Category: non-fiction
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When A Leaf Dances A Snowflake Will Soon Fall
I’m sitting on the front deck of our house which sits on a small rise above Rainbow Lake. It’s late September in the North Country of New York State. The trees are oddly out-of-tune with the season. Some are brown, dead and waiting to drop to the ground. Some are just hinting at the blast…
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Trying To Stay Forever Young
I’m sitting on the deck of our home at Rainbow Lake. A lone chickadee hops from branch to branch and then vanishes into the thicket of trees. I can see the shimmer of the setting sun reflecting from the water below us. Only patches of the lake can be seen, we need to trim a…
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The Migratory Habits of the Boomers
In this lecture we will explore the migratory habits of certain unusual groups of animals. Let us begin by taking a glance at the Puffins of the North Atlantic. They migrate to a big rugged and very isolated rock somewhere in the waters of the Atlantic. There they breed. Then they migrate somewhere. It’s totally…
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Our Appeal To The Great Spirit
[Source: Google Search] It was the icon of our school. It stood in the large foyer of the Owego Free Academy high school. The title of this equestrian sculpture is Appeal to the Great Spirit. The artist was Cyrus Dallin and it dates from 1909. The original bronze statue is at the entrance of the…
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56 Years Along The Blue Trail: Then And Now
Like brave mountaineers, we weren’t bothered much by time. –Gordon Lightfoot It’s late August in the North Country. The green of the leaves and shrubs are looking tired. Some hints of the colors of autumn are emerging from the maples and oaks. Late summer flowers like Black-Eyed Susans and Ragweed are everywhere. The quarter moon…
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Kodak Moment
My son, Brian, just turned 28 on July 14. He is a part of the last generation of people (in America, I suspect) who had their childhood photos of them taken with film. I have boxes stacked in my closet of envelopes containing hundreds if not thousands of pictures of him, my daughter, my family,…
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The Moth
There are stories told around the world about a strange figure referred to as The Mothman. These are compelling stories that are, it is claimed, substantiated by eye-witness accounts and news articles. A Hollywood film was made about the Mothman, which starred Richard Gere. It was a pretty good film. Apparently, the figure of the…
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After The Party
I wasn’t that hungry to begin with. Blame it on the oppressive heat and humidity in the city that evening. Blame it on the seven block walk to our favorite Ramen place on 28th Street. Or, best of all, blame it on the viral bronchial whatever I pick up in late June. I just didn’t…
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Bryant Park On A July Afternoon
I remember a time, back in the 1970’s and ’80’s when Bryant Park was a certain kind of place for a certain kind of person. I was not one of those people. There was a public restroom…a small stone building on 42nd Street. If you entered to use the urinal, in the day, in the…
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The Empty Bedroom
This was once my bedroom. There was a time when this room was packed full of the stuff of life… From a crib made in the mid-1940’s, I would look out at the flowered wallpaper. Maybe a mobile hung just out of my reach, and moved about when a breeze caught it from a partly…
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