Archives in Category: Small Town Life

Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

An Old-Fashioned Winter

Posted on January 30, 2007

It started two days ago as snow began falling in the early morning hours. Radio reports said to expect a foot or more. Weather forecasters are usually less than one hundred percent accurate, but they were deadly precise in this

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Monticello

Posted on August 10, 2006

It’s not Jefferson’s family estate; it’s the other Monticello. A small town in southern Wisconsin on a bicycle trail going from here to there to nowhere in particular and to everywhere Americana. Earl and I always feel pleased when we

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Conestoga Neon

Posted on July 27, 2006

For the past few weeks the families who live on my road probably felt like pioneers when they ventured out in their automobiles. I know I did, and it was because the only road leading to where we live was

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The Silverhawks

Posted on July 23, 2006

Last night Earl and I attended a Silverhawks baseball game in South Bend. We’d been there before and found the venue charming. It’s not expensive to see a ballgame, the hot dogs are decent, there is beer everywhere, and the

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Pride

Posted on July 20, 2006

Three days ago I spoke to Loralee Mendez’s college class, the one she teaches on creative writing. She asked me to come because she had used one of my published essays — the one about meeting my father for the

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Green Beans

Posted on July 19, 2006

Neighbors of ours — I’ll call them Mike and Dave — have a stupendous backyard garden; and it seems we’ll be the recipients of their overflow veggies from now through the first frost. It’s exciting because we get to sample

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Tractors

Posted on June 23, 2006

“I have to work eleven to six two nights next week,” Earl said, as we were having dinner at the Mark III last night. I knew he meant as a Sheriff’s deputy, given that these shifts were in the dead

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Berrien Hills Golf Club

Posted on June 18, 2006

This past weekend, we revisited the Berrien Hills Golf Course, known in a former life as the Berrien Hills Country Club.

I wrote about the Club on March 14 as it faced financial demise and decided to cancel its

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Cemetery Sadness

Posted on June 14, 2006

This is Flag Day, when Americans celebrate and show respect for our flag, its designers, and makers over the past two hundred plus years. So on this day I want to honor three men I don’t really know, but whose

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Aaarrrggghhh!

Posted on April 11, 2006

The title for this essay simulates the sound of primal frustration, that feeling that occurs when one absolutely throws up one’s hands in exasperation at a given situation. When one runs out of reasons or excuses or possible explanations. I

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