Cracker Barrel

Browsing through some yellowed clippings in a notebook the other day I came upon something by my old mentor, the late journalist Sydney Harris. Titled "How to Understand What's Going On," it offers a 10-question guide toward making sense of what's happening to the world today. 1....

All good gardens start in February. Fortunately, this aspect of horticulture is not only the cheapest and least strenuous, but also the grandest, in that one's dreams may grow toward greatness unfettered by such paltry things as crabgrass or an insufficiency of fertilizer. This...

Like many guys of my vintage, I grew up believing that a woman's place was in the home, keeping things tidy, cooking the meals, washing the clothes, supporting the husband and always being there for the kids. True, there were a handful of exceptions in our little town. My friend...

It started with a question from grandson Jack, age 7. "Grandpa, did you ever have a model train?" "An electric one?" "Yeah. The kind that goes round and round on a little track." "I did. But that was a long time ago." "Do you still have it?" "If I do, it's upstairs in the garage....

It happens every year, just before Christmas. Having put off the search for gifts until the number of remaining shopping days dips into the single digits, I find myself standing in line surrounded by hundreds of fellow procrastinators. Yuletide Muzak bleats forth from the stores'...

Over the eons a lot has been written about learning, almost all of it positive. Were it not for our ability to learn, life would probably seem colorless and boring. And as the famous futurist Buckminster Fuller often observed, we can't learn less. This simple fact serves to cheer...

In one of his lesser-known novels, "The Wild Palms," William Faulkner observed that all humans fitted into one of two groups. Some folks go around making messes, he said, while other folks clean them up. While no doubt an oversimplification, Faulkner's observation contains some...

Do you ever wonder why we say some of the things we do, or where they came from? This week, smack in the middle of deer season, seems the perfect time to explore the origins of phrases related to our four-legged neighbors. Why, for instance, do we call a dollar a "buck?" Doug Lennox,...

"Everything's changing too fast." "Nothing stays put." "Things are out of control." "I wish I'd been born 100 years ago. Life was better then." How many times have you heard laments like these? How many times have you made them? A hundred? A thousand? More? Ours is an age of...

A few years ago Charles Mann published a book titled "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," which forever changed our understanding of the past. Readers who plunged into that sprawling book emerged on the far side astonished at how much of what we were taught as...

Author's note: The following is a condensation of an article that appeared in Better Forests magazine titled "From Pines to Potatoes." Shawn Perich, a veteran outdoor writer and concerned north country resident, recently focused attention on the changes under way in west-central...

How much is enough? The answer depends, of course, on what you're talking about. All of us would agree that we need a sufficient amount of the basic life support items to keep us upright and able to move about.

Now that school's back in session and parents and students alike are busy putting their mental muscles back to work, it seems appropriate to compare notes with the learning experience of an earlier era. What follows was mailed to me some years ago by a loyal Echo reader, and is taken...

Boys and dogs go together like ham and eggs, and most of the guys in our gang had dogs. Jim Glendening had a cocker spaniel named Sandy. Smitty had a handsome mutt named Boots. Bruce Nelson had a little snippet of a dog named Tootsie. I don't remember if Larry Bell had a dog, but...