It is easy to forget that horses are prey animals, since they regularly allow dangerous mammals to scramble onto their backs and start giving orders. Side note: I recently saw a meme of a horse with forward-facing, predator eyes, and the vision was unsettling in the extreme. But the equine family never entirely forgets its […]
Category: Mostly Powhatan: Adventures in my home town
Stories on life in Powhatan, Virginia, past and present
Snack time
When I was a kid my mother claimed that she could track me around the house by following the discarded cheese wrappers. In those days we classified cheese into two broad categories: mouse cheese (Kraft American cheese, in individually wrapped slices) and rat cheese (cheddar). It was mouse cheese that was my weakness and my […]
Convict season
I grew up living downstream (James River) from the Virginia state prison, aka the State Farm. This fact was known to create some excitement from time to time. I came home from school one day to find our yard full of state troopers and German shepherds. It seemed a convict had escaped, as they were […]
The family chatterbox
As a child I adored Uncle Brooks. He moved to the farm before I was born and lived in a small house with no running water, right next to his woodshop, which was roughly twice the size of the house. I loved to visit because he would make blocks for me out of walnut scraps. […]
Fear of falling
One of my childhood friends who loved horses grew up to start a riding academy. It was a successful venture for her until tragedy did what tragedy sometimes does: one of the students died after falling off her horse during a lesson. I was already in Alaska by then, and my mother wrote me about […]
In which I acknowledge the finer qualities of chickens
A few months ago, I stopped by the post office and heard a sound I hadn’t heard in forty years. It was like a google earth experience: pull way back, make a wide lateral swing, zoom back in. Is there a google time app yet? Anyway, the sound I heard was the chirping and scruffling […]
In which I make peace with chickens
A lot of people living in small spaces have chickens these days. In Craig, Prince of Wales Island’s answer to a “big city,” you can have chickens in your back yard, as long as you don’t have any roosters. I grew up on a family farm in Virginia, and our main cash crop was eggs, […]