Jay Shafer: The Politics of Tiny Houses

March 24, 2011

In February, 2011, Joan and I spent a couple of hours with Jay Shafer (Tumbleweed Tiny House Company), in his 96 square foot house-on-wheels in Sebastopol, California. Jay is one of the more well-known and successful tiny house designers, and there’s no denying the “curb appeal” of his designs. That appeal is generated by Jay’s [...]

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This Plum Blossom

February 20, 2011

February 20, 2011, Los Altos, California
I’d like to think I can still stand barefoot in the rain-wet, cold grass under a small plum tree an hour after sunrise and look at the blossoms without a thought, without feeling I need to think about the this or the that, only looking at the blossoms, going without saying [...]

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Tim Guiles: Conversations in a Tiny House

January 18, 2011

Seven or eight year ago Joan bought a 1981 VW Vanagon Westfalia. This is the self-propelled cabin that housed generations of footloose people from the 1950s through the 1990s, and those that are still running and rolling (the vans, not the people) are still just about the sweetest, if not exactly the most reliable, mobile [...]

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Pictures of Camels: A short story about giving & getting

December 25, 2010

By George Grafton Packard
Illustration by Donald “DB” Johnson
BEFORE she died a few days after her 97th Christmas, Barbara Kingsbury cleaned behind the Glenwood in the kitchen, painted the one white chair green to match the others around the table, and put the new batteries she’d saved away into the old Eveready flashlight. She ironed the [...]

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Riding the Cars: a stroll along the California Zephyr

December 13, 2010

We boarded the California Zephyr in Denver, with tickets to ride it all the way to its final western destination in Emeryville, California, just east across the bay from San Francisco. The Zephyr runs between California and Chicago, and that’s been a long run. If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember seeing ads [...]

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Sunrise, new moon, at Nederland, Colorado

December 3, 2010
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Little Mikey at Big Turkey Mountain

November 25, 2010

Little Mikey wandered into the kitchen about the time I took the turkey out of the refrigerator.
“Dude!” he said. “What is it and where’d you get it?”
Turkey, and I got it from a turkey farm, I told him.
“OK,” he said. “What are we gonna do with it?”
Well, I said, some of us are going to [...]

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Local Coal: The Cumberland River runs through it

November 15, 2010

Cumberland Falls is a lovely little waterfall, almost a miniature Niagara, on the Cumberland River in southern Kentucky, about 15 miles west of Corbin. And Corbin, of course, is the location of the gas station where Colonel Sanders opened his first fried chicken restaurant.
But I’m thinking about coal rather than deep fried chicken.
Just above the [...]

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Jesse & friends: Warner, NH Fall Foliage Fesitval, 2010

October 25, 2010

There’s a strange diaspora of people with ties to Warner, NH and the Warner Fall Foliage Festival parade and Jesse McNeil and his mother’s big farmhouse in lower Warner and the huge attached barn that is crammed with the artifacts and detritus from theatre productions and float-making that have settled into its haylofts and horse [...]

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Chicken Killing: May what I eat haunt me

October 7, 2010

A week or so ago, when our neighbor Nina decided that three young roosters among her new hens were two too many, she put a little sign up on her mailbox: FREE ROOSTER. I stopped to inquire. Nina said I was the first and only neighbor to express an interest. And by the way, did [...]

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