Lisa deGruyter Bits of one woman's life

It is one thing to read about the Holocaust, about the banality of evil, about the ordinary Germans who turned on their neighbors, about our own internment of Japanese citizens, about lynchings in our South, about many horrible things that people have done to people in fights over territory, princip

For millennia, all across the northern hemisphere, human beings have huddled in the cold and dark as the winds picked up, snow fell, and the days grew ever shorter.  Hunting, gathering, farming done, they gathered together, kept up the fires, visited, told stories, sang, and feasted as much as they

From the Daily Yonder, bits about the Farm Bill, which may be hidden in the deficit reduction and renewed for 5 years without any hearing or debate, and competitive markets for agriculture,  and from New America, some thoughts on obesity – the majority of the US is now overweight. And there’s anothe

An apparent high school suicide in our community, attributed to bullying, has emotions running high, and a lot of memories of our own young experiences coming back. I did some looking around when it was said that the school involved had no policy, and in fact had a “no tattling” policy, so that chil

Every day I have more than one smart-aleck remark on the news, and occasionally a deep thought.  Sometimes I can even tell the difference.  Rather than continue to pepper my friend’s Facebook news and email boxes with them, I’m going to start posting a link page, with comments.  Here’s the first. Ma

Wandering about the web on a Sunday morning, pondering (well, trying to ponder – pondering is probably calmer than my current thought processes) Bill O’Reilly’s definition of what Occupy Wall Street is about In other words, these folks want our stuff. Throughout history, there have been human beings

Three posts across my desktop: Remove the wild from our outer lives and in our hearts and souls we suffer, our compass goes awry. All who still revere the wild know this, as Henry did; he recognized it as the greater part of the soul. So now, some 150 years later, where has it gone? [...]

Time to start posting our adventures again, but first some housekeeping and updates. Long ago, our first home Internet connection (not counting Compuserv) was a dial-up with a shell account at Illuminati Online, which had started, before the public Internet, as a dial-up bulletin board for Steve Jac

The first time I came home from Chicago in the spring, after spending most of a year among gray limestone and very little green, I was overwhelmed by plants that seemed to be taking over.  The Woods Hole Institute has analyzed satellite data and produced this image of where the woods are in the Unit