So many of us feed the birds even though we know birds can make it on their own in any weather,

Adolph’s been here since the Fort… So have Benito and Tojo. As soon as they arrived we gave each of them a huge furnace. They shovel coal all day and all n…

Young hummingbird swirls and darts to the red feeder. Black cat waits below. Donal Mahoney

The two weeks I spent in that small town on assignment, I saw no blacks except for two older women regal in every way,

Farmer John knows he’s old but didn’t think he was that old until he went to town one day and met a young lady he liked as much as he likes the corn

The older I get the more I realiz… the importance of getting things d… before your mother announces anoth… assignment to roust me from my ham… As you know I’ve never been much

Old barber shop in a neighborhood never posh now poor. A single chair with an ancient barber

She’s been a widow a year now and at times she still misses him when she drives past the steak house where he

Black flag on the lawn falls in pieces from the sky. Starlings in command. Donal Mahoney

Sometimes it helps to learn a relative has died a close relative you haven’t seen in years and didn’t plan to see again because

The haberdasher has that season of the year he rids his racks, his bins of oddments. I have no season of the year

I have a friend, old and retired, who keeps busy helping the poor. Let’s call him Ted because he wants to remain anonymous. Some of his ideas, he says, wouldn’t make many of his neighbo...

Sometimes you sit for days sucking yourself in praying the right words will fall in your ear toboggan over the whorls

It was the first time that senators had been asked to go home and address parent-teacher meetings at all the middle schools in their states. Each had been given a sheet of talking point...