I have a long history with the sour cherry. Here is some of it.

Wendell Berry turns his attention toward an intentional spill in Kentucky.

Down in West Texas there is a one-armed cotton farmer named Cliff Etheredge who has turned the sirocco that blows through his part of the country into an asset—and not just for himself, but for hundreds of his neighbors.

Some scientific arguments on energy use are based on data that do not take enough factors into account

Making the case for nuclear power. Since everyone else is.

Since the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) has been discussed on this site by Jerry Salyer and Susan McWilliams, I want to mention that last month the program (after a $120+ million investment) was pulled by the USDA.  It has been…

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…