Scarecrow

Years ago my then very small daughter said that she wanted a scarecrow. We were living in our first house in Austin, and actually had a more-or-less functional garden at the time. I thought about it for a while and decided that there was no reason not to. I had an old, worn out flannel [...]

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Thanksgiving, 1986

November 1986 — it was our second year in Austin and we were at least 1,000 miles away from nearly all our kin and friends. We had neither the money nor available vacation time to spend the holiday with relatives in the north or east, and those few people we knew in Austin had their [...]

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The cat warming shelf

When we bought this house in Clarksburg there was one room that was in particularly bad condition. Under six layers of wallpaper the original plaster was badly cracked and in some places was slowly dissolving into its constituent ingredients. Making this room usable was our first major task, after we ripped out the wall-to-wall carpets [...]

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A campout past

Here Robert and Arend hike in a Texas state park around 1991 or 1992. This was a Camp Fire outing with Hilde’s club. The rest of the group, club members and their parents, had walked on ahead while the two of us, having started out after the others left the camp ground, made our way [...]

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Between Holidays

A week ago our children, no longer children but our children nonetheless, were here, Christmas was approaching, and time was not ordinary. The amazing snow that preceded Christmas by a week, barely pausing to permit our drive to the Pittsburgh airport to retrieve the two, melted in the heat and rain that came just before [...]

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