Category: North Country Life
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The Toboggan
When I enter our garage from the door that faces our house, I don’t often look up. What could be up there that I’m avoiding? Well, there is an old oak bed head-board and foot board that was mine when I grew up at 420 Front Street, Owego, NY. There are stickers of cowboys and…
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Dead Man’s Bone
[Source: Google search] This is not about a toothache as the photo suggests. It’s about me walking around with 0.5 cc of granules of a dead persons bone in my gums (ignore the gender reference in the title. It’s purely for dramatic effect. I thought it sounded spooky). For the next several months, my body…
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D’Arcy At The Bat
A bat. [Source: Wikipedia] bat n : any of an order of night-flying mammals with forelimbs modified to form wings. [Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary] I considered naming this post “Listen to them…they are the children of the night. What beautiful music they make” but I decided: a) it was too long for a title, and, b) the…
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My First Two Weeks Back In New York City After Five Years Of Living In The Far North Country
[Say what you want…this comes with the apartment] Okay, It’s maybe three or four weeks now since we’ve left the cold and hostile fields of the North Country for the Cold and hostile streets of the Big Apple. So, you might ask, How are we doing? [Across the street from out building. A line waiting…
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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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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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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…
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