The circus continues with wild abandon just up the road from Refuge Farm. Peace may be breaking out in the Middle East as the UAE makes nice with Israel. The echoes of all of the global events bounce off the unremitting and insistent downpour of rain. It is pretty neat. Earlier in the week, former […]

OK- I found the concluding line to the couplet that ends Uncle Pat’s obituary. I mentioned that it was more work than usual, but after some false starts, I was eventually able to find the publication in which it originally appeared. It was a curious thing, one I should have focused on at the front […]

(Artist Jerry McWilliams painted the scene above from the battle of Raymond, MS, in 1863. The figure on horseback is Colonel Randall McGavock, who was mortally wounded by Union fire and fell into Pat’s arms. He is depicted at the lower left. The great Rebecca Blackwell Drake, a former State Department player was instrumental in […]

The storms seem to have passed, and there are spurts of sunshine on a pleasant Virginia day. It would have been Dad’s 97th birthday today. Maybe better phrased, it is still his birthday, and I remember it that way. I had some plan to continue the story of Great Great Uncle Pat’s wild ride through […]

This has been a cyclone of a year, and one in which taking stock has been a key activity amid the mass confusion. I am trying to order my affairs, sell my hot rod truck, and lessen the impact on the kids when they hav to deal with the mounds of paper and old wood. […]

What a splendid week we have had, so far, close to the shores of the majestic gray-and-brown Potomac as the tropical storm with the unpronounceable name swept up the coast. We were just far enough that only the rains came to us, though millions bore a more difficult brunt of the storm. We had no […]