Way back in a previous century I had the only job I had ever lobbied for and loved. I was hired as secretary in the P.R. Department at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. We were a three-woman department: my boss, Corky, her assistant, and me. I roamed the Museum freely whenever possible, and was often sent to the basement with galleys for the printshop that lived behind a rear wall down there. Read more about Bushman

There’s a real war going on. And when I say real war, I mean a war with tanks and battleships. They’re even digging trenches, which is not a good sign. Read more about About the War

Two nice Norwegian Lutheran girls, born and raised on a hog farm in northwestern Iowa, went west to Los Angeles in 1941 and struck it rich, if you count two good and true husbands and lives that mattered to all who knew them. Read more about Two Sisters

August of 1983, Northern Wisconsin

A sunrise sky of mauve and cream and silver through a light cloud cover. Clouds with vaguely silvered linings. Read more about Lines From a Life III

December 1982, Christmas at Lake Benedict:

The lake lies frozen, covered with a light snow - swellings of white and depressions of grey - it doesn't look frozen at all, just a lake of white-grey water.

Squaw Point at sunset with a swelling moon rising east in slate blue. Sucker Bay lying frozen, stretched in shades of pink and blue. The sunset marshes glow golden - tall, light shining gold of marsh reeds, stocky deep burnished gold of marsh grass, red-gold of winter maples. Read more about Lines From a Life II

There is rain moving in
From the north and west,
And the wind coming up with
Threat and thunder.

Wet air comes, blowing sweet and cool
Across my cheek, a wonder of a sky-blown river.

What's left of bright and blue slips down the southeast sky,
Some scattered pearl drops spot the porch around my feet,
And I'll have to turn the lights on in the house
When I go back inside.

For most of the farm years, I began each day with a new notebook page citing critical information from the Old Farmer's Almanac: sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, moon phase, moon sign, day of the year, factoid.

2/17/91, for instance. Read more about A Day in the Life

A few weeks back, I posted a thing I wrote long years ago about finding myself in a state of happiness. This is a piece I wrote immediately preceding that one. The happiness essay was, I believe, written as a defiant gesture to the following: Read more about Take That, Happiness!

I was perfectly happy once. I know because I wrote it down. I was 34 years old in 1977, had two children in whom I was very well pleased, and lived in a house on a farm that I loved. My possibilities seemed endless with no pressure to become anything but other than what I was becoming. Read more about Happiness Was

I think, but I don't remember, that this piece of writing is entirely fiction. That is, I don't remember hearing it from my grandfather or anyone else, for that matter. I was working on a story based on a vague memory of my great grandmother's funeral. This piece didn't make it into the story, but I must have been thinking about including it. The names are all the same as my great aunts and uncles - or mostly, anyway. And I might have heard a story about a Lutheran minister refusing to confirm a group of kids that had gone square dancing. Read more about Mother Love