There was a tap, tap, tap. The sound was coming from the water pipes in the house. I got up and responded to the sound with my own taps on the plumbing, and walked out the front door. Sara Bess and I had concocted a private communication scheme. The country was still in the great depression and my family had not the luxury of a telephone and no phone bills, of course. I made my way up the hill to the house next door where I found Sara Bess sitting on the porch waiting for me.

"Hi,” she ...(click to continue reading)

"We’re late, everybody's leaving,” she said as they parked in the Church parking lot.  In fact the service had been a little short with an early benediction. "But we can’t be this late. I set the clock back an hour slower before we went to bed, not two hours." 

"This is the last Sunday of October isn’t it?" he said. 

"Yeah, that’s when we set the clocks back.   I don’t understand it. Well, we may as well go back home and set the clocks back to where they were.  They must have s...(click to continue reading)

Prolog: The tranquil place that Kim envisioned was not available to me. Nevertheless I found a relatively quiet place to let my mind wander and it settled on nothing profound. So I just wrote what came to mind.

Business flourished at Westinghouse Aerospace Division when aircraft companies were building new airplanes. When both military and commercial airplane business slumped, so did ours. Both businesses slumped in about 1985. Rather than lay off people management arranged for a few of...(click to continue reading)

Upon leaving the highway it is a short drive following the creek up the hollow to Camp Campbell, the Boy Scout camp. It is a pretty drive through forest and clearings with the creek sometimes roaring, sometimes rippling over rocks, and sometimes running quietly. It fills a boy’s mind with anticipation of things to come.

At the camp a grassy clearing is surrounded by woods on the slopes of the hollow. Off to the right a good swimming hole has been made by damming the creek followed here....(click to continue reading)

On a dark night some eighty years ago while sitting on the front porch on a summer night a strange sound rushed out of the nearby woods alerting me to the formerly unknown. I thought it was an eerie sound. It seemed to be a kind of whistling sound that started at a pitch somewhere above the treble clef and bounced down in little steps for about three quarters of an octave in about a second.

“What was that?” I asked of my uncle who sat there with me.

“What was what?” he said. Th...(click to continue reading)

Asleep until sundown, he stirs, yawns, peers about, stretches, scratches, shakes head to clear brain fog and waits. His nightly mission begins on silent wings, ever vigilant for movement on the ground. A twig moves, a sudden drop, talons grasp a vole or a mouse. Ah, breakfast! He surveys his land, stops at its edge and recites his claim like a whistle running down stair steps. Who? Our neighborhood screech owl.

(click to continue reading)