My friend was trying to explain the concept to me, “My people lived here for centuries,” he waved his hand across the the plains in front of us, “We moved our homes with the seasons, and roamed all over — hunting, fishing and collecting plants for food, medicine and religious purposes.” He indicated the mountains […]
Category Archives: family
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch And I don’t like anybody very much!! “Merry Minuet” The Kingston Trio I’ve been rereading some of the juvenile fiction books I read as a kid, and found them […]
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Greek Proverb “In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.” Wilma Mankiller “It’s all Al Gore’s fault anyway,” […]
“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm (after they’ve seen Paree?)” ~Walter Donaldson, Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis In my mind’s eye, I see a comfy two story white house with a wrap-around porch, shaded by tall cottonwood trees. An old wooden red barn sits in back next to a corral with […]
“Nature is not always benign.” Mark Tercek and Johnathan Adams, Nature’s Fortune When she went to pick up the pile of laundry, she discovered a rattlesnake hidden underneath. Slowly, she dropped the laundry back in place. Married to a rancher and living on a ranch for years, things like that didn’t worry her too much. […]
My family lore holds that some of my forefathers (foreparents?) were Scots-Irish and the rest were English. There always seemed to be a divide in the extended family between the “rough side” and the “polished side” attributed to these genealogical differences. As I understood it, the Scots-Irish were originally poor Scots who had no land […]
“Chomp, chomp,” woke me up in the middle of the night. “Chomp, chomp,” it went on, “Scrabble, scrabble. Chomp, chomp.” It was coming from my dormitory closet. My roommate was gone, and the sound made me apprehensive. “Rats?” I wondered. “Scrabble, scrabble. Chomp, chomp.” I turned on the desk light and slowly approached the closet. […]
I never thought about heights until we went hunting down on a ranch in the Texas Big Bend. The place was huge, and the rancher drove us around in his war-surplus jeep looking for deer down in the canyons. He would drive fast across the rough terrain, steer for the edge of the canyon, then […]
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Loren Eiseley My family spent a lot of time in the water. My dad was a college swim star, and my uncle would have gone to the 1940 Olympics if it hadn’t been for Hitler. We swam and fished and generally fooled around […]
We never really knew whose idea it was, but once pronounced, it caught on like wildfire. My father and his sometime hunting buddy, Harry, figured that if they concentrated their efforts over the entire hunting season, they could shoot enough big ducks for a really fancy duck dinner. North Texas is on the Central Flyway […]
Writes of Nature 