Columns

Throughout my life, travel has been sort of hard to come by. Growing up on a demanding dairy farm meant there was never any free time in which to squeeze a vacation.

Winding through the hills of Harrison County earlier this month, I turned onto a road and immediately eased up on the gas pedal as a colorful painted quilt block on a barnside caught my eye.

You just never know when you'll have a brush with greatness, or in my case, great fear. As near as I remember, I was cleaning a high shelf in the bathroom when there was a flash of movement, a flutter, and my momentary thought "oh, why is there a big leaf up here?" before the "leaf" became coherent enough to make a beeline (bat line?) for my hair.

(As told by Josie Steeb) I felt great picking up my repaired Escort at the garage and even better knowing that I had paid for the repairs myself.

According to my internal calendar, fall is about four months down the road yet. In reality, the fall harvest season is fast approaching.

Do you know where your thousands - and on a national scale, hundreds of millions - of federally-mandated, non-refundable checkoff dollars go? It's a question Bobby King, policy director of Minnesota's Land Stewardship Project, asked when he viewed advertisements that attacked "anti-livestock activist groups" in the state on Minneapolis' powerhouse WCCO television station earlier this year.

While reading through Good Poems for Hard Times, a collection of poetry selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, I ran across a writing by Erica Funkhouser that could have been written by one of us.

While American taxpayers await an accounting on the billions sent to the Gulf Coast to clean up Katrina's devastation, USDA already knows the tab for four emergency programs hastily designed "to further reduce stress on the grain transportation system" caused by the storm.

Man's best friend is a title that seems to fall short. Few best friends have ever blessed me with such reverence as the dogs who have walked this life with me.

Regarding the subject of etiquette, I once read that rules for social behavior don't exist to control people, but rather to make everyone feel comfortable.