Sometimes it feels like there is a theme to my life, because a certain topic—or variations on it—comes up over and over again in conversations, on the radio, in something I read, maybe on a TV talk show. So lately that topic has been about healthy living, only it’s not so much focused ...

We were fishing largemouth bass on a lake in Minnesota this late October. It was a beautiful day and the thought never entered my mind that this could be the last trip of the year. Since then the weather has cooled noticeably, and there has been ice on the ponds here in north Iowa for ...

The story is told of two young brothers who decided they were old enough to swear. At bedtime one night they agreed that the next morning they would begin swearing. They even chose the cuss words they would use. At breakfast the next morning, their mother asked the oldest boy what he wanted ...

In one of the first writing classes I took as a journalism major in college we learned how to write an obituary. I don’t know if that’s still the progression of things. Maybe that’s why I read obituaries in the newspaper now. I just like to learn about how people lived, where they ...

I was at an ice-fishing Open House at a retail tackle shop recently. There some anglers there who had been looking at a long range weather forecast. According to this forecast, cold weather is headed to the upper Midwest, and these anglers were guessing that they would be on the ice in north ...

Here in Iowa we pride ourselves on being friendly and helpful and supportive of others. Some of us call it Iowa nice. Maybe it is the media that encourages us to believe that we are the good guys while the folks who live in urban areas are impolite, cold, and uncaring folks who live isolated ...