Category: My Memoir
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June 26, 2010
June in Ohio really is that line from the poem: “…then, if ever, come perfect days.” As we get older, time speeds up, but I still occasionally have that moment when you glance at the clock on a Saturday and it is only just past noon and you’re startled that it’s not near dusk. Today…
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The Cross of Blue Flame
You’d be walking home after Sunday evening church. The road goes through the holler and has never been paved. A few minutes past the golden hour, to the mauve hour, when the sun shafts are gone, but the sky is still lighter than the tree trunks. Woods on the right, the creek down the hill…
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Pine Bombs
With pine sap and flat sandstone rocks you can make an explosion in the woods, and when you’re 13 you really really want to. This gives indescribable joy to teenage boys, who like loud noises and seeing how things break or blow up. Flat rocks. Build a little rock house out of these, on the…
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The Girl Who Summons Owls
When I was a young man I read a love story in which the boy exclaims “…a girl who loves owls!”. They’d go out on the lake in the canoe and she’d be all wistful at the sound of owls and his soul would leave his body at the thought that he’d finally found Her,…
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Rockhouse Holler
We’ll take a Sunday drive, but first, about “hollers” – they’re the little valleys, here in Appalachia, where creeks run. When the wagon roads first came into these hills they followed the creekbeds through the hills and we have roads now where the wagons or horses could navigate. But they could also trace a feeder…
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Scenes From My Father
Fathers, seek out your children every day and give them a gift. Here are some gifts from my father. My first memory of dad. I’m not yet 4 years old. Dad lost his mother and younger brother in a terrible accident, which he witnessed. Strong hands are under my arms from behind and they hold…
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Hawk
The hawk on the wire faces away from the road, but looks back at me over his shoulder. That posture is, by now, an icon of the large raptors: the curved neck, the eye and beak somehow more forceful because twisted back toward us. “I will regard you, but not seriously enough to turn…
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Waterskin
The water must have come up high in the drainage ditch – nearly flooding over the blacktop – then froze at the surface, then went back down, fast. As the stream dropped away, the icey surface layer stayed, suspended in mid-air by the weed-stalks. From my car, at slow country speed, I notice the glass…
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Deer
Four or five deer in the headlights, walking away from the road into the pasture. They all crane necks to glance back toward the light. Hooves lift lightly over corn stubble. A hint of blowing snow in the headlight. I remember some scene from a Christmas card: deer and other creatures from the…
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Fox
The fox sat in the middle of the clearing as if he had nothing to do. I’m used to thinking of zoo animals as bored, but not wild animals, and this fox on the mile-wide Outer Banks should be feeling pressure to hunt for supper, since there can’t be many rabbits on this spit of…