Can you remember when you first learned about sex, a word barely whispered when I was younger. Quite often, we get our first knowledge from other children who seemed all grown up even though they might be only a year or two older. Then it was usually more misinformation than anything useful.

With uncertainty all around us, maybe we are needing a diversion, how about a scene with a young girl who is certain she knows exactly how some things work. I thought today that I would give you a snippet from a much longer work that I wrote. It is the story of a young girl, Patty. The setting is rural West Virginia in my mythical Timber County. The year is circa 1959, and Patty is visiting her cousin in Clarksburg, an actual town in West Virginia.

I allude, of course, to several happenings and people that appear in earlier chapters, but here is the part about Sex [mis]Education.

Of course I hold the copyright and all rights reserved. 

This one is for Kim. Continue reading Sex Education? →

I had intended to write a very philosophical post about Easter, resurrection, and what the ideas of spring rebirth could mean to us today, other than the obvious religious ones. It just wasn’t coming together, so I looked at blog post suggestions from several websites. I didn’t get any specific ideas there, but while doing it an old favorite poem come to mind. So, I shall write about that. After all, we do need a bit of frivol in this unfrivolous time.

When I was very young, I had a swing which was a thick rope with a board seat hung from a limb of a black walnut tree in the front yard. I loved that swing. I could sit there for long times, singing to myself and making up stories with my imaginary playmates. I knew the “friends” weren’t real, but I enjoyed them. It was there that I began developing the imagination that has served me well over the years.

Continue reading I Am a Real Swinger →

There are some of us who feel like whoever is writing the big story of the universe has put us in the wrong chapter. We think we know just the way things should be and how to get everything to come right, but it doesn’t always work according to our plan. However, sometimes, if we manage to recognize it, we see what we get is better than we could have imagined. Some stay put and have a better outcome than if they had left. Others have to go looking for their personal paragraph in the correct chapter. That is the stuff of the story I want to share with you this time. 

The Anchoress of Timber County

Wilburta Jenkins was an odd one, and she would have been odd in any group here in Timber County. Some folks thought she put on airs. “Gettin’ above herself,” they said. She wasn’t like all the other girls around here. She didn’t take to cleaning and cooking like other girls did. Her mother bought her a Little Homemaker set when she was five or so. You know, one of them sets with a little broom, kid size, and a dustpan—things like that. Well, Wilburta didn’t go around pretend cleaning like her mother expected. Wilburta left it all to lie outside until it rusted, and her mother had to throw it away. Wilburta preferred to sit under an old gnarled walnut tree in the front yard. She’d set there for all time, just looking at the clouds and the leaves and sometimes talking to a raggedy doll that she kept with her.

Continue reading Thwarted Plan? →