Will raising the legal dropout age teach troubled kids anything? Probably not.

Most of us require an extended social network to keep us mentally and morally awake, and for a laugh, too, and if these friends are people we can weave in and out of our lives without heartbreak, they are nonetheless dear. They respond, they amuse, and they sometimes shelter us in a way that shows as clear as paint that the world is full of goodness and not just evil.

It is only our own town or neighborhood that is specific enough, and someday knowable enough, to enable a capable writer’s imagination to imagine it clear and whole.

Henry County, Kentucky. Most families who celebrate Christmas have their own favorite Christmas traditions. We like to go to Bethlehem.
Bethlehem (Kentucky, six miles from us) is a place too small to have a postmaster anymore, but the Postal…

“I never saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing one another by argument.  I have seen many, on their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another.” –Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson Randolph
“Anyone who observed…

Henry County, Kentucky. Last week here we buried our 97-year-old neighbor, a woman named Thelma Chilton Moody Clark.  Until this spring she had never been sick, “and I don’t know how to do it now,” she said a few months ago. …

Ah, September.  The enervating heat of August is less, and school starts up again with all the hopefulness and energy of a new academic year.  I still feel the year begins in September.  For those of you with children, and…

Henry County, Kentucky.  When the massive dieoffs of commercial bees first became evident a little less than three years ago, what is now called Colony Collapse Disorder was national news.  These days you hear less about it, perhaps because…

Henry County, Kentucky.  If your name is your fate, what does the future hold for Rylynn Shikaela Novaleigh?
There she is in the paper, age one, wrapped in the boa her mother chose from the photographer’s prop basket, a…

Rome, Kentucky. This week my dear Cousin Kate is otherwise occupied Marie Antoinetting around that patch of pigweed and thistle she calls her garden, and has decided not to post on her usual Thursday in favor of spending her…

I must apologize to all our readers and my fellow contributors here for the intrusion of my cousin Cassie Pigeon in a recent post under my byline.
I had my extended family to a picnic on the Fourth, and my reward…

New Castle, Kentucky.  “Simplify, simplify,” said Henry David Thoreau in one of his more peaceable moments, and I repeat it through gritted teeth as I watch the layered complexity that is Mr. Obama’s solution for all the many crises he has inherited.  We…

Henry County, Ky.    Those of us foolish enough to call ourselves “conservative” are forced to admit that culturally and politically at least we live amidst less and less worth conserving.  We can and should continue to mind our own business,…

 
Henry County, Kentucky.  Every Memorial Day my husband takes our children to visit three cemeteries in our county.  We take grass from the family farm for a great-grandfather, rhubarb for a great-grandmother, peonies and roses, and whatever else is…

A few weeks ago a friend’s ten-year-old daughter came home from school, turned to her mother with a frown, and speaking low, so as to stay out of earshot of a younger sibling, asked, “Mom, what does the word ‘contraception’…

New Castle, Kentucky. We can’t talk about the economy all the time, or anyway I can’t.  Today instead I want to sing a song of the literature of place–and my refrain is, “Bred and born in a briar-patch.”
For someone who believes in…

Louisville, Ky. “Rural dwellers may have boundless tolerance for exaltations of the wonders and mysteries of the natural world, but the urban spirit begins to rebel. By the time this well-intentioned but miscalculated show drew to a close, I was…

Russell Arben Fox remembers well his thrifty grandmother, and so do I, and so do you, perhaps.  For the rest of the nation there is Amy Dacyczyn of Leeds, Maine, the founder, publisher, and primary author of The Tightwad…