All Dear Folks letters are licensed under a Creative Commons License. DMI encourages you to share this content by following these easy steps.
Dear Folks: December 22, 1989
Dear Folks,
This is going to be a long, sad letter. It’s going to be hard on you if, like me, you think of life as a fairy tale, where good things happen to good people — or where bad things come out all right in the end and teach good lessons. One shouldn’t write sad letters at the holiday season, [...]
Dear Folks: November 26, 1989
Dear Folks, Well, I was hoping the next adventure I would get to share with you would be a mad love affair, or maybe a surprise trip to Tahiti, or a Pulitzer Prize, or at the very least the triumphant completion of my book — but life has its way of serving up adventures that are not the ones you hope [...]
Dear Folks: October 29, 1989
Dear Folks, It’s Saturday night, the end of a balmy, hazy, calm, blessed Indian summer week. Foundation Farm was busy all day taking advantage of the nice weather to knock items off our fall chore list. Don oiled up the garden tools and put them away and worked on getting the snowblower set up and running. I mixed up three 50-lb [...]
Dear Folks: September 24, 1989
Dear Folks, Two nights ago the edge of Hurricane Hugo brought us wild winds and tropical temperatures. Basil and I woke up about 2:30 and went outside to watch the trees bending in the wind. Heavy gusts whammed through the valley — we could hear each one sweeping toward us from a long way off, sounding like an oncoming express train. [...]
Dear Folks: July 23, 1989
Dear Folks, The hay’s in the barn, all’s right with the world!
Sometimes I think I make the hay a drama every year, by worrying about it too much. Sometimes I think it actually is a drama. I can’t remember putting up hay when it wasn’t darkening in the west, with a few preliminary raindrops falling — just enough to get the [...]
