I am a writer, photographer and artist. This blog will be a running commentary on country living, gardening, cooking, history, people, folklore, writing, reading, art, flora and fauna, photography, music, movies, traveling and whatever else I might be pondering off the back porch.
I love reading year end and new year lists. For the first time I kept track of all the books I read during a year. I read both fiction and nonfiction, and the subject matter was all over the place, which I expect to happen again this year as I continue to downsize my library.
Contemporary American Novelists 1900-1920 By Carl Van Doren
In The Wake Of The Plague By Norman F. Canter
Thurber Country By James Thurber
The Apostle, A Life Of Paul By John Pollock
American Heritage, June 1966
Great Events of the 20th Century By the Editors of TIME
The Troll Garden By Willa Cather
What A Way To Go By Adele Q. Brown
The Medieval Establishment By Geoffrey Hindley
A Journal of the Plague Year By Daniel Defoe
A Lady’s Life In The Rocky Mountains By Isabella L. Bird
Five Chimneys By Olga Lengyel
Sweet Thursday By John Steinbeck
Profiles Of Modern American Authors By Bernard Dekle
In Dubious Battle By John Steinbeck
Trout Fishing In America By Richard Brautigan
Bend Sinister By Vladimir Nabokov
The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony And Other Stories By Franz Kafka
Laughing Space Edited By Isaac Asimov and J.O. Jepson
Smiling Through the Apocalypse Edited by Harold Hayes
The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Earth, My Friend By Peter Townsend
The Steamboat Bertrand By Jerome E. Petsche
Making and Using Dried Foods By Phyllis Hobson
A Pictorial History Of Westerns By Michael Parkinson and Clyde Jeavons
Black Elk Speaks By John G. Neihardt
Founding Brothers By Joseph J. Ellis
How To Live On Almost Nothing And Have Plenty By Janet Chadwick
The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846-1890 By Robert M. Utley
I read a few articles recently about an increase of interest by people wanting to move from cities to small towns and rural properties. In many areas rural prices have been rising in response to the desired exodus. Since we bought our place out here in 2018 I have not seen a single for sale sign on our road or anywhere around us. The neighbors we have met have lived here for a long time. It seems that when one lives in the country something keeps you there. A blizzard blew threw recently, dropping several inches of snow and leaving the usual high drifts resulting from 36 to 48 mph wind gusts. Our two dogs, Marley and Steve, love to lay down and crawl along the big drifts and then roll on them. They stand up caked with snow then shake it off. I don’t know how many rabbits are living out here now but it seems every other time I enter the machine shed I scare one up, and there are tracks in the snow all over the acreage. We have two squirrels around the place but no songbirds are to be seen or heard. After the last blizzard I filled two of the bird feeders but so far nothing. Last time I was in town I noticed the river was almost completely frozen over, which usually brings the eagles out of the river valley over the plains looking for food. Sure enough a few days later I was driving along our road and saw one fly up and land in a barren, empty field. I came to a stop parallel to it and we looked at each other for a few moments. It flew off and I watched it go until I could see it no more. Winter creeps along.
Concrete Canoe Club – Civil engineering students build and race concrete canoes.
Giga Society – Membership of the Giga Society is ideally open to anyone outscoring .999999999 of the adult population on at least one of the accepted tests. This means that in theory one in a billion individuals can qualify.
Ejection Tie Club – Life membership of the Ejection Tie Club is confined solely to those who have emergency ejected from an aircraft using a Martin-Baker ejection seat. The club has over 6,000 members.
Obscure Song Club – Their goal is to increase members’ and non-members’ knowledge of, and performance of, songs, particularly obscure ones.
Vacuumland – For vacuum cleaner collectors and fans.
This is a very quick and frugal meal that our family has enjoyed for years.
Ingredients:
One pound ground beef
One small onion, diced
One clove garlic, minced
½ tsp paprika
One can cream of mushroom soup
One can sliced mushrooms, drained
½ cup sour cream
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1/3 cup milk
Brown ground beef with onion, Worcestershire sauce and garlic. Fold in all remaining ingredients and heat through. Serve over corn chips or cooked noodles.
Once a month I highlight a piece of art I have created and posted on my Fine Art America site. This one is titled Little Breaker from the Photo Collection.
I wrote a while back about one of my boyhood friends named Jeff and how we burned down his house. We had a few other adventures I figured I would recall to round out our time together. After the fire some of the smoke damaged furniture that Jeff’s mom wanted to save was stored in the garage, which instantly transformed it into a neighborhood clubhouse. A few pieces of furniture were soon pulled out into the yard next to the garage to help air them out. Not long after that happened it occurred to us that we might as well jump off of the garage, landing on the furniture in the yard. That evolved into dragging the furniture further and further away so eventually we had to run along the length of the garage and leap off of it in order to hit our targets. We would run and jump then smash into a davenport with such force it would flip over backwards and we would roll off the other side. Needless to say that furniture never made it back into the house. As long as I knew him Jeff had a fascination with flying, vowing someday he would have his own plane to fly. For a few weeks he was even making plans to build a spaceship. On the sidewalk in front of his house we would build a homemade ramp to jump our bicycles, the incline increasing with each jump until someone suffered a spectacular crash. Then we would start over with the small ramp and raise it up again. One summer we decided to build a raft using only logs and vines. A few yards after shoving it into the Des Moines river it came apart and we had to swim for shore. Occasionally I would spend the night at his house, and one night we snuck out headed for a local apartment complex that had a pool. We silently scaled the locked fence surrounding the pool and quietly went for a swim. There were few lights on around the pool and I remember floating in that deep blue water looking up at the brilliant scattered stars. Early one morning when I had spent the night we woke to deliver the newspapers on his route and the radio told us about the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash. We eventually drifted apart and he moved away. The last I heard a few years ago, from an elderly lady in the old neighborhood, Jeff was living a successful life in Kansas City. When she mentioned he owned his own plane I had to smile.
