Opinions

When the thermometer dips ever so slightly, I grab the biggest pot I can find in my kitchen, and cook the life out of something. One week, it was potatoes for potato soup. Often, it’s a carcass which we’ve picked to the bone, to which I add all the leftovers in the refrigerator, as if I worked at a school cafeteria or something.

I remember the day Madeline said to me, “I like watching the squirrels scurrying around in my backyard, looking for acorns or stopping to eat one. I wonder what they’re thinking…” the former teacher said with her perfect diction and uplifting voice, as if she were telling the story to a gaggle of fourth graders gathered around her feet.

How can anyone not like presidential wanna-be, Kamala Harris? Almost always, she is seen flashing a 100-watt smile, and those dimples make the just-turned 60-year-old an easy-on-the-eyes choice. Add to that, her laughter is a hoot… though it lasts so long and reaches an unnerving pitch. It is as though she has feathers in her shoes. Unless one looks into her political past, she is as pleasant as ice-cold lemonade on a hot day.

The men who have been making the terrible noise are still at it.

A homicide in Chicago is not an unusual occurrence. A weekend without a homicide in Chicago would be considered wonderfully rare. But, on this particular weekend, when the victim of the shooting was the cousin of a National Basketball Association star, the flurry of rage extended in concentric circles as the media stretched, molded and compacted the story for all to read, hear and see.

Undiscipline is never an accepted mode of behavior - by those in the military, nor among those known in East Texas as “the law,” that as – the police.

The corn was planted late. We knew that at the time. Because their house is located so deep in the woods, my mother has had no luck getting vegetables to grow. When my parents heard there were garden plots available in town, they signed up for one, and have had a garden in town for several years. The rhubarb was already up when they were told there was a garden plot next to theirs that was not being used.