Christmas Day has come and gone. Scenes of a stable sheltering a young mother who cradles an infant no longer appear in store windows or on our screens.  Yes, Christmas has

A book of poems sits next to my place at our breakfast table. Every morning I choose one poem at random to start my day, in expectation of some bit

According to the Christian calendar, Advent begins next Sunday.  Advent is a time of waiting: waiting for a birth, waiting for the return of light to the north, waiting for

It is so quiet today that I can hear a leaf falling and settling on the ground. Here, in my bare bones cabin, there is no internet, TV or even

The pickers arrived. Bending low, they pulled leeks, carrots, beets. A final harvest. There were five of them: two women, three men; Black, brown and white. The plow came later;

When I was about 12 years old, my conservationist dad talked to me about watersheds. He explained that a watershed was a geographic area that included all the creeks, streams

We were in the doctor’s office waiting for our appointment with the surgeon.  This was the day he would explain the upcoming procedure scheduled for my young son. After being

Summer is a time for reruns on television and elsewhere. That’s especially true this summer. In that spirit, I am running a portion of my 2017 Independence Day post, updated for

E Pluribus Unum, (out of many, one) are the words emblazoned on the Great Seal of the United States. It’s a hope, a dream for our country. In an interesting

Jodi Picoult used those three words for the title of her recent novel. They are borrowed from Mother Theresa’s credo: “Do small things with great love.” As I write, many

Around and about the first of March, I decided I would like to try to learn something new every day. My parameters were two-fold: it could not be something that

My grandfather died in the 1918 flu epidemic. He was in his early forties, the father of five children; my father, at 15, being the oldest. It was in early