Category: Uncategorized
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Memento Mori
I cut myself today, watching the blood with anticipation. It started as a tiny speck of red life escaping from the cut and grew into a perfectly round drop before falling under its own weight onto a white paper below. It proved I was alive. It emphasized the moment at…
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Golden Wash of the Sun
“Kin, yer dad died”, was the shakey but firm explanation that Mom gave in her Oklahoman accent when I asked why my brother left a message on the answering machine to “call Ma”. My name was Kenneth, but in the dialect of the area it was “Kin”. That was it:…
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Mailboxes at a Crossroad
There was once a small cluster of lonely mailboxes, clinging precariously to a post, just off-center at a crossroads in the Colorado high plains. The last vestige of an old town that no longer exists, the mailboxes once linked the scattered holdouts of dry-land farms with the known world. Now…
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The One-Finger Wave
As a kid, I watched Dad greet fellow drivers on a country road with “The One Finger Wave”. One day as a young teen driver, I decided to try it myself. Dad promptly rebuked me, rumbling, “You’re not ready” (subtitle at bottom of screen: “Don’t try it again, kid”). I…
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Chance in a White Box Lunch
The Web seems to dominate everything. Many of us are “connected at a distance”, managing oh so busy social schedules, friendships, even dating online. Often, computer dating starts with scrolling through online biography after biography, hoping to find a match and a companion (with a screening process that resembles a…
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I Believe
At different points in a person’s life, you sometimes reflect back on what has been done with it. As I think about the past, I remember former goals, ambitions, bitter failings, and the joyful victories that helped influence and shape me. When I think about my past, I remember a…
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The Gift
I’m a Shakespeare fan. No, not of the stiff over-serious actors that play as if farting is life-and-death serious. I’m talking the modern stuff that makes Richard III a corporate raider or DiCaprio as Romeo whipping out his sword (brand name “Sword” engraved on his modern gun). What would it…
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Walking the Grain
From time to time the news highlights occupations or their practices that are inherently risky, especially in farming, that sometimes end in tragedy. One of those is “Walking The Grain” where a person assists the movement of grain inside a storage area, runs the risk of becoming trapped in the…
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Black Blizzard
As a child in Eastern Colorado in 1977, I experienced what it was like to have lived in the 1930s Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl during The Great Depression was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history. It brings to mind the iconic images of farm houses buried under…
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So, Who’s Died Lately?
Every time I talk with my mother on the phone, the conversation turns to who has died in the community since the last conversation. That grim, and some would say morose topic, has always been part of the farming life that I grew up with. Mom now lives “in town”,…
North of Nowhere - Bridging Different Worlds 