This rain is heavier now, the sky darker. Oily storm drains fill as the rainwater runs down old French mansard roofs...

Breakfast, dinner, supper. Brunch was a foreign thing that yuppies had while wearing polo shirts with white slacks or big, flappy sweaters..

It wasn't my first trip to the orchard. My mom and I would visit often, picking our way through the bags of grade A fruit and fancy...

Culture is a weird word, a word denoting something high brow, something with snooty people and fine pearls.

The summer morning sun is bright and hazy. There's fog in the North valley. From somewhere comes the smell of sausage gravy and maybe...

The Ray House is a sentinel, watchful, dutiful restored home on the eastern edge of the battlefield.

The blackberries are sweet, juicy. You need the right amount of water in the soil at the right time to plump the berries...

The worn-out hay wagon creaked beneath the weight of too many bales as the tractor pulled over one-too-many ruts in the field.

Above, twilight replaces blue sky and cheerful white cloud. Above, now are stars. Above, now is the unknown.

Cheap motel air conditioning is smelling something like bleach and that inexpressibly comfortable musty smell motels used to have.

Where the Ozarks are, where they really are, is always up for argument by the pedantic and jealous.

There is magic in the mountains. Magic at the end of day. And magic when souls come together.

The Bumper Cars took up a lot of space mid-park, marking the edge to the little kid rides where I would wait, still holding my mom's hand...

I am driving and will be driving most of the day. Roads are funny things, connecting things, delivering things, crisscrossing things...

A flock of pigeons startle, flapping and cooing far up and away. Somewhere but not far off, the sound of country music.

Nights of cold slowed the growth, holding back the forest until it burgeoned seemingly all at once

Much like the weather, I too, was stuck in a strange limbo then, somewhere between man and boy and not knowing quite what to do with either.

Eclipses are, apparently, not uncommon things over the globe...

The dirt road winds from the hill's southern edge, slowly traversing, serpentine, rising higher and higher...