I feel fortunate to have grown up in a rural environment. Behind our hilltop home in Southwestern Michigan my father owned twenty acres of rolling farmland where each spring he would plant fields of corn or wheat until the Feds offered to pay him NOT to plant fields of corn or wheat (it was a government thing, naturally). And just beyond those farmlands to the south was a vast expanse of virgin forest.

When not otherwise engaged, my younger brother and I and, oftentimes, our neighborhood friends, all accompanied by any number of family dogs, would spend countless hours entertaining ourselves in those woods. In fact, it was not uncommon for us to spend all day out there: picking wildflowers for Mom, playing hide and seek, building forts, chopping down trees, killing small animals, you name it.

Continue “Woods, campfires and dogs”

I must admit, following the conclusion of the Cubs’ World Series’ 7^th game victory this past November, my appetite for viewing baseball games was completely sated: As you may recall, the game went ten innings and lasted nearly four-and-a-half hours. It was reminiscent of how I feel shortly after finishing the last bite of that last piece of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving Day – I couldn’t possibly ever eat another bite. And then six p.m. rolls around and its deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. And so it goes for baseball, as we impatiently count off the days till the opener on April 2^nd.

I hate this time of year for weeknight TV viewing: pretty much nothing on the tube but basketball. Maybe a soccer match from somewhere or other (soccer’s a sport, right?). And airings of the earliest stages of the golf season. But I refuse to watch golf this early in the year. Doing so disrupts my circadian rhythms and can lead to Seasonal Affective Disorder and depression caused by imbalanced serotonin levels (this condition is also caused by living in Michigan in the winter, which typically runs from early September through June). Golf doesn’t really start until Pebble Beach as far as I’m concerned.

Continue “Batter up!”

I have used a charcoal grill for my entire adult life, at least during those years when I had some place to store a grill when not in use. I long ago convinced myself that my grilled entree’s taste better when cooked over charcoal than when cooked over a blue, propane flame. In fact, I have convinced myself that it is so much better that it’s worth screwing around with all that ash removal and the setting of lit matches to the jet fuel that is required to get it started. My son went to the dark side several years ago, buying a huge, stainless steel gas grill. His barbecue tastes pretty good. I may not be holding out much longer, but I have not yet turned that corner.

Continue “Turning corners”

For most of my boyhood I lived with my family in a house built by my father out in the countryside of southwestern Michigan. It’s perched on the crest of a hill about five miles north of Buchanan and surrounded by farmland and virgin forest. Five miles may not seem like a lot these days, but when we first moved in one would have to navigate a two-lane country road and then two more gravel roads to reach it by car or tractor. Later, the county would pave Glendora Road, but Aalf’s Road, where we lived, remains a graveled one-laner to this day.

We did not have air conditioning, so any time the furnace was not needed for heat pretty much all the screened windows in the house would remain open all day and night. I shared a bedroom and one of two twin beds with my younger brother with mine on the side of the room adjacent to an east-facing window.

One of my fondest memories of living in that house was the smell of the sweet, country air that would drift silently through those open windows in the wee hours of a summer night. There was no car noise, or unnatural sounds of any kind out there. Just crickets and cicadas. A barking dog in the distance somewhere. And I recall sometimes lying at the foot of my bed with my hands and chin resting on the windowsill watching as the moon began to rise into the dark and star-studded sky. As it lifted fully above the tree line on the far side of the cornfield the lone tree that stood in that field would begin to throw a moon shadow across the waist-high corn stalks. And, if it was a full moon, it would be “…as bright as a readin’ light,” to borrow a line from songwriter, Mike Burton, and thus casting a soft, gray aura across an utterly peaceful and tranquil countryside. Sometimes I would fall asleep there.

Continue “Moonbeams”