Category: Inspirational

I’ve been selected! I was just notified. My story “Olympic Outlaws” has been selected by Harmonny Performing Arts Community to be read aloud at their upcoming event at The Sackets Harbor Ballroom on November 16, 2022! As a cancer survivor with no tongue, this is especially meaningful to me....

A Cancer Fighting Canine’s Morning Paw Patrol Photo Shoot Featuring: Captain Blue As folks may or may not know by now, our Monroe Paw Patrol family recently received some very devastating news. Captain Blue, our canine Paw Patrol Leader, was diagnosed with lymphoma. Captain Blue is only six and...

Ari Rae Marra’s Adirondack Outlaw Christening Bull Rush Bay 2022 was not only our Monroe family’s 50th anniversary camp celebration, it was also an Adirondack Outlaw camp celebration as Ari Rae’s first. Plans and preparation for this big event began late last fall. The NYSDEC built a brand spanking...

Beneath forgotten trestle’s flow Rainfall bounty, melted snow Where heron, bass, and beaver go I can hear  The river calling Misted memory’s mountain home Rocky rapid’s rippled foam Long lost laughter skipping stones I can hear The river calling We swam, we fished Wind’s whispered wish Wild water’s kiss...

The story is fiction. The issues are real. Some moments call for a good man with stones. **********      It was a Thursday. Not unlike any Thursday in any small town. An unassuming grey-haired man in his late fifties quietly parked his forest green pickup truck in the downtown...

The original version of this story 1st appeared in the June 17, 2021 on-line edition of the Adirondack Almanack      I had an interesting conversation with my brother a while back in camp. It began innocently enough, with an observation he made about the difficulties the Saranac Lake Elks...

A Wood Duck Celebration in Haiku   Haiku is a traditional Japanese short verse form written to celebrate some aspect of nature or life. While it has numerous nuances and variations, in my rudimentary understanding, a Haiku basically consists of three lines of verse written in a non-rhyming pattern,...

An SLHS ’81 Classmate Collaboration By Jackie Ely & Dick Monroe (With a cameo assist by Karen Barrow Pittman) Winter’s Long March Behind Me Birch Trees Framing My Thoughts Sitting Alone in a Park Contemplating Ice-Covered Mountain Lake Waters Quietly Waiting for Spring (And waiting…and waiting) Soaking In April’s...

Author’s Note: I drafted this poem many years ago for my wife. My handwritten notes simply bear the date “1990”, so I must have written it shortly after Robin and I married. For reasons unbeknownst to me at this point in life, it sat all these years gathering dust...

The Day I nearly lost Khalisi. My true canine rescue story. A close call, a hard learned lesson, and a warning.      It happened several years ago, right about this time of year. It was late February or early March. The ground had just refrozen right behind an early...