The Scale of Importance The late afternoon with its lowered sun and breeze that barely moved the resting energetic leaves.  The sailing students in class on the river, all in identical boats with mainsail and jib and learning to set them just so to move upwind, and the breeze just warm enough ( more… )

My dad was born in a house near Annie Battle Lake in what is now Glendalough State Park in Ottertail County, Minnesota, on February 17, 1919. The circumstances of my dad’s upbringing required him to learn thriftiness and self-reliance and he learned a great deal.  What I remember is his ( more… )

That bird lying stiff and still Among the brown leaves And cobwebs in a corner Of my little patio of concrete And exposed aggregate Has yellow feathers and has Been there for a month.   One day I’ll be dead And someone will find me Among the leaves and wonder ( more… )

She held her closed hand in front of her.  “I found it in the garden.”  Her smile from this morning was gone.  She opened her hand. The thing was smaller than I remembered.  She had cleaned it, but it wasn’t shiny. My lungs were empty of air.  “How did you know where to dig?”  “No ( more… )

Ernest Hemingway had a lot of good advice for fiction writers. To begin writing he said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” And he demonstrated this with the first sentence of his novel A Farewell to Arms: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village ( more… )