March 23, 2026

Five years have passed since we moved into our place. Five years today, March 23. We closed on the house Feb. 26, 2021. It poured rain that day, we signed everything, went to lunch to mark the occasion, then headed back to our apartment. It then had been three weeks since I finished a month of radiation therapy, three months since the rib-cage operation.

The next day we started loading the boxes we had crammed in the apartment into the van. We hauled them the six miles to the house and piled them in the garage.  The grandsons, Noah and Patrick, greeted us with signs and smiles.

It was then and still is the right place: Greer, South Carolina, one level, so no stairs, gas heat, the front yard bordered by mature greenery, no landscaping needed. The second and third bedrooms are small, closet space is limited, but the garage doubles as storage. It’s just the two of us.

The house had been empty for five years since the previous owner, an elderly widow, moved to a nursing home. We never met her, her nephew dealt with us on the sale. The house was sold to help pay her living expenses.

The place had a strange feel to it. When we tried to set up the internet and couldn’t get the connection, the provider told us there had been no online account since 2013. The lady had dropped the service and lived her remaining time there with neither internet nor email.

The widow’s furniture remained in the house when we first walked through. It was feminine-looking, imitation-antique stuff, well-worn wingback chairs, dark wood endtables, and so on. The master bedroom walls were decorated with flowery wallpaper, long faded. The two smaller bedrooms were painted lilac and pink.  

I found a Bible on a desk, thumbed through it, and scanned the faded handwritten notations. A photograph of a woman stood on a nightstand. The nephew said it was the widow’s daughter, who had passed from cancer some years ago.

We found a painter who painted the walls and removed the popcorn ceiling. We hired a mover to deliver our living room and bedroom furniture. Within a month of our move-in the water heater failed, we replaced it. In July the air conditioning system clanged and roared but provided no cooling. The HVAC was obsolete and could not be repaired, we bought a new system.

The new neighborhood was at first an alien world. We knew no one. The new home was smaller than the Virginia house, where we had accumulated all the stuff that moved with us and would not fit in the new place. Dozens of boxes and excess furniture remained in the garage. The garage was a kind of fun thing, we had never had one.

The backyard was enclosed by a beat-up picket fence. In our second year we looked for a contractor to replace it. We hired the lowest bidder. After we paid him I noticed the picket sections were nailed to the posts in straight rows rather than adjusted to the contours of the terrain, giving the pickets an odd crooked look. A year later picket nails started popping. But I guess the low bidder saved us a few bucks.

In time, we met some neighbors: next door, another retired couple, refugees from Cuba. The fellow is an engineer who got his training in the USSR, on returning to Cuba he fled to the U.S. We’ve seen him sunning himself in the yard in his Speedo. On the opposite side, a single guy who manages a pet store, across the street a friendly young woman with two teenagers.   

We got a few bids on adding a sunroom to replace the beat-up 10×10 deck. After seeing the bids we dropped the idea, I guessed I could refinish the deck instead. For three weeks I spent a half-day or more every day sanding, repairing, and restaining the deck. Since it faces the fierce Carolina sun through the summer, we never go out there. My repairs already are looking old.

The postage-stamp-size lawn is level. We bought an old-fashioned pushmower, the Home Depot clerk looked strangely at me. No gas needed, nor battery, nor cable. Pushing it across the front lawn attracts attention from the landscaping crews who manicure our neighbors’ yards. It’s a stiff shoulder workout. The lawn is getting thicker, the pushing harder.

That first summer we planted sunflowers, marigolds, and zinnias behind the house. They sprouted almost overnight in the rich Carolina clay. Within a month the sunflowers reached eight and ten feet, the marigolds and zinnias bloomed and spread like vines, filling the space with wild color we never saw in our Virginia yard. Giant hostas appeared in thick rows on three sides of the deck, giving a vernal cast to my fading repair work.

The marigolds and zinnias now show up magically in the spring from seeds left in the dirt by last year’s crop. For fun I planted green beans and that down-home Southern classic, okra. The green beans shriveled on the vines, the okra grew and grew. Sandy breaded and fried okra until it wore out its welcome.

