Journeys Without End

Lately I sometimes think I am done writing. Days and weeks pass, and I find I have nothing to say. I ask myself, “How can this be? I read. I write journal entries. I compose letters. I venture outdoors. I photograph.” In spite of the stimulus, I find I think and hear nothing new. My […]

I Dream of Journeys

From as far back as I can remember, I’ve wished for companionship — a companion. And now as I near the last years of my life, I realize that though this dreamed-for companionship will elude me, I have somehow, in some unplanned way, filled that need with my own self. As I bicycle down gravel […]

A Mother’s Designs

My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. Mark Twain My mother had great designs for me. I was to be an artist — a dancer on the musical theater stage. She financed endless dance lessons toward this end. For years she arranged car rides to-and-from lessons; […]

Some Other Dimension

To adventure. When I was young, guided by my imagination and the books I read, I adventured. My siblings and I laid planks between tree limbs and called them forts. We pinned blankets over the dome jungle gym and called it a tent. We dropped charcoal briquettes into freshly dug holes to bake potatoes and […]

A Child Went Forth

Walt Whitman wrote– There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the […]

The Art of Going

The wind blew Thursday, and the snow fell. The world was a swirl of white. Snow devils danced across plowed fields, roadside ditches filled with drifts, cars crept down county highways. Winter, if only for forty-eight hours, had re-asserted itself at October’s end. But today is Saturday, partly sunny, and calm of wind […]

To Dream

I tell you this, ‘though I admit some shame in doing so. My heart hurts as I wander the woodlots surrounding the house. The aspen and slippery elm leaves I watched unfurl in the earliest spring have yellowed. They fall now with the slightest provocation. They fall at the merest suggestion of a breeze. They fall […]

Elusive Fame

Perhaps it’s due to my age, but I no longer aspire to fame. At fifty-seven, an individual might consider one’s remaining years and conclude that fame — elusive up to now — was unlikely to occur. There are flaws in that perspective. For instance, who’s to say how long one has on earth? Who’s to […]

Pennington Co Sect: 24

Vignettes from Northwestern Minnesota

Writing