No products in the cart.
Blog Archives
Fences
One morning in 1998, while I was out in the yard irrigating the lawn, I heard, then saw, a couple of loose boards on the back fence begin to rattle and shake.
It worried me for a moment, because I thought it might have been our newest family member, Niki the cat, who was outside with me and who we hope can be taught to stay in our yard. However, Niki was occupied for the moment with her exploration of the raspberry patch, so I called out toward the moving fence, “Somebody there?”
“Just me,” returned a male voice, and the boards parted to reveal a friendly face I didn’t recall having seen before.
The gray-haired gentleman who belonged to the face didn’t introduce himself, nor did I. We each knew who the other was. He and his wife had lived in the house beyond that fence—a house no more than eighty feet from ours—for a number of years before my wife and I moved to Caldwell in 1980, yet the truth is that my neighbor and I had never met.
Imagine that: living eighty feet away from someone for nearly eighteen years and never having seen him. I suppose if the boards hadn’t come loose because of errant irrigation water having rotted out a two-by-four along the fence’s base, it could easily have been another eighteen years.
We stood talking to each other through the gap for a few minutes, agreed to “get together sometime soon” to do a little fence mending, and then let the boards close again, separating us and our yards. Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Desperately Seeking Sand
When we moved into our present home in Caldwell in 1980, a nice brick sidewalk led from the front step to the driveway.
Besides allowing people to come to the front door without having to walk on the lawn, it provided a barrier to the water we used for irrigating the lawn once a week during the summer. Without it, we would have had regular floods in our garage. We had enough as it was.
Even back then, grass from the lawn had begun to spread into the cracks between the bricks, and before too many years had passed, the only clue to the existence of the brick walk was a slight elevation in the lawn on that side of the yard. I felt there was no harm in this. Folks could still get to the front door via the sidewalk next to the house. The only drawback was the weeds. Those cracks between the bricks, which allowed the lawn to invade, seemed ideally suited to the roots of dandelions and other such plants, and digging them out was next to impossible. The best I could do was to break the plants off at the surface, and this merely reinforced the vitality of their roots.The only solution to the problem appeared to be to tear out all the bricks, dig out the offending plants, and re-make the walk.
As one who dislikes rushing into things—the house might burn down, for example, and then there’d be no need for the walk—I waited until a couple of years ago to begin that cleaning-out process. It wasn’t a particularly hard job. In fact, it was somewhat interesting to see how the various types of vegetation had adapted themselves over, around, into, and under the bricks. I even discovered a couple of quarters long since lost in the cracks, and this gave me the excuse to take a break of several hours while I combed the yard with my metal detector, looking for more. I didn’t find any.
Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
What’s Your Label?
Flexitarian is not my new yoga teacher. The term, I’m told, is for someone whose diet is principally plant-based but who will eat the occasional steak when certain people aren’t watching.
In Mr. Hinckley’s seventh-grade science class at O.E. Bell Junior High School, we called such animals “omnivores.” And unless you insist I exclude Bobby, who ate mostly glue paste, the entire class ate pretty much everything. We didn’t have separate school lunch menus for the vegetarians, vegans, and meat eaters. I suspect we didn’t see the need. We just ate what we wanted to eat and traded the rest for pudding. But we’re getting more sophisticated, requiring, for reasons I’m not sophisticated enough to understand, more and more labels.
I stopped at a convenience store in Idaho Falls yesterday looking for some glue paste. The cashier looked at me, turned to her co-worker and said, “Let’s ask him. He looks smart, like a doctor or a teacher.” I beamed at the compliment and looked about to see who might have been privy to my advancement in status.
Admittedly, I was dressed differently—in my collared shirt and pair of pants—than the other customers. Little did the cashier know, despite the fact I wasn’t wearing pajamas like the rest of her customers, I was merely a “recovering attorney.” Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Thoroughly Lost in the Moment
I attended my first yoga class. I know, you’re asking what I’ve been doing with my life until now. I can’t answer that. But there I was, a first time yogi.
Apparently there are all types of yoga. There’s yoga for runners and yoga for lovers. There’s probably yoga for Idaho history lovers. I know there’s yoga to learn to meditate, to find a union with one’s inner soul and the universe.
So, I began thinking, how about yoga for those who want to be able to clip their toenails without herniating a disk? I suppose a path to higher consciousness wouldn’t hurt —if it comes with the package. Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
It Came From the Deep
When I was in high school, my friend Hank and I used to go the Boise YMCA occasionally to use the pool. Hank was a talented diver and spent his afternoons practicing new dives while I stuck to cannonballs and belly flops. Trouble always seemed to follow Hank. On more than one occasion he cracked his head open with his own knee while doing back flips into the pool, forcing me to take him to the emergency room. One day, however, Hank managed to dive without incident, so after our swim we decided to take a whirlpool.
