Prose

Winter is the king of Wisconsin. Winter is owner of all the land and all the people, a grim, solemn magistrate with moments of mercy and warmth in modest portion, but majestic and terrible in power and authority. Trees drop their leaves in annual submission, paying tax for their lives, offering all the bright color…

The National Debt now stands at $34 trillion dollars. It is 93 million miles to the sun. The nearest star otherwise is Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light years away. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second or 5.88 trillion miles per year. If dollars were miles and the United States were in debt one…

I’m sorry. I can’t bear to throw it away. I’ll keep it as a reminder of what I might have given someone. Small and mighty as the gift might have been. I stopped when I thought I’d done enough. I probably hadn’t. Probably didn’t. Probably should have given just a bit more of what required…

The time has come for new beginnings. Being born again is a daily endeavor, a daily emergence. Then upon occasion the blessed event is far more than it might otherwise be intended or expected to be. Another beginning hoves into view. It might be an iceberg or open water. It might be a harbor or…

I want to tell you about my dogs. The first one I named Colleen, because I wanted a dog and I wanted a name I could yell out across the fields on a farm where I lived. Colleen sounds good when you give it all you’ve got and the sound goes out and over those…

So I went to the hardware store today to buy a tiny little screw like the ones I needed to repair a set of window shade brackets. The brackets were originally fastened to the window frames with tiny little nails and the nails came loose over time, so I thought I’d fix them. I’m that…

I want to tell you a story. A man told it to me today. I want to tell it to you. He organizes baseball games for children with mental and physical disabilities. Himself a man with a limp and a deformed arm from birth, he knows what he’s doing. After a baseball game, after being…

I will write this without amendation or revision. It comes from the heart. When I think of my family, when I think of the past I think of what I have been told and what I remember. I don’t research, but I believe and I know what I know from those I loved and one…

In 1915 the ship Endurance of the Earnest Shackleton expedition to Antarctica became trapped and sank in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Shackleton’s men abandoned ship and began a 350 mile trek across ice and open water pulling and rowing their lifeboats to Elephant Island. It took them over two months. When they…

I went to a Civil War battlefield recently, a battle for which I had no knowledge. Bentonville, south of Raleigh in North Carolina. There, on March 19-21, 1865, General Joe Johnson and his twenty thousand Confederates met General William Sherman and his sixty thousand Union boys on their way anywhere they wanted. They fought. Three…