The Superior Express -

As a young lad my father always wanted a pony. The family owned a summer house on the ocean with a fair–sized lot. The lot was at the edge of town with a sheep farm across the road from the house and a large field beside it. The main problem with hav...

My mother-in-law was raised on a farm. Like many farm girls, she headed for the big city as soon as she was old enough. By the late 1950s, life had not turned out quite as she planned. She returned to her old neighborhood; a single mom with four...

Years ago at my baby shower, my mother-in-law gave me a dozen pre-folded diapers and a dozen flat fold diapers. Checking on line, I find there are many more options for cloth diapers today, but that was all there was back then. Along with the diapers...

When I was in college, I had to take a course in computer programming as a requirement for my major. This would have been fine if the course was in “Basic” language, but the preferred language for mathematics was “Fortran IV.” Back then, compute...

Our house in Pennsylvania was in a valley at the foot of three large hills (probably considered mountains out here on the prairie.) The one to the east had a gentle slope with several rolling hills. Behind the house, facing south, was a hill with...

When I lived in Pennsylvania, the hardwood trees put on quite a show in autumn. Along with the cool weather, harvest and start of many holidays, my drive home from work was full of exciting sights. Starting as I entered a valley, there was a farm...

One of my side ventures when I was traveling was a trip to a Mother Earth News Fair in Wisconsin. I saw it advertised in the magazine and decided to check it out. When I called to purchase tickets, I asked about camping spots. They told me they had s...

When I was young, our gardens were “iffy” at best. While it is impossible to beat a tomato, freshly picked from the vine and eaten while still standing beside the plant, one tomato does not make a salad. Luckily for us, there was a roadside sta...

I use shredded paper as bedding for my livestock in particular my pig. It takes quite a lot of paper to keep a pig happy; much more than an average household can produce. To have enough paper to shred I get the old newspapers and magazines from...

My father was born in Rhode Island in 1915. Like most youth of his time, he was always tinkering with automobiles alongside his father, brother and friends. These vehicles were somewhat different from today’s vehicles. If you have ever watched W...

When I was working at the stable at the Honeymoon Resort, our trail passed a small lake at the top of a steep hill. It then wound down the hill to a marshy area with a pond in the middle of the marsh. Every year large snapping turtles would travel...

As a teenager, summertime meant firemen’s carnivals. Almost every town had a volunteer fire department and one of their main fund raisers was a carnival. Starting after Memorial Day and ending around Labor Day there were few weeks a carnival was u...

Living in the country, laundromats required major effort to ready. You had to gather all the laundry together and haul it several miles. For this reason, we always had our own washers and dryers when I was growing up. When I went off to college,...

When we first moved to Pennsylvania, my mother discovered in the spring the fields were alive with wild strawberries. These strawberries were small but packed with flavor. Although it was time consuming, my mother would go out with a bucket and pick...

When I was about 11 years old, I came home from school to find my mother sitting at the dining room table with an outdated calendar and three picture frames in front of her. The pictures on the calendar were watercolors of birds, probably done by a...

I have always viewed myself as coordinated and at least somewhat graceful. According to my daughter, I am about as graceful as a “bull in a China shop.” I must be somewhat coordinated, however, because I have stayed on bucking horses, and I pla...

When I started my trek, I tried to find actual destinations. Often events were weeks or months apart, so I ended up with many side trips. My first planned stop was in northwestern Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Equine Council has a division dedicated...

When I was very young my brother and I colored a few hard-boiled eggs for Easter. Sometime in the night the Easter Bunny hid our eggs plus many more around the living room. Of course, the ones the bunny brought were prettier than ours, but little...

My original plan when I left Pennsylvania to travel was to follow Route 6 from there to California. After I bought my camper, I headed to AAA for a “trip tick” of the proposed route with accompanying paper maps and travel books. I knew I would tak...

February 12 is Lincoln’s birthday and February 22 is Washington’s. When I was in school, these two days were celebrated separately on the days of their birth. The school halls and classrooms were decorated with silhouettes of the two honorees. We...

One year my husband and I decided to sell Christmas trees in Connecticut with a friend, Rick. We bought an old truck with a tool body on it. After buying two wheels with tires from two different junk yards, we traveled to Pennsylvania to buy 100...

When we first moved from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania, my parents were excited because our 110 acres had many pine trees. They envisioned treks to find the perfect Christmas tree, plucked from their own property. So began the annual Christmas tree hu...

Where I formerly lived in Pennsylvania, most of the fields were fairly small because of the mountains and forests. The fields were wedged between hills and trees and aerial spraying or crop dusting as it is sometimes called, was not a common farming...

During my many travels across the country, I attended several Mother Earth News Fairs. The first one I went to was in Wisconsin. While there, I decided I might be able to work for the fairs and offset my travel expenses. I was told...thanks but most...

My mother had gone to her mother’s for a month-long visit, leaving my father, brother and myself alone to fend for ourselves. I was in charge of the kitchen and all the meal preparation, well at least dinner. I had recently started dating the man (...