I want to honor a truly special person I had the pleasure of getting to know a few years ago. Though this is a personal sentiment, I will extrapolate some spiritual meaning. Please indulge me. The first time I met this girl, she and I were in the fourth grade…

An ode to insects Face mites! I have the strangest conversations with my 5-year-old son. One of the latest involved face mites. I’m not even sure how it happened, but one morning we woke up and (after talking about banana sandwiches) started talking about face mites, which are tiny parasitic…

What is love? No, not the song by Haddaway. But, really. I want to know what love is. No, not the song by Foreigner. You may ask, “What’s love got to do with it?” No, not the song by Tina Turner. Oh, stop, Joshua. People use the word “love” casually…

Little kids seem to go through phases. I don’t know much about phases little girls go through, since I don’t have a girl, but I’m pretty sure one of the girl phases involves unicorns. Little boys, on the other hand, I know. Although I don’t remember much about my childhood…

It was Thanksgiving Day, a light snow falling, my belly still bursting and with uncertainty of what I might find filling in my mind. My 5-year-old son and I were walking a dirt road of unknown length into what used to be the town of Spokane, S.D., near Custer State…

Wintering in the Black Hills True, it’s still technically autumn. But we all know it’s been winter in the Black Hills since, um, September. We can complain about the weather, or we can do something about it! Hmm. OK, maybe we can’t do anything about it. A wise man once…

Autumn. It is a season of contradictions. On one hand, it is the harvest season; it is fullness and bountiful goodness, a reward for hard labor. On the other hand, once the world has reached full ripeness, there is nothing left but rot. The leaves fall, the pumpkins cave in…

And how divorce freed me After my divorce was finalized more than a year and a half ago, and after having sold my house more than a year ago and after moving into a good-sized apartment and then to a much smaller apartment (whew), I was faced with the prospect…

Or, when creative folks run out of ideas. Maybe it’s the endless distractions that come with summertime — like the flies buzzing around my head and the front door open to all sorts of vehicular and pedestrian sounds — but sometimes it’s hard to think of what to write for…