Category Archives: Columns

Published pieces I’ve written, primarily in The Recorder, Greenfield, Mass.

Family A-Fare

What better way to traipse off to my annual December vacation than by telling a Thanksgiving tale – one about a Warwick hunter-gatherer family with a freezerful of healthy game-meat before the first shot of the Massachusetts shotgun deer hunting season is fired? Yes, that long passed Harvest Moon in the midnight sky smiled favorably […]

Gundog Memories

Gundogs are like valued friends, teammates and hunting buddies. You build rapport and trust, learn their strengths and weaknesses, compare and rate them against others. The joy they add to daily life is worth the care. Before I owned a gundog, we used to hunt pheasants without one as teens. It was a coordinated maneuver  […]

Swamp Bustin’

Tan and tattered, they dangle from their shoulder-straps’ bridle-leather diamond-shaped tab on a wooden clothes hanger looped over half of an old, wooden yoke’s bow screwed to the carriage-shed wall as a hook. Who put that creative shed hanger there I do not know, but there are two just like it in the stables, plus […]

This And That And The Other Thing

The stimuli were there: gray, foreboding skies and an autumn chill greeting me for my morning stroll to the mailbox. Then came a call from a friend who, in a roundabout way, recounted a recent purchase of a reasonably priced Belgium Browning Sweet 16. Now, here I sit at my customary Wednesday-morning  station — books […]

October Ain’t What It Used To Be

It was Day 6 of the 36-day pheasant season and I had not hunted or even given it much thought. Too hot. Cooler days ahead. OK, there’s no denying I’m getting old and ain’t what I once was physically. Nonetheless, I still have the enthusiasm and physical (limping) prowess to navigate punishing coverts. That said, […]

Familiar Surroundings

Apparently, word doesn’t travel quite as fast as it once did in small towns. Then again, South Deerfield ain’t as little as it used to be. We’re not talking here about 1997, when I left my hometown for Greenfield, setting my roots 714 feet from a better place called Shelburne. By then, what is known […]

Walnut Wisdom

The big black walnut across the street, naked and gray, muscular limbs flexed to the heavens, whispers through a warm west wind that pheasant season is near. I appreciate the reminder, marveling at my tall, dignified neighbor’s grace, strength and perfect form, worthy of a gilt-framed canvas. Looking across at that stately tree can stir […]

Petersham Cougar Confirmation

Although it seems like old news by now, really, it’s not that old. Plus, there’s an exciting new “breaking” element, which, frankly, is not all that surprising. First, a little background. On the morning of June 28, 2016, Petersham horse owner Anne Marie Zukowski went out to feed her 16-year-old German Hanoverian named Summit and […]

Maple Feedback

It didn’t take long for an informed reader to respond with a diagnosis for a curiosity brought to light in passing here last week. I wondered aloud why maple leaves were drying on their stems and dropping prematurely before ever reaching their yellow, orange and red fall splendor. Most perplexing to me, no dendrologist by […]

River Ritual

With crisp, radiant yellows and purples adding a colorful splash to the marshes, and presses prepared to crank out sweet fall cider, I must say it has thus far been an odd  September. Peculiar indeed. First, unseasonably cool temps, now perplexing foliage developments. Have you noticed sugar maples shedding drab-colored leaves prematurely, before they even […]

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