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?
Let me state firsthand that I needed the lens. It wasn’t a frivolous spur-of-the-moment decision triggered by a press release announcing the latest and greatest iteration of a particular piece of camera equipment, though honestly there was a hefty dose of complicity in its timing. (A new one had … More The world as we know it
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
dispatchesfromkansas 