In the third year we replaced the homebuilder-standard vinyl kitchen countertop with a stone one with a nice pattern to it. Last year we hired a smart young contractor to rebuild the bathrooms. We called him back to fix some glitches, he was happy to do it.

A friend recruited her daughters to paint the still-unpainted fence, the grandsons and a couple of other kids pitched in, we bought the paint, brushes, and ice cream for a fence-painting party. The boys and girls turned it a gleaming white.

On September 25, 2024 Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast. We were in New Hampshire, where the sun shone brightly. Our daughter Marie sent us a video showing the remains of a giant tree limb that fell from the neighbor’s yard, crushing three sections of our fence. Some folks around town lost power for two weeks. Nearly 50 people died in the state, more than 100 in North Carolina.

After the cleanup I salvaged some unbroken pickets and nailed them back into place. From a distance they look almost even.

We’ve thought again of the sunroom idea. Medical appointments are pending. With Trump bombing Iran, oil prices through the roof, stocks crashing, it’s still a no-go, at this five-year mark. We’re working on six.

March 16, 2026

The Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel penetrates about 1,600 feet into the mountain in northwestern South Carolina near Walhalla, then ends at a brick wall and a rusty iron gate.  We trudged the full length of it with flashlights, inhaling the cool damp tunnel air, stepping carefully along the muddy floor. We reached the end and squinted through the gate into a black void.

The state government’s plan in 1855 was to build the tunnel, 5,860 feet long and 236 feet deep, through the southeast face of Stumphouse Mountain in order to lay track for a route from Anderson, S.C., to Knoxville for use by the Blue Ridge Railroad. The idea was to benefit businesses in Charleston that wanted a shorter trip to Ohio than the complicated route through central Georgia and Tennessee.

Something like 1,500 workers, mostly Irish immigrants, and their families settled in a work camp called Tunnel Town which, it was said, had “more saloons than churches.” A Catholic priest arrived and, appalled at the conditions, persuaded the site boss to fire any worker who got drunk. He built a church, St. Patrick’s, the first Catholic church west of Columbia, to serve the workers.

The Irishmen hacked away at the steel-hard blue granite with hand drills, hammers, and chisels. Because of the hardness of the granite the workers could get through only about 260 feet per month. The work went so slowly the money ran out and the work stopped. The men of Tunnel Town drifted away.

While the state and the builders looked for new funding the Civil War began. After the war the state had neither the interest nor the money, and the project was abandoned. St. Patrick’s church eventually was destroyed by fire and scavengers.

The tunnel is said to be one of the most visited parks in the state, which seems odd for an unlit shaft through solid granite 1,600 feet long, in a state of many beautiful places.

The story of the tunnel’s name is as strange as the name itself. We learned it derives from a legend of no specific timeframe: a Creek woman named Isaqueena who had been captured by Cherokees fell in love with a white man who lived in Greenwood County, about 90 miles south of Walhalla. When she heard the Cherokees planned an attack on his settlement she escaped with the fellow, the two hid in a large hollow tree, hence “Stumphouse.”

This version is based on a poem written by a Rev. J.W. Daniels in 1898 entitled “Cateechee of Keowee,” which says Isaqueena’s name was changed to Cateechee. She later escaped the Cherokees by pretending to leap into a waterfall near the tunnel, now called Isaqueena Falls.

The next chapter gets even stranger. Sometime around 1940 a professor at nearby Clemson University (then Clemson A&M) guessed the cool, moist tunnel air would be perfect for curing blue cheese. Yes, cheese. He passed the idea along, and the school’s Dairy Department (yes, there was one) started research on methods of making blue cheese.

In 1951 Clemson bought the Stumphouse Tunnel and commenced Operation Blue Cheese. The cheese was made at the school using milk from the college’s herd of cattle, and shipped the 30 miles to the tunnel for curing. I read that in 1953 2,500 pounds of Clemson blue cheese was cured in the tunnel. By 1956 the Clemson Dairy Research department had built a climate-controlled space and the needed equipment. The curing process was brought on campus in 1958 and the tunnel was again abandoned.

