Be it for the good or the bad, we are from whom we descend. While our ancestors don’t define us, we wouldn’t be here without them.
My descendants and their lives were on my mind recently when my...
Labor Day has come and gone, marking what many celebrate as the last blast of summer.
Technically Labor Day is a holiday to celebrate the social and economic achievements of American workers and not...
A wise man once said “measure twice, cut once.”
So let me tell you a tale about the fool who measured two times but then forgot the number. In fact, I can tell it from a first-person perspective.
Recently...
There comes a day every year in the midst of the dance of the seasons when winter allows spring a brief interlude.
Since we live in Wisconsin, that day may come in late February or late March and will...
My preparations for the upcoming gun deer season took me on a walk through the woods the other day.
While my purpose was to prepare my deer stand, I also needed the walk for therapeutic reasons. A busy...
As we march through the end of October, the harvest season is earlier and going full throttle in farm country, thanks mainly to a long stretch of dry weather.
It’s a busy time of year, with tractors,...
As a longtime suffering and now recovering journalist, I’m a self-professed word nerd. Words are my friends and finding the right one gives me the same feeling as finding a winning lottery ticket.
So...
The lifebl
ood of any farmer is the soil that provides their livelihood, so taking care of it has to be a top priority.
That care involves more than simply adding fertilizer and chemicals...
One certainty that I have learned over my long years is that nature moves at her own pace.
Yes, we’ve done our worst to mess with the climate and destroy ozone, but nature slowly responds to the changes....
One of the benefits of starting my seventh decade of life in Wisconsin is experiencing all kinds of weather and seasons – sometimes occurring on the same day.
There’s usually one day every year when...
His name was Billy and he lived across the street from our family in the Milwaukee suburb of Hales Corners.
He was probably three years older than me – more like my brother’s age – but...
I was outside at dawn recently getting some chores done when I was hit with one of the smells of the country – a malodorous whiff left by a mammal in the mephitidae family.
It was the spray of a nearby...
