A pocket knife and trust
A pocket knife with a 3 inch blade in the hands of a 7 year old would catch the eye of most parents. On the farm, however, a knife is a tool to perform a task. In the small hands of Jonah, a kid...
View ArticleThe past as told by blankets
Now that the older generation is passing on, I am taking a longer look at what they have left behind and, on this particular day, I see blankets. The post The past as told by blankets appeared first on...
View ArticleThe land was everything
You better have plenty of magic markers and colorful tabs as you read Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Land Was Everything” (The Free Press, N.Y., 2000) because every page is plum full of quotables of...
View ArticleAnimal anomalies
It wasn’t a chuckle I felt as I slowed down to watch a strange, somewhat inert bird squatting by the edge of the road. At first I thought it was a quail and let it go at that. I felt pleased that the...
View ArticleWhat is beauty?
Beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder; it originates beyond the physical or phenomenal. It exists, as the Greeks discerned and Emmanuel Kant affirmed, a priori. It is in our nature to know...
View ArticleSweet and salty
Everything sweet comes from the earth; every grain of salt emerged from the sea. Both of these ingredients are biblical; they loom large in our physical and spiritual histories. Our Judeo-Christian...
View ArticleA mother remembered
My mother would have been 100 on April 1. No one ever forgot her birthday — the only benefit of being born on April Fools’ Day.The post A mother remembered appeared first on The Delaware Gazette.
View ArticleDelaware County connections
My grandmother was born in Ostrander to Elizabeth Maugans and George Webster Case. She and her twin sister were put in shoe boxes and then into the warming part of an old cook stove. This “incubator”...
View ArticleA hole in a bucket
I ran over a five-gallon plastic bucket with my tractor and tore a rent in its side. Using it to haul feed or water was no longer viable, but it still could be turned over and sat on while bottle...
View ArticleA second Axial Age: Back to the future
I am not sure many people understand what Post-Modernism is or why it matters much. Most of us think we are living in modern times. How then can we speak of Post-Modernity? This is not back to the...
View ArticleA heap of humility
I don’t know another species of the workforce so forgiving of its mistakes than a farmer. A surgeon has great guilt over his botches and carries insurance to help him through. Acts of nature, of...
View ArticleMeditations on trials of modern air conditioning
I hate air conditioning, institutional AC that is, not car or even one’s home where it can be regulated. I think AC turns us inward, content in an artificial world of self-indulgence. I think only of...
View ArticleValuable woman’s work
I once owned a mangle for a very short time. I bought it at a farm auction and had my husband and others haul it home. A mangle is the size of a small freezer, but in those days, because its chassis...
View ArticleAthens County farm memories: Summer daze
I spent my high school summer years staying with relatives on their Athens County farm. This was the ’50s and my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Orville had not quite adapted to indoor plumbing, but they did...
View ArticleUnusual farm guests not always unwelcome
There is something unseemly about seeing two peahens perched on top of my chicken coop. The chickens inside think so, too. They hoot and holler taking offense at such an untoward intrusion among birds...
View ArticlePuppies and peaches
Kelly Van Gundy and two of her four children just got back from South Carolina where they had gone to “help out” a sister Baptist congregation and their community.The post Puppies and peaches appeared...
View ArticleFamily reunions: To remember, honor
Summer is full of family reunions and my husband’s family has met on the first or second Sunday of August for 92 years. One senior member at 92 was present at the first reunion! My husband’s family is...
View ArticleFamily reunions, part 2
To continue on the theme of family reunions, let me write a bit about recollections of my father’s side, the Wolfe family reunion.The post Family reunions, part 2 appeared first on The Delaware Gazette.
View ArticleThose earlier days
We are as a country heading for hardships, we are told, and perhaps now is a good time for a tonic from the past to remind ourselves of the hearty stock from which we emerged. The Wolfe Family History...
View ArticleA soldier’s recollections
As Ohio pioneers my ancestors, George and Jane Pisor Wolfe, fresh out of Indiana County Pennsylvania and eager to homestead on their 100 acres in Athens County, had much to do. They cleared land, built...
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