Author
“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.
At age twelve my older brother Bruce knew more about the native plants in our pasture and the birds in our windbreak than I would learn by the time I was thirty. I brought his wrath down on my head once for placing stamps of cardinals and woodpeckers, muskrats and badgers—crookedly, poorly torn, and in the wrong spaces—in his Junior Audubon Society booklet.
“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.
“We saw it go from raw prairie to a well-developed, settled condition.” That is how one settler’s descendant, writing in a family history volume, describes the transformation of Sherman County, Kansas.
Of course not everyone would agree with the cultural outlook embedded in that statement. The “raw” prairie had been sustaining human life for over ten-thousand years before our arrival.
“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.
My father, a farmer, took pride in his work, and, little sponge that I was, I took pride in him—for staying on top of things the way he did, for seizing, as he often told us a man must, the first opportune moment to ready, plant, cultivate, and harvest his fields. The markets rewarded my father’s accomplishments. His income supplied us with the essentials and then some—new cars and family vacations every few years,
“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.
Every year about this time there comes a Saturday when I begrudgingly forego plans with friends and commit myself instead to working in the yard. This year, that Saturday came last weekend. Respect for my neighbors demanded that I address the unsightly weeds and grass that had grown up in the wood chips around my shrubs.
“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.
“Your grandparents started out right over there,” Tobe Zweygardt said, pointing to a farmed hillside in the distance. It amazed me how much information Tobe, an elderly retired farmer, stored under that billed cap he wore. I knew my father had spent his early childhood in Cheyenne County, but until then hadn’t known where.
The terrain along Cherry Creek was what my father used to refer to as desert “scrub,” the kind of land I loved—all jutting boulders,
