Columnists
Well, here we are. The holidays are over, but winter remains.
The good news is, we are headed in the right direction. Internet sources say our region will gain 53 minutes of daytime from the beginning to the end of the month, although still ahead of us are the seven days which are typically...
With the end of 2025, I find myself doing the expected thing: looking back over the closing year.
I wish to thank everyone who contacted the paper to make sure we know about interesting people and occurrences.
I want to point out we have a marvelous community, occupied for the most...
Back when I was teaching composition, my students would frequently say something like, “I can’t write the assignment because I can’t figure out how to start it.”
My answer was “Don’t start it then, just write it.” I explained that, thanks to modern word processing, there is no need to craft...
I was privileged to attend five live music performances in eight days. My Christmas spirit is now fully activated.
It started the Sunday after Thanksgiving with the Waseca Chorale’s “Joy! He Shall Reign” concert held at Sacred Heart Church in Waseca. The church, with its stained glass...
SPARKLING - One of Deb’s sun catchers caught light in a different form when it acquired a cap of sparkling snow.
These ideas are being written down on Saturday evening, after a day of snowfall, which covered everything outside with five or more inches of shiny white snow. By the time you read it on Thursday, the whole world will have changed again in some new, wintry way.
Today, though, I am willing...
I am currently reading the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” a 2015 more-than-a-million-sold nonfiction book by Yuval Noah Harari.
The book delivers some surprising information. Delivered in no particular order, here are some facts which caught my attention: Neanderthals were “...
A friend and I spent more than an hour parked along a dark country road Tuesday night watching the aurora borealis.
When I say the show was “breathtaking,” I am not speaking only figuratively. More than once I looked at the colors in the sky and gasped, it was so impressively wondrous...
Something I like about this time of year is the personality change the sun undergoes.
Through July and August, it had the character of a domineering supervisor–someone whose gaze you would rather avoid, even if you weren’t misbehaving or breaking some kind of rule. It would glare harshly,...
You are going to question my sanity after you read this.
In order to allow my granddaughter to visit with some of her cousins, and also to visit “Fright Fest,” a spooky celebration at the Six Flags Great America theme park in Gurnee, Illinois, I drove from Grand Marais, Minnesota, where she...
Thanks to some reading I’ve been doing, I’ve come across the information that indigenous people named the “months” by what happened at the particular time of year. The Hopi of the Southwest call October the “Wind Moon.” The Ojibwe of the north call September “Changing Leaves Moon” and October “...