Posted by Tony Norris on Dec 27, 2012

I think I may have briefly found the Christmas spirit in South Dakota in 1974. I had just talked myself into the first real job of my life. And about time, too: at the age of 24, I had a wife and two boys. We’d spent the previous years living in Appalachia’s backwoods trying our hand at homesteading. My job duties had included ploughing with a team of...

Posted by Tony Norris on Nov 22, 2012

A few yards from my front door stands my favorite tree to pee under. It has ever been so. I imagine a delta rich in potash and nitrogen beneath the pine needles feeding the coyote gourd that twists and spreads downhill in a luxuriant profusion. From this sheltered vantage point I’ve surveyed many a sunrise and moonrise over the ragged edge of the forest a...

Posted by Tony Norris on Oct 18, 2012

“Somebody said, ‘That’s a strange tattoo you have on the side of your head.’ I said, ‘That’s the blueprint left by the coal. A little more and I’d been dead.’” –“Coal Tattoo” by Billy Ed Wheeler   I’m driving north along Highway 89 in the shadow of the San Francisco Peaks. The October sun threads the air with amber. It picks out the new straw color of...

Posted by Tony Norris on Sep 13, 2012

My father’s legacy to me was complex. It didn’t include land and investments or stocks and vehicles. He was a skilled craftsman with wood and iron but there was almost no material evidence of his life passed on to me. A story his older brother, my Uncle Hattler, told me more than 50 years ago helped me to understand his endowment to me of a love of music...

Posted by Tony Norris on Aug 16, 2012

My father’s double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun hung above the mantle of our fireplace. He told me about the summer he was 12 and worked with a wheat threshing crew and earned 50 cents a day. The two purchases he made with his summer’s wages were a winter coat for his mother and a shotgun. I grew up in the gun culture. My early memories include a single-shot...