I’m just fine with X-rays when it comes to taking images of body parts, even when I sometimes have to go back and have them do it again. That has only happened two times out of several dozen, but I’d rather have to walk barefoot, 40 miles, to a hospital in Lexington for an X-ray than undergo…

“Yesterday when I was young/The taste of life was sweet upon my tongue.” So go the lyrics to an old Rod McKuen song. You can find similar ones from other artists--The Beatles, The Carpenters, Stevie Wonder . . .

I wish I was as determined to work as independently as toddlers are.

The pandemic cursing our globe also reveals the fruit of tremendous blessings produced by the private sector’s $1.7 trillion investment in the nation’s broadband networks over the last 20 years, which US Telecom dramatically asserts has brought most Americans access to high-speed internet.

A gang of robbers pulled a holdup at the train station, taking away pretty much everything they could carry.

Our vegetable garden is way past being simply productive and the best stuff hasn’t even started seriously coming in yet. I say “our garden” rather loosely and mostly because I own the property on which it’s tended but there would be no garden if my younger brother, Andy, hadn’t done all the …

Where were you on September 11, 2001? Those of us alive at that time will likely never forget where we were or what we were doing when we heard the first news reports. I recall turning on the television to witness the aftermath of what I thought was a terrible accident after the first plane …

As I write this, the tumultuous month of August draws to a close, and it seems fitting to spend a few minutes thinking about the history of women's suffrage. I'm not sure where that term actually came from, but there is no doubt that the movement contained more than its fair share of suffering.

Loretta just told me that she could not understand why anyone would want to eat garden green beans, just now-picked tomatoes, corn bread and cottage cheese for supper four days in a row, especially if said eater had numerous other choices.

You may remember the story about the two hunters who chartered a plane to fly into the Alaskan wilderness. A week later when the pilot came to pick them up, he saw that they had bagged two moose.

It’s been a few months since I last whined about my personal health issues in this column, but I’ve had several people recently asking about how I’m doing and I simply thought that a public update might be timely.

The last time I mowed my grass at my rental house I’ve lived at for the last three years was much like my first.

Dear Ketchup,

As the story goes, a fellow had been depressed for so long that he finally decided to go see a psychiatrist.

We don’t normally cook soup beans on one of the hottest days in August. In fact, I seriously doubt that we had ever cooked soup beans in August before last Saturday. One or the other of us (Loretta or I) may have ordered some in August as a side dish at Cracker Barrel because they had the AC…

It’ll be too late by the time you read this to do anything about it, but the question is what to do with over three dozen dead ripe cantaloupes when it takes you three days to eat just one? These cantaloupes, mind you, are fresher and as large or larger than any you will find in any produce …

What is normal? Is anything actually normal? Well, of course something is, I guess. But once you start to think about it, it's sort of a meaningless word.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the honor of having this column picked up by the newspaper in Somerset.

Wanting to build the self-esteem of her students, a teacher told her class: “Anyone who thinks he’s stupid, stand up.”

A few Saturdays ago, my little brother Matthew sent me a photo of a sheet of golden waffles lying on a cooling rack.

The closest thing our family ever did that came to share cropping was allowing a few relatives and neighbors to pick strawberries “on the halves.” Sometimes that got tricky when a picker deliberately tried to only pick the grade A berries in the bucket he was taking home and pick mostly stun…

Two young men from the other end of the state were flying to the big city for a visit. Before they left home, their father gave them some advice: “You watch those big city taxi drivers. They’ll rob you blind. Never pay them what they ask for. You have to haggle.”

Last week, I disposed of a dead possum that my dog had been eating, which graduated me to the status of bona fide Kentucky girl. But 2020 wasn’t finished making my world collide with rodents. Instead, it was just getting started.

“School days, school days, happy Golden Rule Days . . .” Well, that's how the song goes. A very old song (1907), but I wonder how successful schools ever were at actually teaching the Golden Rule. I mean, so that it was actually learned and carried out into the real world.

I’m guessing that it had been at least 15 years since the last time we pickled some beets. Actually, like several other misnamed preserves, the beets are not technically “pickled.” Genuine pickles go through a fermentation process that usually takes anywhere from 10 days to 3 weeks, dependin…

Spring has gone and summer will soon end,

The story is told about the teacher who gave her students a weekend assignment to sell a product and then give a report to the class on salesmanship.

A couple of weeks ago I was remarking on the unusual abundance of songbirds we’ve had here on Charlie Brown Road in 2020. Numerous readers, from far and wide across the state, have also told me that they don’t recall birds ever being as prolific as they are this year. I’ve even had similar o…

It took 15 years, but I officially became a Kentucky girl last week. This was so deigned by my friend Candice, who is from a holler (see how Kentucky I am?) in Pike County, so I trust her judgment completely.

Our society is in the midst of a massive cultural shift. According to the Barna Group, “rates of church attendance, religious affiliation, belief in God, prayer and Bible-reading have been dropping for decades. Americans’ beliefs are becoming more post-Christian and, concurrently, religious …

Connecting the dots for health, education and safety is paramount if schools across the Commonwealth are going to re-open. It would be negligent for the Governor, the Public Health Commissioner, the legislature and the Kentucky Board of Education to recommend schools re-open without school n…

The virus may have shut down much of the rest of the world, but it sure hasn’t bothered the birds on Charlie Brown Road. Maybe it’s because I’m not physically able to do much else, other than watch them, but if we’ve ever had as many song birds in our yard as we’ve had in 2020, I wasn’t payi…

If we thought that harvesting, selling and preserving nearly two acres of strawberries was some sort of practical joke related to the start of “school vacation,” imagine how we felt about taking a break from picking berries to spend the afternoon hoeing vegetables until dark.

Confederate monuments are in the crosshairs.

You may recall the old joke about the ventriloquist who was performing with his dummy on his lap. He was telling hillbilly jokes when Bubba jumped to his feet, one gallous of his old faded bibbed overalls unfastened and flapping.

By late June in the 1950s and early 60s, the strawberry patch was pretty much picked out but my mom would ask us boys to if we would run out there and see if we could still find a few for mash up for supper. If there was a single berry left in the field, she didn’t want it to go to waste.

Recently I have become aware of several conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19. Conspiracy theories are “attempts to explain events by identifying a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others.” (American Conspiracy Theories”, 32)