Category: Inspirational

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...

Author’s Note: What a beautiful day today! Everything sparkles after last night’s fresh snow. The sky is so blue. The sun shine’s such bright warmth.  I took my canine companions out for a snowshoe “paw patrol” stroll. The poem below formed in my head while the dogs explored and...

Author’s Note: The snowshoes pictured here are my dad’s vintage pair. He made them in Ranger School during his time at Wanakena. He graduated from Ranger School in 1961, two years before I was born. They are still sturdy, solid and strong. I have taken great care to maintain...

    Author’s Note: This story appeared in the June 8, 2021, online edition of The Adirondack Almanack. ********** I remember our orientation day visit to Paul Smith’s College with our son RJ as he prepared to enter his freshman year as a Wildlife Sciences major there.      It was August...

Small Town Life Adirondack Captured on Camera An SLHS ’81 Classmate Collaboration Featuring Photography by Jackie Ely   Author’s Note:  This story appeared in the January 14, 2022, edition of The Adirondack Almanack. Jackie’s photography proved to be extremely popular. Gaining 371 Facebook shares in a little over a...

Christy Mathewson & Larry Doyle Big League TB patients Forever Inspiring Saranac Lake Youth League Baseball ********** There Once Was A Time When Every Town Had A Team Every Team Had A Star Every Boy Had A Dream ********** Author’s Note: This is the third in my planned series...

An Adirondack Outlaw Survivor Approach To Living Life Forward      We’ve all heard the phrase “Think outside the box.”  It’s all too frequently offered as a euphemism for innovative thinking or creative problem solving.  It’s even been used by many “experts” as a foundation philosophy for a long list...