Backyard Meanderings

This book is a collection of smaller pieces I’ve written through the years and, for the most part, have been published as columns in the Community Spirit newspaper in Amherst, Wisconsin, and in the Elbert County News in Castle Rock, Colorado. Some were just floating around on my hard drive, lost to the world of “literature” only to be resurrected for this effort.
All of them have been “revved up” a touch, meaning embellished and decorated in a meaningful fashion to make them more reflective of my actual state of mind, which by some accounts isn’t so much a state but more a county. They’ve also been professionally edited by Susan Luton, who tidied things up but didn’t change the content, thus making it possible for her to claim a certain plausible deniability in the event of legal challenges to my veracity.
While this introduction seems to make light of my seriousness, the content of the pieces can, at times, be serious, as I do have opinions—but, admittedly, there is a humorous tone I can’t seem to avoid. In reality, life is serious. I do want to believe that reveling in the merits and wonderment of the simpler things in life may be both fulfilling and entertaining, possibly rewarding in a genuinely spiritual way. These pieces reflect my observations of many down-to-earth aspects of rural life. I’m a downsized person believing these day-to-day observations are more important now than ever, since the complexities of life are starting to have rather unpleasant repercussions on the fate of the finite earth.
I don’t want to be a preacher, just an observer. But it’s possible that an individual who reads this written offering may think I have one oar out of the water, or one bee short of a swarm, maybe not enough large turnips to make a reasonable famine garden. Yet that is my intention, as sanity appears rather useless at this point. So there.