Recently I was getting ready for a trip from the sleek, modern metropolis of Craig, Alaska, to the wilds of central Virginia. My sister Laura always stops by my little cottage before I come to make sure no possums have moved in, and this time she said casually, “Oh, by the way, there is a […]
Category: Mostly Powhatan: Adventures in my home town
Stories on life in Powhatan, Virginia, past and present
Attack of the herbivores
There are many, many things about the film Jurassic Park that I can get irritated about, and even more in the sequels, but one that stands head and shoulders above the rest is the bit about the veggie-saurus. Here they are, stranded in a tree, and this five-million-ton critter is blowing snot all over them, […]
Let’s talk about the flowers that bloom in the spring
One of my mother’s lifelong missions was to keep the general level of family conversation out of the gutter. When one of us began to stray into the earthier realms, she would invariably say, “let’s talk about the flowers that bloom in the spring.” That was our cue to shape up, and we rarely failed […]
Red, the retired quarter horse
Red came to live with us when I was sixteen. He was a quarter horse, trained to run the western barrel race event, but he had gone lame in his old age. There was plenty of physical evidence that he had been mistreated by an early owner, and I was told I could ride him […]
Mary’s hair
Due to popular demand (by which I mean requests from my friend Carolyne and my sister Laura, both popular people), I am presenting here some evidence to back my past claims about my sister Mary’s hair. Take a look-see: Isn’t it wonderful? Until she was seven or eight, Mary’s hair did what you see here: […]
Admiral Richard E. Bird
Growing up as we did, in a farmhouse surrounded by enormous trees, my sisters and I encountered birds of all shapes and sizes. Not all of them got the same reaction from my family. My mother, for example, built special houses for the bluebirds, but would take after the starlings with the shotgun. The robins, […]
I’m trying to toughen myself
My great-uncle Brooks, a most colorful character, had as many stories as he had career ventures. At one time in his life, he found himself the informal caretaker of an elderly gentleman named Eddie Wilkinson, who had become increasingly eccentric in his old age. In the vernacular of the day, Mr. Wilkinson would often be […]
In which the General takes us on the road
I have very few childhood memories that are more than one or two degrees of separation from a Volkswagen. During the sixties, my decade of single digits, the aunts had a succession of beetles while our family had a bus, nicknamed the General. The General was nothing to remark about when at home, but on […]
The minor tragedy of the curtains
When I was growing up my parents wanted two things for our house: to keep it warm and to keep it nice. My father was mostly in charge of keeping it warm. The only source of heat was a Moloch-style wood stove that crouched in the basement and sent its warmth up through a metal […]
The one and only front-yard trolley
My father was always looking for ways to keep us kids active and entertained. He built a catapult out of a rat trap and a block of firewood so we could fire acorns and walnuts across the yard. He hung a long cable from a tree so we could swing back and forth across the […]