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The Winters Of My Life
“Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail. If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see.” –Robert Service. The Cremation of Sam Magee I live in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. I don’t live in the Yukon. But lately, I feel…
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Coal For Christmas
[Artwork:Watercolor sketch by Paul Egan (Date unknown)] Note to my readers: If you think you’ve read this blog before, don’t thing you’re getting senile…(the doctors won’t release such information)..this is perhaps the third, maybe fourth time I’ve posted it. Hey, maybe I’m the one getting senile. I’ve tweaked the story several times to try to make the narrative better,…
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Walking In A Winter Wonderland
Sure, I could be walking down this snowy, quiet and picturesque road. I could be thinking about the approaching holidays, the snow men, the fire in our downstairs living room wood burner…but I don’t imagine I’ll be making this walk. Don’t get me wrong, I love snow. I always have. But as I stand in…
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A Farewell Letter To Jimmy
Hey, Jimmy…I can’t bring myself to call you James. For most of my life you’ve been Jimmy, so there it is. Mariam and I were in Burlington just this past weekend. As I wandered up and down Church Street I kept wondering where the restaurant was that we met for the first time in over…
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Here I Sit In Space #275 In The Rose Reading Room: Yet I Am Not Insecure
It was an afternoon in mid-October. The rain had fallen most of the morning so when I arrived at the wet slippery steps of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Ave., the scattered metal tables were mostly empty and wet. I posted a photo of the wet tables on Instagram.…
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My Personal War With The Xlerator
[Photo credit: Patrick Egan] There ought to be a law… What I am about to say might be familiar to some of my readers. These thoughts and descriptions appeared, in a slightly different form, in my book In The Middle of Somewhere. It was in the chapter that dealt with public bathrooms on a cross-country…
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Thirty Feet From My Pillow: A Tale Of Love, Sex And Perhaps Death Outside My Bedroom Window
I can’t recall seeing so many clusters and varieties of Fungi in my front yard in the sixteen years we have owned our home on the hill above Rainbow Lake. I was on my knees examining a species that was unfamiliar to me. I was on my knees in three inches of yellow, red and…
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The Great And Silent Feast
I felt the breeze… I stumbled on a tree root when… Finally, we reached the pond… Concentrate. Start over. When I was a teacher I was often given the dubious privilege of “lunch duty”. A room, nearly the size of a gym, filled with 5th & 6th graders…or 9th & 10th graders and a hand…