Today, the university says, the school’s cheese department (Department of Food, Nutrition, and Packaging Sciences) sells 25,000 pounds of blue cheese annually. Clemson leased the tunnel to the Pendleton Historic District Commission, which turned it into the park site.

We had driven over to Walhalla with the grandsons, the idea being, as it often is, to see unusual places, to recharge, but now also to break away from war news. The tunnel park is a few miles north of town on U.S. 28, which curls into rugged country towards the North Carolina state line. It was sunny but chilly.

We drove down a winding access road through thick woods to the parking area. We climbed the steep hill to the tunnel entrance and took a few uneasy steps inside. The shaft is 25 feet high and 17 feet wide. We turned on our flashlights and moved forward across the muddy floor, cringing as cold water dripped on our heads from the overhead.

As we walked slowly through the darkness, we navigated the rough ruts and ridges of the tunnel floor, which along the walls is covered with water. The sunlit entrance receded behind us. Soon we could make out the locked rusty gate that prevents further progress. We peered through the gate, the tunnel extends further into blackness. We took deep breaths and turned and headed back to daylight. 

We walked back down the hill, glad and relieved to feel the sun’s warmth. We found a picnic table, got out our sandwiches, and ate lunch. We noticed a few other visitors, who wandered up the hill toward the tunnel entrance.

The boys and I walked the quarter-mile along a steep trail to the falls. We peered over a ledge at the rushing water, which disappeared into the forest below. Looking out maybe 60 miles at the horizon, we could perceive the change in the terrain from the rugged northwest to the gentle roll of the central Piedmont, which miles farther extends into the flatness of the coastal Low Country.

We stopped at a cute place in Walhalla for ice cream. A chess set sat on the table, the boys played. The shop owner and a few customers chatted. We relaxed, letting the afternoon tension settle.

As we sat waiting for the boys I recalled Sandy and I had driven out to Walhalla about a month after we settled in our Greenville apartment. I was getting over surgery. We looked at homes in a lovely old neighborhood. We knew it wouldn’t work, nearly two hours from the city, the hospital, the kids. But it was lovely. Strange, but lovely.

March 9, 2026

While the bombers flew, we thought about windows. The one in the guest room has four cracked panes. We had covered the crack with clear tape maybe two years ago.

Two aircraft carriers, twelve destroyers, other ships are operating in Middle East waters. Destroyers have launched land-attack missiles, called Tomahawks, at Iranian targets. The Air Force threw its long-range bombers and fighter-bombers into the air assault.

Operation Epic Fury also launched a frenzied onslaught of boldface headlines and melodramatic TV news reports. Stock prices bounced, governments worldwide declared support or condemnation. Gas prices ticked up. Hundreds died. 

We read that experts are nervous about what happens next. Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell’s 2002 “Pottery Barn” rule, “you break it, you own it,” which then referred to Iraq, has been revised by the Trumpers to “we break it, someone else owns it.” Trump’s promise to Iranians that “help is on the way,” has been reworked as “we’ll see what happens.”

At home people go on about their business. On December 8, 1941 Americans tuned their radios to FDR’s immortal noontime “day of infamy” speech. Meanwhile buses and trains ran, people went to work, to the grocery, then came home and cooked dinner.

Our cracked window faces thick shrubs in front of the house, so not visible from the street. Whenever I thought about it, something else more urgent came up. But on these recent cold winter days, standing near the crack, I could detect a faint, chilly draft. We promoted the window from “sometime” to “now.”  

Mass-mail flyers arrive almost daily from window companies offering 30 or 40 percent off, they’d pile up and get tossed. I found one for Andersen Windows and called, the nearest shop is 30 miles away. I remembered Sandy’s cousin Mike owns the Window World franchise in Cape Girardeau, Mo.

On our St. Louis-Nashville road trip with the grandsons last summer we had stopped at his shop. The operation was impressive, the windows in the warehouse were beautiful, solid quality. Mike treated us to lunch at Lambert’s Café in Sikeston, famous for “throwed rolls.” It was worth a post (June 23).

When we visited Mike at his Tennessee home, he showed some video of his company ads. They feature Mike saying, “We not only stand by our windows, we stand ON our windows.” Mike, a husky guy, then stands on the glass center of a Window World window. That’s a tough window.

