Stuff in the Basement

What seemed so clear to me is the cause/effect sequencing of the entire, awful story--how this led to that and that led to this and so forth...

The Trail of Tears President Andrew Jackson's bright idea to put every tribe and Native nation under the sun into what he called "I...

It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for an elementary-school gym's worth of red-blooded Luxembourgian genealogists to show off the resear...

  I didn't know him--couldn't have. He was killed four years before I was born. For years I wouldn't have known his story any mo...

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death”  or mourning or crying or pain,  for the old order of things ha...

Two years ago, I was divorced. I could give you a hundred reasons why, but none of them would be any good really. Anyway, I see my two kid...

My father is a tall, gaunt man with very dry hair and proud features, a wide nose that, come summer, reddens almost daily. His arms are lon...

Some summer nights a few years later, when I was home from college, I drove slowly down the lake road past their home late at night, maybe o...

I remembered Cassie and our child and my own father, who yesterday was out baling hay somewhere, just as he was during the Dutch Festival i...

When, one Easter, I went out to the back of the barn to feed the rabbits, a job that supposedly belonged to my children, what was immediatel...

I don't think there's a marketing department in the local American Legion, nor will there be any time soon. The events on Memorial D...

In Raymond Carver’s story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” two couples, in what is shaping up as to be an all-nighter, soak th...

  Apparently, I'm not supposed to love this stuff. I wish I didn't know that.  Yesterday, I took a river walk amidst a gorgeous day,...

It's shameful for me to say ill of her. She did her darndest to make high school English a class we would find endearing. She was not so...