First came apartments, one to two bedrooms with inescapable views of major streets, intersections and multi-floored buildings, followed by duplexes and yards that needed to be maintained. Like most urban denizens we moved around with blithe frequency, playing the rent game as others do the stock market. We went where rent was low and amenities … More Reverting to wild
We entered from the north though I could not say with any certainty where we were. A small town, a dead town, a town with no future and no past worth remembering, its broad main street devoid of marker or traffic or vehicles or any sign of life other than the cartwheeling … More The new frontier
The shortening days always catch me by surprise. Last week I geared up to photograph an engraving on a limestone outcrop high above Alcove Springs, the famed watering hole on the Oregon Trail, only to find the sun already slipping behind the thicket. My idea was to capture the carving when the light was low … More Break in the weather
Everything changes. Though it’s hardly an original concept it tends to take on a sense of immediacy once the tipping point loosely called middle age is reached, at which time it stirs in the ashes of personal history to rise phoenix-like into the light. Sometimes its appearance is welcome and at others … More Disappearing acts
The phone jars us awake. I glance at the clock to see it’s past seven, exceedingly late for me. “That’s not a good sign,” Lori mumbles. It’s Peter. “The fog,” he says breathlessly, as if he’d been running a marathon or under the spell of some … More The fog
Sleep made me awake and the whisky sleepy. Surely that’s coming full circle though I’m left dazed and not a little woozy, midnight passing and me yet chained to the computer. After a week without Internet I’m still spelunking the endless alleyways of cyberspace with thoughts of birthdays and aging and creativity and … More One step closer to the unknowable
In the end, I stood my ground and prevailed. It wasn’t much of a victory but it was better than nothing. Better by far than the alternative, which in this case would have meant being swallowed in one of those enclosed, multi-story parking garages in downtown Lincoln, Neb. And … More The world’s most expensive pattypan squash
It’s always the same, you sit down to your first cup of coffee, sleep dragging at your gritty eyes, your list of to-dos exponentially long depending on the day of the week but set aside for a brief spell to collect your wits and infuse your sluggish gray matter with hard jolts of caffeine, and … More Chasing elusion
She was here and she was gone and the space between too short for memory to claw a foothold. But I think of it often, usually in the truncated, silent spaces between nonessential things that snare my attention, and while there were other moments that resonated to the core … More The girl who loved books
As a sometimes environmentalist, I’m familiar with having to defend policies or procedures enacted to preserve our natural resources. This is, admittedly, not always an easy task. Nor has it improved since our relocation to Kansas, less the fabled (if not iconic) heartland as much as the heart of the uber-conservative Republican mindset … More Brother, can you spare a gas can?
dispatchesfromkansas 