All Purls. No Swine.
It is beneficial that the next generation learns about the past for the same reasons that it is important that you remember your childhood. The quintessential question of “what next!” How will we as a society go into the future without knowledge of the past? If we don’t know what we, as Americans, are, how… Continue reading Why is History Important?
My last post on the wonderful Merlin Bird ID app, and how much fun I had with it the first time I really gave it a go, reminded me of circumstances a few years ago, here on the farm. I wrote about them on Ricochet for the first time in 2017, and reprised the post here… Continue reading The Gift–2023 Edition
Well, we're well over halfway to 2024's "Kiss a Ginger Day!" No sense letting Prince Harry have all the fun, so I think I'll throw my hat into the ring with a a lightly-edited version of a post originally published on the member feed on Ricochet, more than six years ago, on 2017's smoochy day,… Continue reading Growing Up Ginger, Again
Today would have been my stepson's fifty-eighth birthday. He died, five years ago next week, from a brutal beating by a pair of thugs who were convicted of causing his death, and who are are currently serving their jail time at the pleasure of the United States government. Things being what they are, I expect… Continue reading “His Name is Sam”
It's not so much the "sukebind" around here as it is the poison ivy. Amidst which any thoughts of "mollocking" simply cannot be countenanced. ("Mollocking in the sukebind" is the favored activity of the earthy Starkadders and their help, as explained in Stella Gibbons' comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm. A more well known rural metaphor… Continue reading “Mollocking in the Sukebind,” Redux
June 24, 2023 would have been my mother’s 95th birthday. She died in September 2014, at the age of 86 after a long struggle with the effects of fronto-temporal dementia. Her death was, in the eyes of her children and others who loved her, a release and a blessing. And for her, peace at last.… Continue reading Music To Bury My Mother By–Redux, 2023 Edition
It’s been 16 years since my father departed this earth, and I miss him every day. Most days, I still chat with him, even now. (He can sometimes be quite helpful with advice for my life’s little projects and problems. I’ve found that he’s not nearly as excitable as he once was, which can–on occasion–be… Continue reading Always My Dad–A Belated Fathers’ Day Post for 2023
Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters, there is something which there are no words to express. So said Joseph Addison, seventeenth-century essayist, playwright, and politician… Continue reading Happy Fathers’ Day, 2023!
Today, the seventy-ninth anniversary of the D-Day invasion, I can't but think of one of my most iconic conversations with my late, great, darling Auntie Pat. It was in 2019, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the day. Pat was approaching her ninety-sixth birthday, Donald Trump was the President of the United States, and the specter… Continue reading Operation Overlord: Seventy-Nine Years On
Seventy-nine years ago today, on June 4, 1944, my father marched into Rome, his British Army regiment having been seconded alongside Mark Clark's Fifth Army. (What Dad had to say, from a personal standpoint, about General Mark Clark doesn't bear thinking about.) My mother always pooh-poohed the whole thing (not unusual for Mum to do… Continue reading “His Holiness Will Receive You in a Few Moments–I could Have Dropped Dead!”