Thanksgiving column

Here's my column on Thanksgiving, as it appears in the Mennonite Weekly Review. Photo here is online freebie.
http://www.mennoweekly.org/2011/11/21/when-saints-met-originals/

buggy graffiti: A loves K

A neighbor got married yesterday. In the dark of night this buggy was pushed up against my walnut tree to make a statement. Graffiti scrawled on it proclaimed that A loves K. I guess that says it in a nutshell. One hopes that K also loves A. Or, is the message that A or K ditched the relationship? The preachers had said this and that for over an hour. Is it possible that they missed the essential point and the teenagers had to say it? By dawn's early light, the wash was hung, the bench wagons were being loaded.

fodder's in the bale

"When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock" is the first line of a James Whitcomb Riley poem from America's era between the Civil War and WWI. In Monterey nowadays the fodder's in the bale. What I see today is almost the same as this photo I snapped two years ago.

weekend away II

On Sunday we stopped at the Maryland location of the Chesapeake & Ohio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_and_Ohio_Canal_National_Historical_Park%20Canal historic site. The canal was begun in 1828 and ran, when it was completed in 1850, 184.5 miles from Washington DC to Cumberland.

weekend away

This weekend, on a getaway close to Springs, Pa., near the western Maryland border, I ventured back a country road and saw this farm and its fence. The weathered wood of the fence posts exudes character. The junk is another thing.