What do you say?

Before my junior year in high school, I returned from a Boy Scout canoeing trip to discover my sister had been killed in a car crash.

Stray Thoughts: Parenthood 4

When our children are young: every time you saw them, you changed them. you lifted them and swung them around by their arms. you teach them routines so they know what to do and when. you help them brush their teeth and put the toothbrush away.

Little Pasture on the Prairie

This was a difficult week in the midst of a string of challenging months. Since having COVID in December, I haven’t fully returned to my old self, and I’m beginning to think I never will.

Parenthood 3

At one time or another, we all do this. We look through our grown children’s rooms, now sitting as stark memorials to the past, their important things undisturb and set up exactly as your children left them. These are artifacts of a childhood done well. Developmental years on curated display.

Day care needs community help

Our community is facing a crisis, and I’m not referring to the fact that we’ve run out of places to pile snow. Our working families are up against a predicament that impacts many people and businesses in the Timber Lake area. I’m referring to our Community Daycare.

Stray Thoughts: Parenthood 2

I am finally out here on my own! Out from under the watchful eye of my parents, where I can do and say anything that I want, whenever and wherever I want. But it sure was nice having my favorite meals prepared for me that I didn’t have to think about or pay for, or cook, or clean up after.

It’s healthy to talk about bodily functions

One summer during my college years, another premed student and I got a job at the Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis, as nurses’ aides. At that time, the guys were called orderlies, but we were part of the nursing department.

Openness in government takes some work

This week is Sunshine Week – a national observance of the importance of open government and the public’s right to know. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said more than a century ago: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

Fearing death can cause suffering

When in life does one come to confront the tough truth that each of us will eventually die? In my years as an internist caring for young and old alike, some people understand this early, and some people never get it. In denying death, we intensify our fear of it.

Little Pasture on the Prairie

Barn cat politics are complicated. They are full of alliances, double-crossing, and violent overthrows. My personal introduction to all this began my first summer on the ranch when a young beauty named Roxy arrived without fanfare to our barn.