Splash was up early. The last thing we caught from the news storm of Sunday was an ultimatum from the Kremlin- we used to say things like that- about what had been a pretty nice town on the Black Sea in Ukraine. It had been surrounded by some invading army, and as night settled in […]

Editor’s Note: This popped up in a search for something else. It was written onboard USS Midway, then home-ported in Yokosuka, Japan, and an account of an ancient military exercise in the height of the Cold War. Four US Marines were just lost in Norway in something similar in these strange times of a new […]

“You may as well talk about the cycles of the sky!” That is how our assigned Attorney greeted the weekend. We had been talking about the waxing gibbous Moon that under clearing skies the bathed Refuge Farm in silver-colored light sharp enough to cast shadows. She stood up, almost flounced in emotion and went to […]

The crew was of mixed demeanor this morning. Splash was unusually subdued, perhaps still working off the celebration recently passed. Melissa looked radiant and wore a long flowing dress of practical construction, themed in a sort of dark fabric with flashes of bright green like the jungles in which she had once lived. Loma and […]

(These are the Chaplains of the Civil War Union Army’s Irish Brigade. It is an image courtesy of Alexander Gardner through the Library of Congress). This is a special day. No, I am not referring to the global tensions that could slide us all abruptly sideways into personal and international horrors It is a collective […]

Goodness gracious. There is commotion at The Farm this morning. A crew- all Hispanic, we think- but certainly with the working language being Española- is laboring at vast cost to clean up the debris of the savage January season that brought down trees and branches all over the sprawling property lines. The Chairman is apparently […]

Marlow is off-site, but he started off discussion with a rumination received late yesterday about conditions today. He talked about the change of life many of us call “retiring.” It hit the group standing around the Fire Ring with half-drunk coffee and an occasional puff of gray Marlboro smoke for those who still do. It […]

You could hear the muttering early on a spectacular clear morning in Virginia’s Piedmont. You already know what it sounded like as people looked at clocks, mystified that an hour of restful rejuvenating sleep had been sacrificed to the people in Richmond and Washington who seem to still be living in some old time of […]

(Alaric, king of the Visigoths) “Saturday, damn! What fun!” That was Splash, who walked up the path from the Fire Ring to the Bunk House, entering by the side door and into the warmth provided by the roaring fire in the wood stove in the corner. His parka was not dusted with snow, which would […]

So, Buck is a little different than the rest of the long-term Writer’s Section. He thinks we are funny artifacts of old conflicts. We view him as a breath of fresh air in his ability to tell us what going on in those Faculty Lounges that seem to be manufacturing a whole new history, economic […]