My aunt’s tiny farmhouse in west Texas always smelled faintly of dust, but then dust was a west Texas specialty. It probably didn’t help that we boys slept on the floor during our infrequent visits, huddled in the room’s center to avoid things creeping from their lairs at dusk. There were scorpions, mostly the smaller, … More An unexpected new friend

With everything neatly stored away in the basement there was little left to do but remain at my lonesome vigil. I can’t say I was afraid but the past two weeks were enough to make most Midwesterners feel stalked. Beyond the thin skin of the walls lightning flared in strobic pulses painting the fields bone … More Looking beyond what if (Part 2)

How many times I studied the doppler radar image on the Internet I couldn’t say. Many, many times. Too many, to be honest. Like others who voiced their reservations on Facebook, the unfolding cataclysmic weather front was impossible to disregard, in equal measures fascinating and terrifying, riveting us to our seats when there were better … More Looking beyond what if (Part 1)

 I had just returned home from a trying day at the office—something of a laughable concept as I’m there only one day a week and I’d spent several hours wandering backroads on my return leg—and sitting down to supper barely able to keep my eyelids aloft heard a slight tapping, a gentle rapping at my … More Once upon an afternoon weary

 Lately I’ve been trying to find a way to inhabit this new body of mine, not so much in circumventing its foibles or overcoming whatever limitations treachery and old age have in store but simply in understanding where I fit in and how the two of us might function as a whole. Or parts of … More Reclamation

     Well, the first round of thunderstorms wasn’t nearly as impressive as they looked on Doppler radar, and the amount of rain they produced nothing like predicted. Weather forecasting has always been a crapshoot and I for one am glad it’s not my responsibility to divine the proverbial tea leaves. I’d hate to be … More Discoveries and disgust during disciplined spring cleaning

“I don’t believe in anything anymore: god, country, money or love.” – Dorianne Laux       This is the life I always wanted but never knew how to dream: Rabbits in a two-acre yard with a view of the northern edge of the Flint Hills and a wide river a half mile away, a … More All that matters I hold in my hand

It seemed like another lifetime, tinted with a faint sepia tone like an old faded photograph, impossibly distant, but not so distant that its details failed to surface as we replicated each somber step of the journey. Ours was a slow and stately procession, or would have been if not for the road’s adherence to … More Consigned to this fair land

       If the new metropolis is a cultural stew, rural America, at least in my neck of the prairie, is a goulash.       Frankly, this surprised me. From what I’d seen over two decades of annual visits, northeast Kansas was predominantly white, Protestant, friendly and Republican. (Which proves that there’s no … More The world’s first but not the last

“They’re just a big pile of rocks,” my friend said. “What’s the big deal?” Responding to such a concept—that the Rocky Mountains were nothing more than a jumble of boulders—left me all but speechless. My friend, a man just turned 35 years of age and never having once seen a mountain or a foothill, was … More Why I’m here, why I’m not