Knee Deep

As smoke trails rise above the fire pits in the Fall, neighborhood used to be filled not only with lit pumpkins but raked leaf piles burning iin the street. Our family had another take of fire, and one that involved The Zoysia, the super-grass of all lawn grasses.

You've got your Lone Ranger Suit on and headed through the last vestiges of the neighbors innocent begonias, greaniums and zinnias that have blossomed through another glorious summer. The flowers bend over, leaning towards the sound of sinister organ music down at the neighbor's house. It's a pale Halloween night, and their fate is hanging on the ominous arrival of Frost Itself.

Some things never change in spite of what the world is doing out there in the wild. Wars, like the one in the Middle East, will unfold before our eyes as landscapes are bulldozed with violence. Is it really survival of the fittest or is there some fresh air that can breathe new life into our wilderness hike?

Poems take license to transcend those kinds of endearing moments, to use our language in ways that our prose is not well suited. How do you write about your experiences such that you feel your grandfather standing next to you, or you see yourself playing Kick-the-Can in the front yard again? A poem might do that. They are fragments and flashes of a larger history we are trying to put together, sti...

What we call safety is only another name for holding onto what's close. Our pond ecosystem is constantly changing, and the changes are what makes the pond a steady habitat for the frogs living there. Sometimes, we work so hard at being safe and knowing the future, we trade in a kind of safety for the very pond we need for our survival. Our leap of faith isn't too far off from that of our aquatic f...

They say you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family. A lot of people have left me out of either category because, admittedly, I don't care for sushi. I just can't acquire a taste for the stuff. Is there some ancient wisdom inside each circle, like rings in a tree that foretold the day each one of us would meet our destiny? Is there something medicinal in that sticky-ish texture,...

Neither my mother or my father were the screaming types around our house when I grew up. They had cause to be, as we kids were handfuls. Like all children we took our parents to the bursting point at times, and their faces turned into a likeness of Edvard Munch' masterpiece, "The Scream." Could we all be reflections of our parents silent anxieties? Or could it be that we are the masterpieces that...

We've now made the plunge into the world of the flat screen television. My wife and I are two decades behind everyone else and are lost and alone against the backdrop of something too slick to grab onto, too technical for us to fathom. No longer do we have that warm and fuzzy feeling like in days of old when our television set was our wonderland and the most important object in the room. Thank goo...

Giving compliments is one of those skills that don't come that natural to us as adults. We like to get them of course, but giving them out takes a little practice. Turns out, kids also have to be taught how to divvy out the accolades, and it was an important lesson our grandson Cash was learning as a first grader this year. In addition, when he found out that rewards were involved in giving ou...

This episode is the first of our second year of Knee Deep together, and we'll be putting our toes in the water with more enticing, if not oddball stories from here and yon. We pick up this new season touching base with Sumatra Sammy, a toy surfer who we thought was lost at sea. His sojourn into the wild sparked a memory of a wild ride I had of my own, back when bathrooms were not as kid friend...

You've heard the saying, "wherever you go, there you are." Our surfer toy, Sammy, was the true embodiment of that sentiment, returning to us on shore time after time as we winged him out to sea. Surfer's are a funny lot though, part sailor, part philosopher, and all in. Our toy reminded us of their true mantra, the one they surf and live by: "Wherever you surf, like man, keep surfin'!"

It's a gorgeous day out, there isn't a cloud in the sky, kids are out of school, the pools are open and I've got a a summer cold. Rude. But...I'm finding some good in the misery of stuffiness, and a house of Kleenex droppings. My voice is different, lower, and commands a certain level of vocal respect, even when I'm miserable.

A child cries out in the night for her parents. She has heard something under her bed, a monster that is scaring her. With assurance, the grown up calms her fears and she goes soundly back to sleep. We have our monsters too, ones that can be sung to sleep with a reassuring lullaby of love. The rats in the rat race aren't winning this one...

The truth is, I don't know how to act on vacation. While HR hasn't done my background check yet, I may get promoted at this resort from guest to Towel Folder. It doesn't come with a benefit package but I do get to keep those cool seahorse soaps they stock the room with. Am I vacationing or working here? I'm not sure, but tomorrow I've been invited to eat in the employee break room.

You are setting foot on Planet Eyeball, and immediately attacked by the dreaded Sudsy Slime! Never-before-seen creatures are at foot, and overhead, starships scour the land. They are trying to steal our fun and transport us to the alien land of Real, but we have a secret weapon...

This past week we paid our last respects to one of the greatest songwriters of our times, Gordon Lightfoot. He died in his Canadian homeland at the age of eighty-four. Timeless as his songs are, his talent for songwriting brightened our days and gave us a tune to whistle all day long.

Well, baseball, turns out, is a lot like love. You can't hide anything when you're playing the field and trying to make a catch. Excuses and begging won't help, neither will cheating or bragging. God's long finger of justice pointed me straight up, where the clouds broke open and my baseball fog lifted, and I got the answers I needed.

With a C in science keeping me home afte school, my only hope was catching one of Mr. Dadburny's pop-ups at recess, flies that were hit so high they disppeared into the sun. I thought maybe there would be a science formula for catching a baseball, and when I went looking for it, my answers came both on and off the field.

I couldn't wait for the ground to dry up and head out to the baseball field first thing in the Spring. Spitting on our hands, the chatter at the plate and equipment strewn behind the backstop. I relished the season of all that – except this Spring I couldn't play. I got a dadburned C in science, and I was out at home, quarantined to study until I could get my grade up. But just because I was on th...

It is always interesting to ask a Christian about their salvation story, especially this time of year. There is never one of those stories that is boring, and often they begin along a dark path with twists and turns with little assurance that there is any light at the other end. Along the way, someone likened the journey to walking through a dark tunnel that begins black and dingy, but ends with.....

Some people find the call of the mourning dove sorrowful, perhaps because its low and tender tone. I am just waking up myself, allowing my thoughts from the night to pivot into those of the new day. The waking hour is one that adjusts slowly to a new field of vision, and doves come in gently.

Enter Maude and Claude, a cute little mallard couple that waddles across our driveway, like they do every year, and invited themselves to be our pond Airbnb guests. We aren’t that great with uninvited boarders, but we love to see this couple flap in and make an uncoordinated landing near our back porch. Really though, they stop because they like our company. They are part of our family, our people...

Our life lessons are here and gone each day, but sometimes they hit pay dirt and register deeper in our consciousness. I saw one of those snippets come to life recently at the Greatest Arabian Horse Show, a competition at a horse arena near Phoenix, Arizona. It too, was a snapshot that came and went quickly, but reminded me that whether we are the student or the teacher, we all still feeling the o...

It was not long after I began the first leg of a get-a-way to Arizona that my suitcase took control.  My own luggage made it clear that if we were going to dance, it would be the one leading, and I would be the one to follow. If my suitcase was meant to be more coordinated than I was, Ginger Rogers would have paired with one a long time ago, and ditched Fred Astaire. Grab the handle, and step...

Everyone had that professor. Yes, that one. He had taught all his life and his lectures, while on point, only needed a spark to set off the powder keg. We needed the credit, we needed the degree, but secretly we were only hoping his lecture would end before...oops, someone brought up that touchy subject and woke the Kraken.