Hank always bragged that he could hold his breath longer than I could, so we decided to have a breath-holding contest. I went first. After just a minute I had to come up for air. Then it was Hank’s turn. He took a huge inhalation then plunged beneath the foamy surface of the water, disappearing completely. I sat at the edge of the pool watching the clock.
Thirty seconds…forty…a minute… The bubbles bubbled, but Hank did not surface. A minute twenty… a minute thirty… still, no Hank. Continue reading
Tricks of the Trade
It was my wife’s response to a completely innocent question that got me to thinking about writing this, so blame her.
“When can I go fishing again?” I asked as I unloaded my gear after returning from my latest three-day excursion to the Lochsa River.
“Why on Earth do you think you need to go again? You’ve already learned everything there is to know about fishing. Instead, you should be mowing the lawn and fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom sink and—”
If there’s anything I have learned in the past almost-sixty years, it’s how to tune her out when she begins talking like that. The more I thought about her answer, though, the more I returned to her statement that I know everything about fishing. Of course I don’t. Who does? But I do believe that I’ve gained more than a little bit of information about the sport in the past seventy-five years. I expect to be at it for another twenty-five or thirty years, too, but this might be a good time to jot down some of what I’ve learned. So here, for the first time in print, are a few of my tricks of the trade.
A major problem is knowing where to start, of course. Another will be knowing when to stop. I won’t describe how I became involved with fishing. For one thing, the first fish I ever caught was purely an accident (which describes a large percentage of what I’ve caught since then, as well), and because accidents can’t be planned, the details aren’t important.
Nor will I spell out precisely how to choose rods and reels and lines and lures, and how to read water and tie flies and so on. Those are the subjects of umpteen zillion books and videos and TV programs intended for folks at the two extremes of the fishing spectrum: those who don’t know which end of the long stick to tie the string to, and those who would bypass a fishing safari to Chile or New Zealand in favor of a month-long workshop on tying Royal Coachman flies on #38 hooks.
So I guess I’ll have to zero in on the subtler things that make me the guy that people point at and say, “See that guy in the orange hat? Somebody told me once that he’s a pretty good fisherman.” (I started that rumor many years ago, and it really caught on.) Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Locked Out!
As my car door shut, I suddenly thought: is this a mistake? It was.
The door was locked, my keys were sitting on the dash, and the spare key was in my wallet, which was safely in a pocket on my fishing vest, also locked in my SUV.
The mid-summer sun had set a while ago in Idaho’s high desert, and I was clad in shorts and a T-shirt. Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Messing Around
“Why do you have the bucket in the house?”
For fifteen minutes or so, my wife had been home from work here in Caldwell and was checking the TV to make sure her favorite soap had been taped.
Since I was in the family room and out of her sight, she hadn’t paid any attention to what I was doing until I kicked that darned metal bucket.
“Just messing around,” I replied, impressed that she’d recognized the sound.
She hit the mute button on the remote. “Why are you always ‘messing around’?” she asked. “Don’t you ever have anything constructive to do?”
“I did all the things you had on the list,” I responded.
“My goodness,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me that you finally put both of those boxes up in the attic and carried out the trash? And it only took you six hours? That may be something of a record.”
“I do my best,” I replied modestly.
“Did you empty the dishwasher?”
“It wasn’t on the list.”
“Why do I have to put things like that on a list?” she asked.
“I’ve got other things on my mind,” I replied. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do unless it’s on a list.”
“What ‘other things’ did you have on your mind today that were so important?”
“Squirrels,” I said. Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Buggy Ride
Here’s the scene: the wife and I, who have been married fifty years and one day, are riding around the Sun Valley area where we honeymooned, taking in the sights and reminiscing.
We drive up a bumpy and very dusty road—did I mention that my wife had spent a couple of hours washing and waxing the car before we left home?—to check out one of the spots we’d visited so long ago. When we get hungry, we stop in the shade of some pine trees to eat a magnificent picnic lunch. (Okay, not so magnificent, just a can of fake potato chips, two drumsticks from the deli at the local supermarket, some tepid bottled water and a nearly-ripe peach from Honduras or somewhere.) As we eat, we wander around looking at flowers and butterflies.
That repast finished, we drive back down to the highway, adding a couple more pounds of dust to the car, and turn west toward Galena Summit, where we had gathered some cool-looking rocks on our honeymoon. We come to a straight stretch where I can test out the new—okay, used—car that I’d bought the missus as an anniversary gift. I step on the gas and get the speedometer up almost to the forty mark when all of a sudden there’s a scream that causes every hair on my body to stand out straight. Continue reading
This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options.
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
Register & Purchase Purchase Only
