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...

As hurried and busy as life seems these days, we still spend plenty of time waiting. Estimates are that we can spend an average of six months of our life waiting.   I thought about waiting recently...

A long, long time ago when I worked in newsrooms far, far away, I liked to tell aspiring journalists my definition of news: it’s what people are talking about.   It was justification and rationalization...

One constant I’ve noticed in myself as I’ve grown older is that I’ve become more reflective. Perhaps that comes with age, but there are times when I see or hear something and it makes me physically...

As we settle into winter and the appearance of that four-letter word that is both cherished and hated, I’d like to take a moment to thank J.W. Elliot.   It was Elliot, hailing from Toronto,...