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

Upper Right: Three grand nephews
Lower Left: Father, daughter, granddaughter
Top Center: Nephew
Upper Left: Niece and Partner
Center Left: Two Sisters-in-Law
Lower Right: Niece and Partner
And in the Very Center: My Daughter and Nephew-in-Law Victor

And that's just the immediate family that made it to Chicago in June of 2021

I'm so in love with them all! Read more about The Fam II

Assad’s guaranteed election victory in Syria shows how badly U.S. policy has failed.

That was the header of a newpaper piece – WaPo or NYT, I forget which – written in the last week or so, and it made me wonder, not only about Syria, but also about Palestine. Palestine and Ukraine, Iran and Afghanistan, Israel and Belarus, Russia, China, Taiwan – the world at large and everything that is going awry with it.

And my question was: What in the hell can we do about it? About any of it? Read more about Whatcha Gonna Do About It?