Columns

It’s Up To All Of Us

It’s over, at least for some. For others, it’s another six months of rubber chicken dinners, hand-shaking, mud-slinging and name-calling. Tuesday’s primary election in West Virginia was anything but calm, cool and collected. Some races were predictable while others gave us a few surprises. By now, you have read or heard all the vote results and know who won or lost. I applaud everyone who took the time to vote. If you didn’t, well you can redeem yourself in November. If you don’t cast a ballot, you have no right to complain about the results. I just want to make it loud ...

A Blooming Message From Mom in Heaven

My patience has paid off. It took seven years, but Mom has sent me a message from heaven. When Mom passed away in 2017, I inherited two of her many live plants. They are Christmas cactus plants that held a prominent window seat location in the dining room of my childhood home. It’s the same room where she taught us to play cards. One of my last memories of her was seeing her sitting at the dining room table, playing Solitaire, surrounded by a menagerie of plants. This room and just about every other window seat in Mom’s house held assorted living plants. Some were rather exotic ...

Think Twice?

Did you ever do something and later sit back and think “What was I thinking?” We’ve all been there, I’m sure. Maybe it was the purchase of something we felt we could not live without only to learn we really could. You know, like a pair of lime green shoes that really look like clown shoes on your feet. Anyway, let me relate such an incident that has me scratching my head decades later. Many years ago I remember a summer of constant nightly storms with lightning, thunder and rain — lots of heavy rain. One steamy summer night I was awakened not only by the thunder, but by ...

Springtime Delivers More Than Sunshine

The sights and sounds and even smells of spring are all around us now. The odor of chimney smoke is slowly being replaced by the scent of freshly cut grass. It’s a welcome homage to the new season. The drab browns and gray colors of the wooded areas around the house are quickly being replaced with a lush carpet of green. Wildflowers and weeds alike are springing up in random places. Oglebay Park is once again the backdrop for the true colors of spring as yellow daffodils and brilliant red, orange and yellow tulips have sprung up from the brown earth. Soon they will be joined by ...

Just Some ‘Feed’ For Thought

It’s just a silly chicken, I tell myself. Throw the hen some feed and move on. But then this beautiful black as coal and shiny fowl begins to follow me to my car. Okay, I tell myself, I will engage the lonely chicken for a minute or two. So I sit on my neighbor’s front porch steps and talk to her. Well that was months ago, and today I find myself more and more sitting and conversing with my feathered friend as she gobbles up the few chopped up grapes I brought to her. She has gotten to the point that she allows me to stroke her back every once and a while. I never spent much time ...

Tearing Down, Building Up

I was born and raised in Wheeling, West Virginia nearly 70 years ago. My birth took place at the now defunct and nearly demolished Ohio Valley Medical Center. That hospital, ironically, was also the site of my father’s childhood home before giving way for the hospital construction. While running errands in the Center Wheeling area on Monday — the day of the lunar eclipse — we found ourselves near the demolition work at the old OVMC. There is something about those monstrous sized machines that begs observers to stop and watch. And we did. With each swing of the massive crane ...