George Catlin, Ioways--note feathered headman's pipe When you're nine, I'm guessing you don't think much about the word sacred. We were already on our way when it occurred to me that our grandson probably needed to know something of it. I'm driving,…
Hattie says that just before her mother got married, she’d left the farm to start working in a grocery in Springfield, SD, where some young men “seemed suddenly to have a greater hunger for candy and cigars.” One of those…
Let me tell you a story: Fifteen years ago, I was in line at a grocery store, behind two Hispanic men checking out. The clerk—a high school girl—got frustrated because her customers had trouble with the English language. That she…
Buxton, Iowa Could be an early 20th century shot from a lot of places on the map. There's a hill up the street, but the place looks like any of a thousand small towns from almost any region of the…
After just about forty years of teaching students from all over the continent, I came to believe, grudgingly, that no geographic group adored their "homeland" with more lovesick passion than kids from the Pacific Northwest. Hundreds, being away, brayed like…
I didn't know him--couldn't have. He was killed four years before I was born. For years I wouldn't have known his story any more fully than I might have known the stories of any other veteran who didn't return from…
Last night I couldn't help thinking of an old story told to me long, long ago by an organist--the organist, the very one who'd been asked to do a concert on a brand new pipe organ a country church had just…
Job's friends had his health in mind, but none of them, nor their arguments, could satisfy the emptiness in his soul. He'd lost everything, his family, his land, his enterprise, even his health in a tsunami of bad times unlike…
The only means of getting man and woman, beast and wagon across the rain-swollen Niobrara River was by rope, hand over hand. Dozens of oxen and as many as 500 horses had to get to the other side, as did…
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…
