James C. Schaap

Your great-grandpa wasn't sure where he was Sunday, but, as you know, that's not unusual. For some reason, he was expecting a trip to the cemetery, brought it up several times: "Is that the way they do it now, before…

"Why are they called Canada geese?" our third-grade grandson asked us last week. It seems no one really knows; after all, they show up in every state of the union and don't necessarily make pilgrimages up north to watch hockey.…

We visited Stratford-upon-Avon, of course, toured Shakespeare's house and watched the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Julius Caesar in the Royal Shakespearean Theater. I vaguely remember the grave of Jane Austin, but, twenty years after our visit, Piccadilly Circus is gone completely from…

"Sunday, October 15, we went to church. The wind was then blowing wildly, but this became worse further along in the day. When we got out of church, we saw smoke in the distance, because the prairie was on fire."…

A January thaw is what all of us look forward to out here, a breath of warmth that reopens our hope that someday soon April will return. Two cold-of-winter days, then maybe three of forty degrees. No wind. Heaven comes…

I snapped this shot at the Somalia exhibit at St. Paul's Minnesota History Center. I wanted a picture of the plow, that wooden contraption in the far corner, a venerable, ox-drawn ancestor of, well, this 21-bottom plow pulled along by…

The story goes that Michelangelo used to come by St. Peter's Basilica at night to stand there before his sculpture, not because he was so proud of what he'd done but because he'd grown to love this woman, this Mary,…