Columns

When my sisters and I were children, each year for Easter Sunday we’d get brand new dress clothes. While that’s a nice memory now, back then, it was my least favorite Easter tradition. Clothes by themselves were not considered a gift by me, let alone stuffy, itchy,...

April is synonymous with birdsong: pregnant robins who proudly carry the title of our State Bird. There’s nothing sweeter than waking before dawn to a cheerful chorus of red-breasted mothers-to-be. I related to their song this morning when a plump robin landed on a...

In 2010-11, former Tri-City Times columnist, Rick Liblong, researched, wrote, and published the story of Almonters who served in the Civil War - “Answering The Call to Duty.” It is a marvelous story of the “farm boys” from in and around Almont who enlisted and fought...

Mitty jumped up on my bed this morning during my devotionals. Cuddles, Mitty’s sister, established this daily meeting when they were kittens. She aimed for my pen to chew on the cap which makes a scribbly mess in my journal. One morning several months ago, Mitty...

Toward the end of my eighth-grade year, which marked the ending of middle school and portended entry into high school, one of my teachers invited some former middle school students who were now in high school to come and speak with our class. The two young ladies were...

When a series of three reading buddies recommend a book, I often buy it. However, several years ago, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2010), a New York Times bestseller by Eric Metaxas, came with concern. I don’t read horror, fiction or non-fiction. And what...

Every summer when I was growing up my family would attend church camp. This was a weeklong campout with church services morning, afternoon and evening. Some were prayer services, some were Bible studies, and some were singing and preaching. Some years we camped in a...

I discovered the root of my love for poetry twenty years ago when traversing Ireland’s winding roads. A dominant charm of the Emerald Isle is the English language spoken by the Gaelic tongue. The cost of travel is worth the verse and cadence of conversation in...

Today’s young people will encounter never-before-seen challenges in the years that lay ahead. Challenges of a magnitude that Americans have not had to deal with since World War II. The coronavirus has impacted every segment of the population during the past year, but...

It’s Sunday. I stand in the warm sunshine of our kitchen’s sliding glass door. Downhill, our Isa Browns peck and scratch in their pen. The foundation for my beehive stands beyond and between the henhouse and greenhouse: three symbiotic structures indispensable to...