Home Beckons

Last week, I drove by farmland along the Susquehanna River, thinking about how beautiful the newly plowed rock-free dirt looked. Our own farmland on Sugar Hill was a different story. I remember an every-spring requirement – picking rocks. After the fields were plowed, my brother or I drove the tractor and wagon around the fields, […]

“Yuck, I got my hair stuck in it again!” I looked back and saw the yellow fly sticker swinging back and forth from the middle of the kitchen ceiling with the dead and mostly dead black flies stuck, unable to free themselves. I gingerly felt my hair to be sure none were there and reminded […]

Aunt Claire and Uncle Ern Hunsinger lived out the Back Road in the 1950s, first house on the left if you’re headed to Sugar Hill from Hollenback. Aunt Claire, like my grandfather, had red hair, and I would sit on her lap on their front porch to count the freckles on her arms. My mother […]

.Out the back road. Down by the swamp. Over along the lane. Up behind the house. Across the apple orchard. Each of these phrases conjures up memories from our Sugar Hill farm when I was young in the !950s and ’60s. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what happened down below the barn. A small stream, […]

I walk through Clark Furniture in Wysox, on a mission to find a recliner, but am sidetracked by shiny new dining room tables. Their highly polished surfaces enhance the distinctive and rich wood grains of oak, maple, hickory, and walnut. For a moment, I’m tempted, but instead return to my recliner search and spend the […]

The barn is empty now and the cows exist only in my memories, but oh my, what good memories they are …   “It’s time to go get the cows,” my mother said, reminding my brother Lanny and me to get moving as she set the supper table. We grumbled a bit, but out the door […]

Bob Pond passed away on September 10th, age 93. I read his obituary and felt a surprising sense of loss for a man who I hadn’t seen since the mid-sixties and who I barely knew at all. The write up said that he had worked for 44 years for Northeastern Breeders Association, now Sire Power, […]

A year ago today, I sat on my father’s porch on Sugar Hill for two hours, content after a noontime meal of grilled hot dogs, Campbell’s baked beans, and macaroni salad from Connie’s Market. He liked to cook for me, and I always enjoyed the step-back-in-time warmth of eating off the well-worn melmac plates of […]

Image by roboppy I thought of my great-Aunt Belle the other day while frying Spam. She spent all of her long life in the northeastern hills of Pennsylvania busily cooking, gardening, teaching, living. Starting when I was about six and continuing for the next seven years, I made an almost daily trek the half-mile to […]

  My eyes shift quickly to the left side of the road as I round the sharp curve, drawn to a boy dressed in hot orange, standing in stark contrast to the dull December browns of the Pennsylvania fields. Three more men flash by my window at sixty-yard intervals, each in orange garb and with […]