I was saddened when my mother told me that JoAnn Derry had passed away. She was 90. Her obituary described her as “a firecracker with grit and determination.” Yup. That was her, all right. I met her in Sunday School at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Frederick, S.D., in 1968. I was misbehaving one day — hard to imagine, I …
This blog was posted originally on April 13, 2017, in Unheralded and reprinted in the Grand Forks Herald and The Forum of Fargo Moorhead, as our region was observing the 20th anniversary of the Red River Flood of 1997. During a massively destructive event, it was one small moment that has stayed with me. I still think about it from …
I was getting toward the end of my long walk on a typically scorching Texas morning when I approached a road construction site. I passed a Hispanic man standing in the bed of a pickup. “Amigo!” he said. I assumed he was speaking to a co-worker and I kept walking. Then he called out again. “Amigo!” When I turned, he …
As a blogger and Facebook presence, I use my forum to give my opinions but have always steered away from engaging in debate with others online, especially people I don’t know … until now. Perhaps it is because my posts and blogs are shared a lot and I get tagged in them, but in the past week, I have been …