I didn’t think we needed new windows, but called Window World Greenville and made an appointment. The next day Terry, the design consultant, knocked. He looked at our cracked window then pulled out his tablet.

“You know your window is a single unit, you have to replace the whole thing,” he said. I didn’t know that. To me it looked like two windows supported by a central post.

My preference was to get this taken care of without spending a lot. Other than the crack, which extends diagonally from the lower left pane to the upper right, the window looks okay to me.

“You’ve got contractor windows, installed by the homebuilder,” he said. I inferred he meant that’s a bad thing. They’ve been okay these five years we’ve lived here.

“You’re out of code,” he said. “You need ozone protection, it’s now required.”  He worked up a quote for two 4000 Series DH W/ Solar Zone Elite 165 windows at $545.00 each. With the gridwork, site setup, removal of some vinyl siding, and a $60.00 discount he got to $1,959.00.

Doing our due diligence, we went to Lowe’s and looked at their stock, which includes Pella and United windows. We scheduled a visit from their consultant. I felt sure Lowe’s would come in under Window World. The next day Brittany from Lowe’s came by. We went through the same drill as with Terry. She emailed proposals, Pella at $2,659, United at $2,064. We said no thanks.

I realized I knew nothing about windows or the cost of windows. We had had new windows put in at our Virginia house, they were the basic one-pane push up/down type, about 20 of them. I thought we paid about $8,000. Well, everything’s gone up.

All we really cared about was the crack. The next day I found a local company, Dixie Messer Mirror. I called and talked to someone, he said to send a text with a photo of the window to his technician, Kenny. Half an hour later, Kenny replied. “I can do it for $600. I can come by today and get measurements.”

Kenny arrived just after noon. A woman stood next to him. “I’m Wanda, his mom,” she said, smiling. “I come along to help.” I showed them the window, Kenny took measurements of the cracked panes. Wanda jotted them in a notebook. She noticed the painting of Sandy’s childhood home, which hangs above the bed.

“Did you have that done?” she asked. “Well, I did it,” I said.

“I’d love a painting of my house like that,” she said. “How much would you charge?”

This caught me off guard. I’ve given away a few things I’ve painted. The rest hang in the garage.

“I just do it for fun. It keeps me busy,” I said.

“Will you paint my house if I give you a photo?” Wanda asked.

I didn’t have anything pressing. I said I’d be glad to. We walked toward the front door. They looked at some landscapes I’ve done that hang around the house.

Kenny and I shook hands. “The glass will be in in about two weeks,” he said. “Sounds great,” I answered. “Thanks for coming by so promptly.”

Wanda smiled again. “I’ll get you a photo,” she said. I watched as they drove away. 

I looked at my phone. Iran news did not let up. Americans were killed. Drones exploded in five Middle Eastern countries. France and the U.K. were sending ships. More U.S. aircraft were heading to the theater. Congressional Republicans refused to call the war “war.” Trump was on every front page and newscast, calling it “war.” Military analysts speculated U.S. forces could run low on ordnance. Tomahawks are expensive.

Dark thoughts welled up of December 8, 1941 and the nightmare that followed, then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.  Then I moved on. I wondered what Wanda’s house looked like, and pulled out my paint supplies.

March 2, 2026

Turning 77 is a lot like turning 76, and so on back into the misty past. Some thoughtful cards and phone calls came in. Friends and family joined us for a nice dinner downtown. It was chilly but warmed up a bit, a small peek at spring. That’s all I hope for about now, every year.

A few days earlier at the Cancer Institute, Dr. B. strode in to the little office he uses for meetings, smiling, as always, and extended his hand. He turned to his flat-screen monitor. “We’re going to need a PET [positron emission tomography] scan,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

He opened my CT scan of last week, a black-and-white image of my insides, then the previous one, taken in November, then the PET scan of almost a year ago. He manipulated the three images on the screen and shifted the angles of view.

“I’m concerned about the lesion near the heart, which is—here.” He waved his hand at a shadowy patch, nearly invisible on the PET, larger in November, still larger now.

