Other Writing

When my grandpa, Iris Harmon, was a boy in the 1920s, he lived in a rural community in northwestern North Carolina. Life for him and his brothers and other boys like them in that neck of the woods pretty much consisted of helping on their family farms, but whenever they had the chance, they looked for ways to have fun.

One outlet was baseball, but because weekdays were workdays, their games had to wait until Saturdays. That never seemed enough, so in order to be able to practice throughout the...

Yesterday, I mentioned that my gladioluses are in bloom.

For some time, I have known the proper spelling of this flower is “gladiolus” rather than “gladiola,” but I admit to not having been sure what to call multiples of them. According to Merriam-Webster, the plural of gladiolus can be “gladioluses” or “gladioli.”

Upon further reading, I learned that “gladiola” and “gladiolas” are the informal, Anglicized, singular and plural versions of the word. These versions are also referred to as “...

In recent weeks, daily emphasis on an appreciation of God’s creation has become a priority for me. It’s not that I’ve never previously appreciated it, but both quantitatively and qualitatively speaking, it has been sporadic and lackluster at best. My communal time with God within the “walls” of His natural sanctuary has been inconsistent and interspersed with long periods of taking His handiwork for granted.

Several factors and recent influences have converged to renew this appreciation within...

The boy was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural North Carolina on the tail end of the Great Depression. He entered the world in an old cheese factory that had been converted into a dwelling. His mother had a terribly difficult delivery, and it was so traumatic that the boy would be an only child.

Within the following year, the boy and his parents moved into a small wooden shack, and a month after the boy’s first birthday, a devasting flood hit their region. The mountains became so...

In light of our nation’s 250th birthday, my mind drifts back to 1976, when, as a grade school student, I was the proud owner of a bicentennial lunchbox, exactly like the one pictured here.

As a history nerd, I preferred the Founding Fathers to “The Fonz,” Donny and Marie, and Evel Knievel. Rather than Marvel superheroes, the various sides of my cool lunchbox featured George Washington, Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, Valley Forge soldiers, and Boston Tea Partiers.

Not only did this lunchbox serve a...

As I was reading in the book of Hosea today, a short but beautiful phrase caught my attention:

“A DOOR OF HOPE”

In the preceding verses, God had portrayed the idolatrous Kingdom of Israel as an unfaithful wife and the Valley of Achor as a place for her judgement. To symbolize the strained relationship between God and Israel, God instructed the prophet Hosea to marry an adulterous woman, and among their children were Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi. “Lo” being the Hebrew word for “no” or “not,” the...

C. S. Lewis once stated that, when we are offered the infinite joy that accompanies the promises of God, we are “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

This has made a lasting impression on me, and I think about it regularly.

Throughout my life, I have often had tightly held ideas of what my life should look like and consist of. I have frequently pursued goals without committing them to...

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

I can’t say for sure, but I do know that, when you get a group of Baptist men together for a few hours with a handful of chainsaws and axes and a couple of wood splitters, it’s enough to fill two small dump trucks. The old adage doesn’t lie: Many hands make light work.

That was what happened this morning, when nearly twenty men from our church gathered at our pastor’s place to cut up wood for the benefit of a fellow member....

This morning, I spoke to around a dozen kids at a summer reading camp. Although once upon a time, as a student teacher, I taught middle schoolers, kids are not my typical audience, particularly over the course of the past few years of being invited to speak about a true crime book I wrote. Still, I accepted the invitation with equal measures of curiosity and slight trepidation. Kids can be a tough audience in that they are super discerning and can see straight through you if you’re not on top...

This Father’s Day marks my 20th year without mine. It’s hard to believe two decades have passed since I last saw him and heard his voice. Still, I was blessed to have him in my life for 41 years, and with the realization that not everyone is that fortunate, I don’t take those decades with my dad for granted nor the many wonderful memories I have of him.

For thirty years, he was a high school business teacher, and in the summertime, in addition to tending his yard and garden, he helped his own...

This past weekend, I completed a task I had been avoiding all spring. I pulled weeds. My prolonged neglect of them had resulted in their spread and multiplication, but since I live alone and seldom have visitors, I had convinced myself that addressing them was not a matter of urgency.

