It currently cares for 325 chimps formerly used in biomedical...
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Daughter Mere sent my Beautiful Mystery Companion a birthday present recently – a half-dozen volumes in the Inspector Armand Gamache series, written by Louise Penny. I have started reading them as well, trailing my BMC by a couple of editions. The novels are set in the picturesque village of Three Pines in Quebec, Canada. Since first publishing Still Life in 2005, she has written 17 novels with another due out next month. That’s one a year. Pretty impressive.
As Penny writes on her website: I live outside a small village south of Montreal, quite close to the American border. My husband Michael...
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Spring is slow in coming to our farm, about 8 miles north of town. I had no idea being a few miles north would make a difference, but it does. On campus, the annual wave of pollen is well underway, coating vehicles with a sickly yellow powder, stirring up sinuses and, when the wind is blowing hard, leaving a haze in the air. But here on the farm, on April 1, the wave of pollen hasn’t quite arrived. The oak trees are reluctantly starting to bud out.
Just the other day, the three Bradford pear trees in the front pasture started flowering. I walked out to take a few photos, in my ongoing project...
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The other day I went to the University of North Texas library’s website, looking for an article for a patron. As I called up the site, the official name of the central library popped up — A.M. Willis, Jr. Library. We knew him as Monk in these parts, a nickname he bestowed on himself because nobody could properly pronounce his given name: Achille Murat.
Monk Willis and I became friends in 2008 when he was 92, and I had just returned to Longview to be publisher of the News-Journal. Monk owned an insurance company for many years and worked under Lyndon Johnson both as a political operative...
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More tales from the farm.
In coming days, we are going to have a pond built and some drainage work done to the two pastures behind the house. I say pasture. Potential rice paddy might be a better description. Where the pond will be built a very large mud puddle has formed after the trees were turned into mulch last fall. One recent Sunday morning, I was sitting at my desk and looked out the picture window to the pasture below. I detected movement in the ersatz pond, grabbed the fancy pair of binoculars I gave my Beautiful Mystery Companion for her recent birthday and peered out the window. Two Canada...
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Rosie came into our lives in December 2010. I was signing books along with other local authors at Barron’s. Down the way, as they do most Saturdays, a pet rescue organization had set up. My Beautiful Mystery Companion and daughter Abbie walked down to have a look. Abbie picked the puppy from a litter that would become a big part of our lives. Rosie went home with them. My BMC and I had not yet married, and I returned to Cedar Park, near Austin, where I was working at the time. I returned to Longview most weekends, a long but worthwhile commute.
Rosie, who was about six weeks old when they...
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It sure is handy having a personal tractor mechanic, someone who is also pretty handy at working on vehicles. That would be my little brother Gregg, who learned his diesel mechanic skills in the Marines. While he wisely later studied to become a database engineer – think indoor work with no heavy lifting, and air-conditioning to boot – he still enjoys tinkering and knows his stuff.
Gregg, who is nine years younger than me, came over Saturday from Garland to work on both Little Red, the tractor, and Big Red, our 1965 Ford F100. The tractor had developed a slight fuel leak, forcing me to spread...
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