“You can see there’s an increase. So we want to stay on top of this. The PET will give us a closer look, then I’m thinking either some radiation or go back to the drug.”

If he gave me a choice it would be easy. The drug is a stew of side effects. Radiation was punishing in 2019, but lenient in 2021. Our son, Michael, the medical physicist, mentioned a new technique, SBRT (stereotactic body radiation therapy) which is more intense than conventional radiation but requires fewer doses.

The CT reports call these things “lesions” or “nodules” instead of the old-fashioned “tumors,” which for non-medical folks conveys a different impression. Lesion seems a bit gentler. The increase the doc picked up is in the range of centimeters, a centimeter being about half an inch long.

Within hours his office scheduled the PET for March 18. I’m a PET veteran, with seven behind me since late 2018. The drill is straightforward, check in at the hospital, wait 45 minutes for the radioactive tracer to flow through the body, lay on the slab under the scope for 15 minutes. The doc will get the image the same day.

We left the Institute and went shopping for a new bed for the guest room, which sits empty most of the time. No guests expected, but you never know.  

Putting a PET scan on the calendar helps your focus. We are talking again about those ideas for projects, for trips that we’ve talked about then set aside or forgotten. Suddenly the timing makes sense. We had thought about Alaska, it kept moving into the future. We’ll go, punching our tickets for another stop on the retired folks’ tourist circuit.

We talked about highway trips. The Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-mile race in Virginia is coming up in May, I’ve volunteered for years. The college class reunion in New Hampshire is in June—that’s a plane trip—followed by the Harper family reunion in Tennessee. We’re getting to be regulars there. We talked about getting to New Jersey sometime.

Eventually all the joyriding will come to an end, you hope because other things come up. We heard an old Virginia friend died a month ago. She had moved to North Carolina. For a while we’d drive up to visit. She suffered a stroke, the connection faded. We got word of a memorial service.  

The birthday evening set us off from that. We talked about good things, summer plans, kids’ accomplishments. The grandsons and the young daughters of a friend laughed and chatted. The kids’ smiles helped create joy. I guessed they wondered why they were invited to an old-guy birthday dinner.

We left the restaurant happy, anticipating great things in coming years from these young folks.

Then we moved on. The next morning, the first day of year 78, I got back to reproducing in oil paint a landscape printed on a placemat I picked up in a Saigon restaurant. The image, four farmers harvesting wheat, hints at hot, backbreaking labor in a remote Asian place. In some mysterious way it offers calm, serenity, retreat from the dark comedy of daily headlines.

The placemat reprint is unsigned. It’s marked ST25, so it’s an advertisement for a premium Vietnamese rice, which is offered everywhere in the country.

The job took about three weeks, not full time. I covered the canvas with three coats of acrylic white to create a base, then combined colors, shades of green and blue for the background mountains, then skin tones, yellow and orange mixes for the reflections of sunlight. The structures and forms were blunt and bold, no delicate strokes needed, which brings the project down to my skill level.

 I worked for a while on the sun hats, the reflection of sunlight on clothing, on the complicated color mix for the wheat. The steep slopes suggested Vietnam’s Central Highlands, but it could have been regions in neighboring countries with the same rugged terrain, farming practices, and reliance on manual labor.

I went back to Hobby Lobby a couple of times for new brushes, brush cleaner, paint, the works. This is something worthwhile, even fun, when you’re in your late seventies and waiting for a PET scan. You could call it creative, I wouldn’t go that far. Most likely it will end up on the garage wall next to the tool shelves, like much of my stuff. The next step: try again.

February 23, 2026

Next week marks the tenth anniversary of an accident. On March 5, 2016, a truck hauling nearly 8,000 gallons of fuel oil over the ice road across the Great Bear Lake fell through the ice.

The Great Bear Lake is way up there, at the northern edge of Canada’s Northwest Territories, about 1,000 miles from the U.S. border. It covers 12,000 square miles, the fourth-largest in North America, larger than Lake Huron and Lake Erie. The crash occurred about three miles from Deline, the only settlement on the lake, with a population of about 500 Native Americans.

