These Buff Orpington chickens have had a long and happy life, and have given us many an egg for our breakfasts. One day soon they will also give us their bodies to become soup, just like the chicken I had in my soup not one hour ago. (That’s how it is, if you eat meat. …

Remember that famous painting by Norman Rockwell showing the showing the family seated at the Thanksgiving table and everybody’s smiling and the grandma’s down at the end setting on a turkey and the grandpa is standing beside her like a patriarch? Well this is our family yesterday. Only in this case the patriarch is standing …

Well, it’s not Thanksgiving yet, but I’m giving thanks that there’s snow. I took this picture out of our bedroom window this morning, and it’s been snowing all day out there. Yay! I love the snow. It’s a mystery to me why so many people who live up here complain about the snow. It’s like …

When the cold weather hit a few weeks back, Jess was forced to pick all of her tomatoes, even though few of them were ripe. The adolescent fruit* huddled in the mud room for a few weeks, huddled together in boxes and buckets, awaiting their transition from green to red. Then they started all turning …

I think I wrote before about how we put this computer desk in the corner of the dining room because we don’t have any other place to put it. Well, it works handsomely. We got this used machine off of Craigslist and it works pretty well.* Um, yes, I wrote about it here. Jess decided …

…so to speak. I mean it as a metaphor for an approaching storm; in this case, the heavy, silent storms of winter. This is Wanderer’s Peak as seen from our living room last week. We’re happy to see the snow settling down its flanks. Seetheca, the little mountain in the foreground, has a cap of …

I’m a big believer in global warming. It happens every year, and around here we call it “summer.” This year, though, “summer” stumbled on its appearance. The climate didn’t warm up all that much, though it did rain a lot. Our carrots, beans, and lettuce loved it. Our tomatoes and squash? Not so much. The …

Here you have it, the John Denver song in real life, but exceptin’ we don’t live in West Virginia. This is the country road that takes me home every night. Our driveway is about three quarters of a mile up ahead. Except for hunting season (right now), our road is pretty quiet. Because this road …

Recently I wrote an article for a local magazine about how I take our kids into the local wilderness for hikes, Jeep jaunts, and backpacking trips. The article detailed places readers could take their own kids, but its focus was really about spending time with kids. One accurate measure of our character is how we …

As Dexter approached 200,000 miles, I kept a close eye on his odometer so that I could pull over and snap a picture just at the momentous moment. Unfortunately I was completely inattentive at the time, and that rare alignment of the Five Zeros came and went while I buzzed along my World’s Prettiest Commute, …