WARNING: this is a longer-than-usual read but I don’t think you’ll mind. This is quite a story. Last Friday on a quick trip to New Orleans, Jim and I were in the French Quarter, trying to catch a streetcar over to the Garden District. The corner stop was crowded, and a woman in a wheelchair was telling nobody in particular that the streetcars were full by the time they arrived at this particular stop. The way to actually get on one was to walk down the street and go around the corner to catch it at the end of/beginning of the line. Nobody paid much attention to her. Then, when…
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Putting “Take a Picture: It’ll Last Longer” Into Action
Some of my favorite conversations with people I don’t know have come about because of the car I drive, a 2020 Ford Mustang Convertible in “Race Red”. Things you may or may not know about this car: I had two funny conversations just last week. The first one was in Nashville, when I was on my way to meet a friend for lunch. The car top was down, of course (June!), and my music was blasting, as usual. I exited the highway and stopped for the traffic light at the top of the ramp. A small white sedan was in the left lane, and the driver and her passenger were…
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Protecting My Peace
I want to tell you about a new writing project I’m very excited about: I got started over on Substack so I could connect with a lot of my writer/OG blogger friends: it’s easy to read and comment on each other’s posts because they’re all under one umbrella. I started a publication over there to claim a little more world wide web space but I have NO plans of giving up this site, my little corner of the internet that belongs to me and me only. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I don’t write nearly as much here as I used to, and it might bug you…or it might not.…
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What I Know For Sure
Four years ago today, the snowy scene pictured above was my reality in the western suburbs of Chicago. We moved to Knoxville a year and a half ago and no longer had the need for the snowblower we purchased the year that photo was taken. Although it snows occasionally in Knoxville—and yeah yeah yeah the area practically shuts down when it merely flurries and people, who don’t think about the fact that the South doesn’t have the infrastructure to deal with snow, let alone the fact that the hills and sharp curves around here make traveling in icy conditions very dangerous regardless of whether the roads have been salted properly,…
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Abundance
One of the things I love about coming back up north is having the ability to stick up on things I can’t get in Knoxville. Being in Kenosha for this holiday meant a mandatory trip to my favorite grocery store. Woodman’s is a Wisconsin-based chain that is employee-owned and has the largest selection of products I have ever seen, as in four whole aisles of candy, one entire corner of the store devoted to soda pop and other beverages, and an aisle the length of the entire back of the store full of every kind of chip you could ever want, just to name a few. Unlike other stores which…
