I wanted to write about hunting season here in the rural countryside, the howling packs of dogs, the men and women who sit in muddy trucks on the side of the road with loaded guns, waiting, and the orphaned black bear cubs. I also wanted to write about my Mississippi cousin who transported cross-country in the back of his Toyota pickup, a taxidermied bear’s head bagged on a Native American reservation in New Mexico. But October calls me, like the wild and wild things, to write about my wild nephew. He will be turning twenty … Continue reading Call of the Wild by Trudy Hale→
I am waiting at the Chicken Co-op, pronounced ‘coop,’ inside the Exxon gas station and convenience store in Lovingston, Virginia. A couple of blocks away the mechanic is changing my car’s oil, rotating the tires. I’m not very good at waiting. Delayed planes, bank lines, stop-n-go stalled traffic. Pedicures. In the Chicken Co-op a narrow island counter is a few feet away from the hot food display. I climb onto the metal chair and sit at the lunch counter. To survive the wait, instead of reading and not remembering much of what I’ve read, I … Continue reading One August Afternoon by Trudy Hale→
Something there is that doesn’t love a bridge. At least on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Oh, when I lived there, we were proud of the engineering marvel that connects the waning end of the Delmarva Peninsula to the Hampton Roads metropolis across the Chesapeake Bay. With two tunnels, four high bridges, and twelve miles of trestle bridge across the mouth of the nation’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is an impressive structure. But natives of the Shore have always viewed it with some ambivalence, much as they have viewed the rest of the land “across … Continue reading A Bridge to Somewhere by Alex Joyner→
Not too long ago, I was walking my black lab down Norwood Road when an acquaintance stopped his truck to chat. He said he was concerned about my neighborhood. Wasn’t I embarrassed for writers to come to the retreat and see all these ruined and abandoned houses here in Norwood? It’s a shame. It hurts him every time he passes through our hamlet, he said. He then announced that he was going to buy up as many of the forlorn houses as he could (he has the means) and renovate and turn them into Airbnbs. … Continue reading The Pleasure of Ruins by Trudy Hale→
I can’t help thinking about what I haven’t read. Every year, I try to read at least one piece of classic literature that I had overlooked, never got around to, or was not included in the curricula of whatever classes I took. The books I should have read. The books every literate person should read. I feel like the woman in that Roy Lichtenstein lithograph sadly proclaiming: “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. I FORGOT TO HAVE CHILDREN!” Except what I forgot was to read Jane Austen, and so much more. One year, I savored Homer’s Odyssey¸ … Continue reading I Can’t Believe It. I Forgot to Read Jane Austen! by E. H. Jacobs→
After an eighteen-hour flight with a connection in Dubai, my daughter, Tempe, and I landed in Delhi. Throughout the trip I posted photographs on Facebook with simple descriptions. Palace of Winds, the Baga Border at sunset, a boat ride at dawn on the Ganges. Before the trip I had wondered if I would be gifted with a dramatic adventure tale, as travel in my hippie-chick days provided when I hitchhiked through Europe, a sleeping bag and dulcimer strapped on my back and a chip of acid hidden in a lipstick tube and no return ticket … Continue reading A Small Marvel by Trudy Hale→
Five years ago, my wife fell in love. I’m not talking about me (we have been married thirty-nine years, so I hope the falling in love thing happened much earlier). Through her genealogy research, my wife, Vicki, discovered a ninety-three-year-old cousin living on her own in Montreal. Vicki’s research started with one item that she found among her late parents’ belongings: a postcard, sent from Poland and written in Yiddish, that had been addressed to her paternal great-grandfather. This was her first inkling that she might have family that had not emigrated to the United … Continue reading My Wife Is In Love by E. H. Jacobs→
I had heard when you get older you revert to a lot of your tastes and activities when young, but I disregarded it, until I started buying old Joni Mitchell and Buffalo Springfield albums, and listening to the Beach Boys and James Taylor in the car. Now I am riveted to a 230-acre ranch in the high coastal mountains of British Columbia, with wild horses and meadows bordered by beautiful woods full of aspens and birch, and even taller, snow-covered mountains in the distance. A few days ago, one of the spunkiest, fiercest of the … Continue reading The Little Colt by Laura Marello→
‘The silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from nowhere, as if I’d been hit by a plank. It dropped from the heavens above me like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the field. . . . But the silent fields were the real world’ —Annie Dillard, “A Field of Silence” I was born in a forest in the foothills of Virginia. My birth certificate notes a hospital as my place of birth, but we know how trivial that is. Birth for me was waiting in the trees. Through … Continue reading The Silence of No-One’s Land by Alex Joyner→
When I was thirteen, my mother left us. It was on a Sunday and she knew that Daddy, my brothers and I were away, visiting a family out on the old Nashville road. A moving van pulled up to the duplex and my mother emptied the rooms. Excited by the drama, neighbors watched from their front yards. My mother ‘stole’ the large Heriz oriental rug, the twisty verdigris wrought iron table, the African basket lamps in moss green linen shades—my friends had never seen such lamps. The hand-embroidered pillows, magenta and orange molas sewn by … Continue reading Red Sofa by Trudy Hale→
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