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The Day Grandma Swore Off Eggs
What began as a simple rural experiment on the old Joseph Compher Farm quickly became a chaotic lesson in chickens, honeybees, and country life. Mail-order chicks arrived screaming at the post office, bees…
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The Driveway Cure
One winter evening during the Christmas holidays, I looked out my grandparents’ living room window and saw my grandfather sitting alone in his car in the driveway. The engine was running. The windows…
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The Crow’s Nest Walkabout
This story was passed down by my father, who had no problem in relating humorous tales about himself. In the mid-1930s, most residents of Shaw Mines did not own automobiles. My father was…
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The Day Grandma Became a Flyboy
In the 1980s, three generations of my family piled into the car for a day at the Flying Circus Airshow in Bealeton, Virginia. What started with popcorn, biplanes, and a WWII pilot turned…
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Peaches and Pressure
Long before she became involved in a Virginia winery, a fifteen-year-old girl in a Southern Maryland trailer park attempted to make peach wine using decorative liquor decanters, July Elberta peaches, and a dangerously…
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Hog Days Explosion
I was visiting my grandparents one weekend many years ago. My grandfather asked if I wanted to take a walk and see the place where he was born. I was amazed to learn…
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The Great Dynamite Caper & Peach Wine Debacle
Walt & I Were Up Behind the Mines I blame the whole thing on my friend Walt. Not because he was the one who found the dynamite, though he was. And not because…
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A Kitchen Full of Starlings
Christmas Family Gathering A Christmas family gathering in a large household is something between a celebration and a carefully managed storm. Every year, Christmas dinner at my grandparents’ house in Rixeyville, Virginia brought…
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Hong Kong Flu and the Bean Sprout
It was September 1968, and my cousins and I were spending time at our grandparents’ farm in Rixeyville, Virginia. At twilight, we raced around the backyard playing Tag, Red Light/Green Light, and Hide…
Writing that's Rooted in Truth, Memory and Myth
