The people of Perry County love their history, and for good reason. Change comes slowly to these parts. Looking out at Blue Mountain from my favorite rocking chair on the back porch, there’s very little from modern times to see. In fact, there’s a lot more...

There’s nothing like the loss of electricity to make a house feel broken. In a recent column entitled, “Did You Find the Squirrel?”, I wrote about an exciting afternoon of powerlessness on St. Peters Church Road, thanks to a cute furry creature that...

There’s nothing like a salad fresh from the garden. A bowl of mixed greens, spiced with herbs and perhaps an edible flower blossom or two, is one of the great pleasures of summer on St. Peters Church Road, the perfect accompaniment to a pizza baked in the mud...

One of our guilty weeknight pleasures is to curl up with an episode of House Hunters International, a made-for-cable reality show on the HGTV network about the ins and outs of buying property abroad. The show taps a deep vein of the American experience: curiosity...

If there’s an opposite to a peaceful June evening on St. Peter’s Church Road, when the moist evening air rolls off the flank of Blue Mountain and flushes an armada of hopeful fireflies from the field grass, it has to be rush hour in Manhattan in the...

One summer, a few years after we moved onto St. Peter’s Church Road, I turned on the television to watch the Wimbledon final. The championship match was broadcast on NBC, which was lucky, because that was the only channel we got. And by “got,” I mean...

It’s dusk on a humid summer evening. Your heart pounds with anticipation. This is Warm Springs, the road you’ve been warned about but can’t resist. You take it slow, rolling on despite the danger signs, your tires crunching the moist gravel. Shermans...

If you’ve ever sat in a pediatrician’s waiting room, you’ve probably  met a pair of comic strip characters named Goofus and Gallant. Goofus, a pudgy little miscreant with rebellious hair, has been behaving badly in the pages of Highlights...

It started like any other mid-July zucchini-roasting session. Balance the tray beside the trusty Weber grill. Turn on the propane. Wait a few seconds. Click the igniter. But this time, there was no satisfying “whoompf!” I gave it a few more seconds. Then a...

I’m not very good at writing short stories, which makes me admire the geniuses of the short form all the more. A good short story – like a good column – aims for its ending like a rifle shot. And just as the “crack!” of  a rifle...

As I write these words, not fifteen feet away, a Sawzall is chewing through a gnarly cast iron pipe. The house is literally shaking. The cacophony covers the spectrum from stadium-leveling heavy metal bass notes, through the ear-numbing mid-range familiar to...

We’re cruising at thirty-five thousand feet on a cross-country flight, a few hours out of BWI. The Great Lakes are already behind us. At the moment, we’re high over the plains of Iowa. Visibility is unlimited. It’s all checkerboard farms to the...

Last week, the Olshans stepped off a plane in Seattle with a sense of great relief. We stretched our cramped legs and took a moment to appreciate the ambient temperature -- cool and dry, no air conditioning required, unlike the solar furnace we’d left behind on...

During our recent sojourn by the Salish Sea, the Olshans crossed the Canadian border at Blaine, Washington, on our way to Vancouver, British Columbia. For a border crossing, it’s a pretty tame affair, more like a glorified toll plaza than a military checkpoint....

What went running through your mind when the earth shook last week? I’ll tell you what went though mine, as our old house in Baltimore leaped up and down, pictures came down off the walls, and the floors groaned: Why is the dog still sleeping? There she was,...