When the world is hot and my skin is fried, scratching from the constant dry, let the clouds boil up, boil up high, and then shade the earth with the darkening sky and bring the secrets and the smell of rain. The coolness and the blessed rain, again. Our land is brown but blessed, stressed [...]
“One of these days,” said Pete, out behind the sale barn where he works, “I’m going to be elected emperor, and then, by smash, I’ll change everything around.” Now several of us from the Mule Barn coffee shop’s philosophy counter were out back there with Pete to look at an Angus bull that he thought [...]
Whenever Delbert McLain — our chamber of commerce here — gets a new idea, he generally shows up at the Mule Barn for coffee. He likes to try the ideas out on bonafide members of the world dilemma think tank before springing them on the world. “What I’m thinking, guys, is this,” he said, “We [...]
There are so many things to consider when writing a book, Dud thought. Sometimes, as now in the middle of a hot summer night, he wondered how anyone actually finishes a book. The odyssey of his writing passion, tentatively called “Murder in the Soggy Bottoms” by him and “The Duchess and the Truck Driver” by [...]
We all know that someone will find Jenkins’s cabin. Someday. Oh, it’s up there in those hills somewhere. We all know that. It’s become a friendly object of conjecture and speculation. No one living has seen it, as far as we know. Jenkins himself died quietly when he was on one of his infrequent trips [...]
When Harley Jacobsen came into Doc’s office the other day for his physical — you know, the one his wife, Gladys, insists on from time to time — it was a treat for Doc. Harley is one of Doc’s favorite people. Harley is a farmer. Not a young farmer, but a solid farmer. A 24/7 [...]
“Amazing,” Dud said out at the corrals the other day. Bill and I looked at him a bit strangely, because there were just two horses in the corral and neither one of them had been amazing since Ronald Reagan moved to Washington. “What’s amazing, Dud?” “Kids. What they’re doing today is just amazing, compared to [...]
“It’s June, by golly,” said Doc. “Isn’t it great? I mean, all the summer to look forward to. Fishing, swimming, camping, heat stroke, dehydration, skateboard accidents and the occasional case of appendicitis.” “That’s what we like about you, Doc,” Steve said, “always looking on the bright side of things.” “You know what June is, don’t [...]
