http://www.katemcintire.com ... beware a woman with no obvious vices ... Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:18:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I loathe dirt under my nails, despise bending for hours in the heat, and can no longer kneel [titanium knee hurts like Hell.] Nonetheless, I'm swept away by gardens. Lawns stretching to the treeline, banks of blooming Azalea, gently running water -- Heaven on Earth. I do garden a wee bit, though, ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1365              Once in a rare while, in my childhood, a bustling broke out: wiping, sorting, dusting; someone oiled a hinge; granddad tidied his workbench; Junior or Jimmie Dale mowed what lawns we had as well as the wide, grassy alley behind our fence, and coiled the long snake of green ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1356       I last saw Daddy when I was eight. He said he was "getting married"; he said he wouldn't be seeing me again, but--dammit--I was eight. Glad for him, I guess I wondered if I'd be going to visit him, now that he'd have a house. What I didn't get was ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1336 Remember when grandparents or great-grandparents said somewhat apologetically they only had an 8th grade education?  Well, could any of us products of 'modern' educational institutions have passed this 8th grade test from 1895? The following 1895 eighth-grade final exam was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1329 The old woman seemed fancy to me, not that I knew what fancy was. She must have been a hundred, wore long dresses like ladies in the picture show -- wore them around the house. Imagine! How she came to be in this little town, out here on the prarie, ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1322 Great-Uncle Ural was a fine storyteller. His too infrequent visits, living in California and all, left us wanting more.  Crowded around the big round kitchen table after supper, someone always asked for the story about the poorly cow.  He'd grin, glance  out of the corner of his gray-blue eyes toward the ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1278 Maggie, the Cat and Big Daddy are onstage, the director *blocks* out the scene with them, "When Big Daddy turns, Maggie moves to the bar and removes the stopper ... ." Each script gets quick marginal notes, and they step and block through the next set of lines. The theater is dark ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1260 His khakis hung on him from a cinched belt; shirt was tucked in - neat as he could get - but too large. Maybe it fit when he got it. His dirty shoes were last year's knockoff Air Jordans. He made his way around the islands of fresh produce without ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1252 In a Baltimore Sun column this past week, our favorite small-town guy Garrison Keillor suggested "When Everyone's a Writer no one is." He posits an argument whose logic doesn't stand scrutiny--his thesis was, as far as I could tell, that self-publishing, ebooks, and the web are taking the field of writing to-Hell-in-a-handbasket--as ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1227 The mayor's part-time clerk and full-time daughter, Marge, did a favor for me once. Since then, she's asked several in return; recently, I've tracked prisoners' graves/headstones, long dead and forgotten in the North Cemetery, which section soon will be moved.  A developer bought the parcel south of the cemetery stretching to the River; soon ... http://www.katemcintire.com/?p=1170