Who cares? They’re not bothering anyone. Nobody’s around to see them but me. But my mama and daddy raised me right, and I like things to look neat and well kept. I saw them, I cared, and ultimately, they bothered...

My multiple times great uncle, Isaiah “Zade” Wilcox, was born in 1796, and his own great uncle was the renowned frontiersman, Daniel Boone. Uncle Zade grew up as a farm boy in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Described as a natural genius, he learned to make wagons and to manipulate iron and steel, which enabled him to become a good blacksmith and gunsmith.

As an adult, Uncle Zade stood around 5’10” and weighed about 165 pounds. He was a good-looking man with a fair complexion, blue eyes, and...

Mary Frances was a poor girl from El Paso, who lived in a shack with her brother and their parents. Her father was a carpenter, who occasionally shot and brought home jackrabbits for their supper, and her mother took in laundry for extra income.

Toward the end of the Great Depression, the family moved from Texas to California. Mary Frances was seven at the time. A bit tomboyish, she preferred dungarees to dresses. As she entered her teen years, she admittedly had no money, no taste, and no...

Do you remember the comedic genius of Nathan Birnbaum and Mendel Berlinger? Or the graceful movements of Frederick Austerlitz and Virginia McMath? How about the cinematic offerings of Lucille LeSeuer, Issur Demsky, Frances Gumm, and Bernard Schwartz?

No? What about (in order) George Burns, Milton Berle, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Kirk Douglas, Judy Garland, and Tony Curtis? I get that only those of a certain age who are reading this may recognize these stage names, but to my...

Once upon a time, I got my skull cracked.

It was not an accident or an attack but a premeditated skull-cracking that I assented to with foreknowledge.

Someone recently asked me how long it had been since said skull-cracking. “Around seven years?” she asked. “At least seven years,” I responded. Later that evening, I dug into my archives to pinpoint the timeframe and was shocked to discover it was FIFTEEN years ago this month.

In January 2011, I was the proud recipient of a craniotomy. The...

Over a period of decades in the 1800s, branches of my family moved nearly a thousand miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to Nacogdoches, Texas. One of the first to make the trek was my 4x great-granduncle, Jacob Mast, who arrived there in 1828. Shortly after, he took a wife and started a family, his third child being Milton “Milt” Mast.

Milt was a farmer, waggoner, Confederate captain, retail merchant, and postmaster, eventually being elected as the sheriff and tax collector...

The typically carefree boy had recently become less so. Worries, some of them irrational, had gradually crept into his mind. He became preoccupied with thoughts about war and dying, and he was concerned by the possibility of getting sick while away from home. He worried about his life and the future.

These disturbances carried into the nighttime, and even his sleep had become troubled. One night, after some tossing and turning, he got out of his bed and went to his mother in the family’s den,...

Okay folks, here’s another gem from the Christmas vault a la late 60s. Here you see three American children in front of their bedecked tree, but me thinks there is more to the story. First, I (the child in the middle) apparently failed to receive the cowboy attire memo. That aside, judging by my wild-eyed expression, I may be a little inebriated. I’m pretty sure I was on the bottle till I was about five, so I could very well be high on Sealtest, or perhaps, in order to induce nap time, my...

This photo of my sister and me with “Santa Claus” always evokes an odd mix of both horror and amusement. At the time of the event – maybe circa 1969 – we were terrified by this masked stranger who entered our home and took us upon his knees. Okay, maybe horror and terror go a bit too far. As I scrutinize the image, I think my wide eyes and my finger in my mouth definitely portray some sense of “What in the figgy pudding is going on here?” My expressionless sister, on the other hand, seems...

In the midst of the Great Depression and World War II, a boy named Herff, from Spur, Texas, was brought up in a very religious home, due, in part, to the influence of his Presbyterian minister father. Hoping to become a pastor himself, Herff earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy with an eye toward seminary. In the interim, he met and married Ann, a fellow Texan who had graduated from a Christian women’s college in North Carolina. Later, in the midst of his theological studies, Herff...