At the beginning the hours spent in the waiting room were simple boredom. She had gone in for what was to be a routine surgery. I heard my name paged and then a telephone conversation. I began to shake and the breathing became hard. I listened to the surgeons words. The hours passed and night […]

We had made a track that looped down the dirt driveway, around the weathered outbuilding and through the cottonwood trees. My great grandparents had homesteaded this bit of Nebraska at the turn of the century. Stories were told of my grandmother as a young girl driving the plow horses as they dug the hole which […]

Late fall and it was sugar beet harvest. My father arranged for me to drive a harvest truck for one of the local farmers from Basin City, George Matsumura. I had driven a truck with a 1900 gallon water tank for all summer so I had an idea on how to handle an overloaded vehicle. […]

The bleached white rocks crunched under foot as I walked down the road. A layer of rock had recently been added to cover the clay earth that would turn into slick and undriveable muck with every rain. On either side were waist-high green wheat fields that moved musically with the wind. Nebraska has sky that […]

An eleven year old boy stood in the wings behind three others of the same age. We all wore long white gowns over our swimsuits. I remember the heavy burgundy curtains as they brushed my arm and the detail of the pastoral mural that arched along the wall. The congregation sat in rows behind the […]