My inheritance from my mother lay in a large grocery bag filled with twelve inch muslin squares cut from feed bags. A transfer depicting each one of the 48 state birds and flowers lay with every white square. With a bit of tenacity, I started embroidering those designs collected in…
Who grows up wanting to be a soil surveyor? What is a soil surveyor, anyway? Hugh Bennett, that’s who. A man who classifies soil types and decides the vegetation and land use patterns for certain areas of land. The exact person needed during the 1930’s in the Great Plains as…
“The Black Blizzards were fearful. A giant wall rolling toward you like a steamroller.” – Floyd Coen Learning to Live in the Desert Growing up in Oklahoma Territory in the early 1900’s, Henry Finnell learned the ways of the semi-arid land on his parents’ homestead. He graduated from the local…
Childhood memories Living in Greeley, Colorado, as a child, water conservation made perfect sense. My mother used a wringer washing machine with two tubs of rinse water. After hanging the wet clothes on the lines, she emptied the tubs by carrying buckets of the water to the strawberry bed, the…
As a child, I lived on an eighty-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin. We slopped pigs, gathered eggs, cleaned/plucked chickens, hung by our knees from the top of the windmill, and birthed calves. Nature and life intertwined as geese migrated overhead and ice storms prevented the school bus from coming. A…
In a neighborhood like Englewood on Chicago’s south side, second chances are rare. An underserved community with a food desert, Englewood residents struggle to raise children in the midst of inner city challenges. The streets are unforgiving. Gunfire is rampant. The economic pressures are relentless. But Growing Home offers a…
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