Category Essays

Time and Space, and How to See a Tree

For local readers  in Floyd County, you might have read this essay in this week’s paper. Except for the very important “bit.ly bundle” at the end. This was omitted when printed. What can I say? It is sort of important,…

Dry and Warm: No Easy Matter for Plucked Chickens

Assured in advance by the region’s soggy-foggy reputation that I would face constant drizzling rain there, I bought the first modern rain-proof garment I’ve ever owned before my May trip to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. But following the thread…

Every Drought Ends with a Good Rain

This selection is from Slow Road Home, written in August 2002, a lament during one of the worst droughts in living memory for the old-timers who live in our part of Floyd County. Hundreds of wells went dry that year.…

If You Can’t Stand the Heat

This is the time of year when the early morning hours of browsing, answering emails, researching and blogging are supplanted (nice, seasonally-appropriate verb-pun) by yard and garden work before the sun crests the east ridge and the temps begin to…

Between the Everything and the Nothing

Image via Wikipedia Revolutions and Resolutions in a Bigger-picture New Year January takes its name from Janus, the Roman god of portals, of comings and goings, beginnings and endings–an odd-looking, two-faced deity who looks at once both where he’s been…

AC: Not All It’s Cranked Up to Be

Growing up in the Deep South meant dealing with the heat in summer (well actually, from March through October in Alabama.) When we moved north to Virginia in 1974, I thought surely we had left 90-90 temp-humidities behind. But it’s…

Rising for Another Day: The Firefly Ballet

At nine o’clock on a warm, calm and fragrant summer night, I am alone at the edge of our pasture, set deep in the fold between steep ridges on the eastern flank of Floyd County. The whites of fleabane, chrysanthemum…

Toxic Lunch: Decades of Exposure–Now What?

We’re being poisoned, and not by our enemies. More than 93% of American men, women and children have this substance in their tissues. Research has linked it to cancer and heart disease, Type-II diabetes, obesity, sexual dysfunction including low sperm…