I don’t know if you can predict the winter by woolly bears but I do love seeing them. Also, I would be part of any club called “The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear.”

From a great piece by Ted Goia on Glenn Campbell:

[Glen Campbell’s] father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”

In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:

Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.

I took out a six-month subscription to The Budget, a weekly newspaper by and for plain Anabaptists (to quote the wiki). I probably won’t subscribe to it long term but I’m really interested in the scribe letters.

Yesterday, Rachel and I walked to our graves. A nice way to delay the day when we’ll be carried there.

Lamps and candles glow
in morning dark, as we read
together in peace

Quite a story: “How Chinese spies used lies, love and betrayal to target the Federal Reserve”

“we are not hedonists, and were not created merely for our own happiness or pleasure”