I don’t even remember when I became one of those garden ladies. I don’t have a ton of memories of tending to a garden when I was growing up, though Mom remembers it plenty. Given that, I don’t recall how it became part of my own DNA. We knew a guy who once told my husband that they ...
This is the time of year when Americans traditionally embark on extended journeys with their loved ones. Some of these journeys are so long that by the time they end there’s a good deal of fantasizing about leaving said loved ones at the next roadside gas station. It’s family vacation ...
In the ongoing, years-long group text between my four brothers and sister, there was a brief exchange the Saturday before Memorial Day between me, son Paul, and my next younger brother Perry. I had forwarded Perry a message from Paul, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy serving on a ...
In late 2024, my wife and I were asked by friends to accompany them to visit the White House at Christmas. The last-minute invitation came from college friends, he now being the mayor of Madison South Dakota. He had worked with the Biden White House on an infrastructure program that brought ...
NEWS The Trump administration is asking Congress for more than $11 billion in additional agricultural assistance as part of a broader emergency supplemental spending package tied to military operations involving Iran. The proposal includes roughly $10 billion in direct economic assistance for ...
We received an envelope a while ago, delivered by an official government-certified carrier pigeon. An eye-glance investigation revealed it was nothing less than the U.S. Census. It said we had to comply or face a season of wearing orange. Orange is not in my color wheel, so I got right on ...
I was recently asked to speak at a meeting of a secret society. I was surprised when they invited me as it’s widely known that I can’t keep a secret. My wife and I went to an innocuous building located in the midst of a sleepy college town. We descended a set of concrete stairs that led ...
Editor's note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series. While crop production margins have been negative and subsequently the number of farm bankruptcies has climbed, there is nowhere near the degree of financial crisis occurring that defined what the ag sector went through in the 1980s. ...
NEWS U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer says the Trump administration will soon seek public input on which Chinese imports could qualify for lower tariffs under a new U.S.-China trade framework. The agreement creates a Board of Trade to review roughly $30 billion in non-strategic goods for ...
The medicine cabinet was crusty and rusty, much like me. And like me, it’s old enough to be a museum piece. The cabinet was installed in my parents’ bathroom when it was added onto their farmhouse more than 60 years ago. I was just a tyke at the time, and flushing the toilet was ...