Yay! Here in western New York, gardening season is starting! People are out mowing their lawns and the daffodils are blooming. This is exciting stuff. I remember starting these blogging challenges on April 1st, wondering when I would be able to go outside and clear out the old gardens and prune the rose bushes. And, […]

Walking is both good cardiovascular exercise and transportation. It’s a way to get from point A to point B. But, beyond that, it’s a way to see the world, close up and vivid. In a car, you see things as you whiz past them. When you walk, however, you are within touching distance of your

Two years ago, I was walking from Chicago to Battle Creek, Michigan, with a group from Voices for Creative Nonviolence. On the day when we left Chicago and walked into industrial Indiana, it was a dreary, rainy day. We were walking on the side of a busy road with no shoulder. It became a scary,

Utensils can be plain or fancy. Some foods can’t be eaten in front of an audience without utensils. Well, of course, if you are eating your food without the benefit of an audience, you can eat in any old messy style. Apparently, really good utensils are a sign of wealth. Or, at least, they used

Trees are awesome. A world without trees would be a world in which it would be virtually impossible to live. Have you ever noticed that there are no people on Mars? Well, there are also no trees on Mars. Here in Grand Island, New York, back in the nineteenth century, there used to be many

The Trumpeter and the three bears Once upon a time, there were four bears. Unfortunately, the Big Bad Trumpeter Fake Wolf (he wasn’t really a wolf and all he did was to embarrass real wolves everywhere) took away one of the bears, who had not been seen since. The Big Bad Trumpeter Fake Wolf said

On Sunday morning, April 17th, I walked to church. It was warm and sunny. The ground was still swampy after all of the precipitation (snow followed by rain). There are a lot of wetlands in Grand Island. Because the majority of the soil here is clay, the water sits on top of the ground. Clay

One of my articles in yesterday’s Island Dispatch was about a donation to the Grand Island Historical Society that was made about ten years ago. It was a shadow box containing stuff that was found on land near the river. The land has had quite the history. Back in the 1890s, the land was going to

A quatrain is a French poetic form. It is a stanza of four lines, usually having alternating rhymes. The quatrains that I wrote today are independent of each other and their rhyme scheme is ABCA. That is to say, only the first and last lines in the stanza end in a rhyme. Each line is

On Tuesday, I did my Big Government Job. I was an election inspector. The polls are open in my county from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m., so it made for a very long day and lots of activity. The polling place that I was working in is a fire truck house. It was a good