This essay was first published on the Plough.com on 16 February 2024 On a typical morning in my childhood, I wake and trudge down to the barn to help Dad with the farm chores: chickens, two horses, a milk cow, a dog, a pig or two. I am often conveniently fifteen minutes late. When we arrive…
Sketch: Snow
Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Job 38:22 Student: Teacher, what is snow? Teacher: Snow is part of the hydrologic water cycle that is essentially ice mixed with air. Supercooled droplets of water freeze into microscopic crystals, then these crystals conglomerate into a flake, forming one of six unique shapes of snowflake in accordance…
Sketch: Conversations with Developing Souls
The following has been aggregated from a small experience in working with children. Names and details have been changed to insure privacy. Me: “Hey! Good evening.” Faye: “Good. Can we pick up my friend Steph?” “If her parents are OK with it.” “She lives on the other side of town. I can show you.” We…
How the Real Alaskans Do It
Alaska has always had an aura of mythology, and it’s easy to see why. Just plop a mountain like Denali into a state and you will have climbers dying on it. Have Jack London come into the North, almost die of scurvy, then retreat to sunny California to write hairy-chested and Darwinist tales of the…
Jehovah’s Witnesses Don’t Go to Heaven
Or, How Not to Evangelize It’s been disappointing enough today, incurring debts from gracious people and otherwise being stuck a hundred miles north of nowhere. Never mind. So I’m sitting on the edge of a weathered deck, trying to pilfer some WIFI to tell my family that everything is fine, which is not a complete…
Epiphany of Fatherhood
“…parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible.” —Wendell Berry She cries. I cry, but not for the same reasons. “You want to hold her?” they ask. Do I want to hold my baby girl! I reach her away and it takes me five…
Nonsense
It’s a post-Covid waiting room with all the magazines gone, the television and radio playing simultaneously. I have an ear cocked to the radio and an eye to the television while passively consuming these media like a decent citizen. On the television: “Eggs are not a dairy product.” Is that why they call them chicken…
Big Words and Haters
The trouble with using a four-foot-long word is you risk sounding ostentatious. (See what I mean?) I’ve tried to argue that we should learn more and bigger words, but I’ve been trounced by smarter people and I surrender. But I must make one final jab at the editors and readers who have not humored me.…
Not All Who Wonder are Ignorant
Sketch: Saturday morning, 5:30, Kenai River flats, 32*F Sandhill cranes, long legged and musical, pitching into the mud with stilted legs outstretched. A flock of several hundred White-fronted geese, these with a watery cackle, circle once and come in. The sky is alive with birds: Lesser Canada Geese, Pintails and Mallards, a wigeon, some Northern…
Book Review: The Need to Be Whole by Wendell Berry
The Need to Be Whole is, by Wendell Berry’s own admission, a “pondering and ponderous book.” Approaching 500 pages, the ponderousness comes in part from Berry’s abhorrence of shadowy language that might allow some assumption to crawl under the back fence and set up shop. Any word with the suffix –ism calls for a page or two…