(To begin with, always get at least two opinions on anything. After a dear friend read my recently published book, she suggested that it have a prologue. It is too confusing if it does not, she said. So, here is the prologue to my new book, available on Amazon.) A…

Count the beats, mark the meter, deconstruct the poem. Only then will you know it, understand it. John Senior taught us well. Because I am old — A poem must have rhyme. It must have meter. Count the syllables, count the meter. Because I am old — My poems…

Okay, the weather last week was over 90 so I dutifully put my long sleeve t-shirts in the storage bin at the back of the closet. I replaced them on the shelf with my tank tops. I contemplated putting up the felt hats and getting out the straw, but opps…

The winter in Central Texas rarely gets the white of the north or the brown and tan of the high plains. It is green all year round. The winter greens are dark. The ash juniper, called cedar around here, is dark green, shading to black until we have a frost…

A flock of migrating waxwings visited the hackberry tree on the east side of the house this morning. That was much to the dismay of our resident mockingbird. Earlier in the year, a flock of robins visited the tree and only a constant battle of dive bombing and squawks kept…

One of the current “hobby horses” for the far right is CRT, Critical Race Theory, actually an upper-level course in law schools across the country. Somehow, they have defined and promoted it as a course taught at all levels of school. This mis definition claims it is a way to…

As I was walking in the meadow one recent cold afternoon, I noticed an odd pattern in the dirt. At first, I suspected the print of someone’s shoe, but it was much to widely present to have been a shoe. They are tiny ditches in the layer of loose dirt…

My love of history can be traced to an act by a dedicated librarian. It was the result of my summer reading contest persistence in reading all the books in the children’s library section of the Carnegie Public Library in Laramie, Wyoming. When I ran out of books for my…

“Alexander, the conqueror of the world; Julius, invader of Rome and of the world, who was the first to unite dominance in both war and arts within a single person…would not now be remembered, without the aid of books. Towers have been torn down; cities overthrown; triumphal arches have succumbed…