Of course it dates me to describe a time and place where a cold draft of a tame American beer was the answer to the summer end of day craving of a GS 3 firefighter in a mountain town. But it was the early ’80s and we liked our tall Buds in brown bottles and cold cans of Olympia. Heineken was as close as we got to differently brewed. There weren’t the 50 or...
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“Jean. Jean! I found one!” “Wait a minute, Vennie. There’s a bar whispering to me.” Last fall my friend Vennie came down from Albuquerque to meet me in Lincoln County, N.M., as I drove across the country. She’d read about the Little Free Libraries in Carrizozo. These are more than a dozen decorated 36 inch long by 36 inch wide by 36 inch tall boxes around...
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The driveway to the front door of the cabin where I live is a steep 50-yard lunge off a dirt road. Much of the year I goose my old truck up it without incident, but sometimes the travel of the gravel results in wavelike potholes that require a head start to gun through. Last week with gritted teeth I clutched the steering wheel of my old truck and felt the...
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The woodstove that keeps heat in this cabin has changed into a sleeping bear. A match put to the teepee of crumpled newspaper and kindling offered an hour of warmth two mornings ago, and I approved. The flames were easily coaxed, miserly with woodpile leftovers, quickened by low humidity and higher temperatures. I went back to bed but then got up later to...
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Memo to Mr. Zuckerberg: why isn’t there a Facebook emoji for, “I appreciate this delicate ripple passing through my heart?” Dear Shonto Begay, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly and Tony Norris, I am cured of highway numbness when my smart phone tosses a two by three inch pebble of you into the blurry pond of my road fatigue. It is a long reach to...
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