Cookies for George, 40 years back from Viet Nam, are the only payment the man will accept to mow your lawn,

Two grackles, black birds shiny and iridescent, nest again this year high and deep in our tall spruce.

Freddie and Fern were an old couple, a very old couple if truth be told, but on the matter of age, the truth seldom surfaced. Their kids were grown and gone and had families of their ow...

This is Granny in the Ozarks call… Please come down before spring goes away for summer. The geese are coming through and landing on the pond

Tornadoes in the parlor, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, t… churned every hour Dad was home. He never worked and with good reason.

I should have said yes, meet you anywhere you want for lunch, even that greasy spoon with the lousy chili and corn dogs… Every five years or so we meet

They weren’t talking at all, back… Deep in that house, conceiving the… they weren’t talking at all, back… And they’re not talking at all, ri… Still in that house, rearing their…

After Yeats and Heaney, you wonder when the new one will come galloping out of Dublin or perhaps from yet another farm

For some nervous wrecks a pill or two might help. For others

No Supper for a Year My wife looks out the kitchen wind… and tells me the starlings are bac… the same big flock as yesterday strolling around our yard

He’s at least 70 now and has never forgotten his childhood. He lives with that child every day… He remembers that Thanksgiving Da… his family had parched field corn

I know this story to be true because I know Ruben and he wouldn’t lie even though Ruben and I have never met. He lives in Alabama in a hollow and I live in St. Louis. But that makes no ...

I’m on my way to Larry’s Place, a food pantry in the city. I park a block away because parking in front of Larry’s isn’t wise even if one drives