Sunday Morning Desire
It’s five in the morning, and I settle into my rocking chair on the front porch.
Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer
A small-farm agrarian life, serving a convivial table.
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Twenty-One Years, by the Numbers
It has now been close to twenty-seven years, and while I might quibble and revise some of the numbers up and down, they are still a good marker of what two people can accomplish while also working full-time jobs off the farm.
Blast Furnace
There is a moment that comes every year when the heat and humidity kill all ambition on the farm.
Notes on Southern Property Rights
The land that borders Winged Elm Farm’s southernmost pasture is a parcel of about fourteen acres of scrub trees and marshy ground … and it sold this month for three times what we paid for 70 acres and the construction of a 1,500-square-foot home twenty-seven years ago.
Visiting a Farm, a how-to guide
Throwback Thursday
Ghosts in the Field
The original property lines of what we’ve called “Winged Elm Farm” for the past twenty-six years were surveyed in the classic English way of natural landmarks—from this boulder to that post, from an ancient white oak to that sycamore.
Throwback Thursday
Dealing With Crime
A Letter to Me
I haven’t written in a while, and one of the reasons dates back to last fall.
Winters Remembered
A Short Note on the Season
In the shade of a cattle shed sits a 300-gallon watering trough, its contents frozen top to bottom.
Tobacco Ruminations No. 4
I hurt as I walk up the lane, and I hurt when I sit down on the rocks to smoke my pipe.
Sixty-five in ‘25
I finished the year’s reading with a few ultraviolent but still managing to be lovely all the same Dave Robicheaux novels by James Lee Burke: “Or maybe even old compatriots in butternut brown wending their way in and out of history—gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the…
A Tennessee Christmas Remembered
I’ll end the year with another note from my book, Kayaking with Lambs. Have a Merry Christmas.
A Tale of Two Ewes
Throwback Thursday
2025: Ten Reasons I’m Thankful This Thanksgiving
The wild turkeys that wander our landscape have disappeared.
Before We Make a Roux
"When I knew my maternal grandparents, in the 1960s, they lived in a modest home off the main street.
From the Curmudgeon’s Desk
The talkative teenager
Vespers
Throwback Thursday
Possibilities
Throwback Thursday
Prime
a monastic hour