Blessed be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred mindsIs like that to that above. Before our Father’s throne We pour our ardent prayers;Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one Our comforts…
I come to this winter season—this icy interlude of cold and snow and thin light–lonely. I am struck by the yawning emptinesses once filled by friends and family and colleagues who are now gone. This…
Never underestimate the universe’s brilliant, complex, and astonishing perversity. Salish Elder Tony Incashola and long-ago friend and historian Bob Utley both died on June 7. Their deaths–and their lives– shadowed June. I knew each in…
You gotta love a seven-year-old grandson who can’t get over the odd pattern in the tines of a salad fork that don’t exist in the regular one. Or asks that his next birthday present be…
My Simon, my white ghost, my sun-seeking companion left this world Monday afternoon. As always, my heart breaks more viscerally when my cats die – than even the humans who’ve lighted my way. In their…
A couple Saturday nights ago, I gathered by Zoom with my sister, Sonja, and her two sons, Ben and Tim, and daughter-in-law Lori. Borne of the exigencies of COVID when a summer reunion proved unwise,…
You and I would agree, I think, that heaven such as the one anticipated by “true believers” does not exist. That your Plains Indians heroes and the armies that killed them do not reside on…
Maybe not 50 cents. (For those of you who remember Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”) But for sure within my budget. Ada Keifer’s red brick Civil War-era house sat at the crook of Baltimore…
This little vignette will make no sense unless you remember a time when most houses had just one or two phones, tethered firmly to a wall. When calls occurred more for arrangements than chats. When…