At the time officials said the ice at the scene was between 2.5 feet and 5.5 feet thick. The lake at that point is 300 feet deep. The driver escaped as the truck sank halfway below the ice. Three days later crews drained the truck of 7,900 gallons of fuel oil. Within weeks the truck was dragged from the ice by a crane. An investigation found the truck weighed nearly 9,000 pounds more than the 88,000-pound weight limit for the ice road.                                                                                                  

The obscure, near-tragic incident resonated with a fragment of memory.  My son Michael and I visited Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, on a fishing trip 16 years ago. That was in June. The Great Slave Lake, near Yellowknife, was still thawing out. We talked about going back, but never did. The vast distance, the rough-edged remoteness, discourages travel. 

I found the story when I looked up the weather in Yellowknife. Midweek last week it was -38F according to weather.com, with a “feels like” temp of -54F.

News reports of the accident said that temperature changes and variations in the density of the fuel could have added to the truck’s weight. Authorities were understanding, you might say forgiving. No charges were brought against the driver or the company that owned the truck.

Meanwhile Lent, the season of penance, started with Ash Wednesday. Churches, judging from the parking lots, were crowded. We have lots of them here, in some neighborhoods clusters of two or three.

Penance, we’ve learned, is the opening of the heart hoping for forgiveness–always hard, sometimes excruciating. In an episode of the British TV drama Law and Order UK, the obnoxious prosecutor loses a big case and ends up in church, then in the confession box. “Bless me, Father,” he says, as the show ends. The scene hints at humility, the redemptive virtue that leads us to penance. All those Ash Wednesday preachers reminded us.

In the Old Testament book of Genesis (chapters 37-45), Joseph lives with his father, Israel, and brothers in Canaan. Because he is his father’s favorite, his brothers hate him and sell him as a slave in Egypt. Through hard work he becomes a high official in Pharoah’s family. When famine afflicts Canaan the brothers travel to Egypt to beg for food. They don’t recognize Joseph, but he knows and helps them. Later he reveals himself, and intercedes with Pharoah to allow them to settle in Egypt. Joseph reunites with his father, who weeps with joy.

Joseph’s story typically is cited as a lesson in forgiveness. It was an easy sermon on Ash Wednesday and a central theme of Christianity and every other spiritual tradition. That could also be because we see it in stark relief to the tenor of public life at this moment: anger, depression, fear. Things are not working out well in America.

But then. A friend lost her mother to Alzheimer’s after caring for her and her father for years, years of nights away from home. The memorial service was packed. “She’s in a better place,” her grandson said. We listened to some Scripture, the pastor’s rhetoric soared. “There’s no darkness in heaven,” he declared. It was that old-time Southern Baptist religion, lifting the congregation at that painful moment.               

A week earlier, the bishop of the Charleston diocese ordained 11 men as deacons, who will assist priests at their home parishes. One was a local guy. It was a happy occasion, a group from our parish drove down. The new deacon came to the Knights of Columbus social and gave a little pep talk. “Do something for Lent,” he said. Show up, be present, witness to goodness, he repeated.

His brief words pointed at the ancient lesson taught by all spiritual traditions, that men and women are led through faith to discover the truth about the universe, the nature of humanity, man and his destiny, the meaning of salvation.

I wrote last week about the hoopla over the Buddhist monks’ walk to Washington. We guessed they left something with a few people, maybe more than a few. There must be something to be said for bare feet pounding on asphalt and concrete for 108 winter days.

So we wait for signs and special moments, beacons of change. A grand jury of everyday citizens refused to indict six members of Congress, military veterans under Trump attack for reminding service members of their obligation to refuse illegal orders. The jury members stood up for the law.

I thought of the bizarre symmetry, the terrifying cracking of the ice beneath the overweight truck in Canada ten years ago and the metastasizing obtuseness of government.

Still, Lent’s solemnity is gaining ground. The Ash Wednesday services were crowded. The priest didn’t try for eloquence but offered the schedule of observances, then sat down. It was time for the simple, brutal ritual, the black crosses scratched on foreheads. He took his chair for a moment of meditation, then stood with the deacons and the young servers. We rose silently and waited for the blessing.