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This time “What’s on your mind?” is not a fatuous question on Facebook, it’s a medical matter It started bugging me in April last year, and 14 months later it’s getting on my nerves. I need that like a hole in the head.

A gentle tickle in the face, not bad at all, escalated as the weeks went by. Why was I getting a sore sensation from the upper lip to the right temple?

My Aunt Naomi from the piedmont of South Carolina was visiting my mother in Southern Georgia. I wanted to see her, too, so I invited my parents and Aunt Naomi over for a cookout at my house. Aunt Naomi had been the victim of a stroke some years earlier and had some problems from time to time with speech, but hadn’t aged much, except for long gray hair that resembled Emmylou Harris.

There’s something about being a writer that leads people to confide in me. Think about that. Why tell a writer, a person who uses life itself as raw material, your deepest secrets. But tell me they do, and sometimes their secrets break my heart.

Through my writing and books, I meet a lot of people. Some become friends. I’ve come to know women who confided in me just how much they hated their father. They had reason. So they say. Several told me…

“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but [humans need] both.” — Fritjof Capra

A conflict between “science” and “pseudoscience” is now playing out on the national stage. The conversation is long overdue. I speak of the recent flap surrounding two TED lectures on the nature of consciousness — by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock — that were initially removed from YouTube because TED’s scientific curators deemed them “pseudoscience.”

This morning a little before noon, he went gently from the ledge, dear…

As I sit here wondering how I can talk about my “best boy” Hankie without being overly sentimental, I can’t help but cry knowing that my companion who was pushing fourteen is no longer with us. He showed us he still had a voice just a few days ago when he barked as I was brushing him.

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.” So goes a sentence from The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges, one of South America’s most influentials writers of the twentieth-century.

I was reading this short story this morning when Robert, a fellow who lives nearby and operates heavy machinery and drives a large dump truck, arrived with four cubic yards of mulch I had ordered earlier in the week. I met Robert and his brother David nearly twenty years ago…

With a few holes to fill in our new book Robert Clark and I headed to western South Carolina Wednesday, May 29. We went directly to Lincolnton where we used sister Brenda’s home as a base camp. After a visit with my mom we set out for McCormick. As soon as we turned off Highway 220 onto 378 the sky turned a menacing yellow. Soon the smell of burning woods filled the car and Robert spotted a cloud a bit different from the rest.