Table Of Contents

Those Were the Days, Dorothy C. Forsberg
Untitled, Howard Perry
The Visit, Pauline Borton
The Third Chair Clarinet Player, Marione Boller
Growing Up In Bosnia, Fatima Becic
The Day of the Seiche, Brian Forster
Growing Up on the Wapsie, Carol Stephens Bottin
My Most Memorable Christmas, Vanella Byrd
A Glimpse of Life in Country Schools, Esther Timm
The Oilcloth on the Kitchen Table, Iva Fratzke
Mom’s Table, Kenneth Main
Herding Turkeys, Ruth Hubbard
The Very Best Christmas Ever, Pauline Borton
Wash Day, Iva Fratzke
You can take the girl away from the farm, but you can’t take the farm away from the girl, Colleen Liming  
The Case of the Disappearing Rod and Reel, James H. Newcomer

Fiction:
The Journey, Frankie Tjarks
Christmas Cards, Patricia Gourley
The Old Springhouse, Joan Sutula

Poetry:
Snow Daze, Marion Slee. Clark
Bringing Home the Babies, Pauline Borton
Seventy-Five, Nadine J. Wait
A Tribute to My Wife, D.W. Hansberger
Snip Shots (or Silhouettes), Marie C. Cook
My Time, Marie C. Cook
Rivulets, Marie C. Cook
My Mother’s Hands, Opal Abbott
Untitled, Don Benson

Untitled
Howard H. Perry, Age 93

I grew up in northern Wisconsin, near the little town of Ingram. The only fruit that we had were wild strawberries, wild raspberries, and wild blueberries.

Every fall about Labor Day, a local store keeper had a box car of apples shipped in by railroad. My parents would buy two bushels of apples and then store them in the dirt cellar under our house.

About Thanksgiving time we started using them. My mother would tell me to light the lantern and bring four apples from the cellar. Her last instruction would be to "Be sure and bring up apples with brown spots on them." I understood that brown spots on apples indicated that they were ready to be used.

One time when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I sneaked a good apple out of the basket and ate it in the woodshed. It was there that I made a discovery that I deemed of equal importance with Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of the Law of Gravity when a falling apple hit him on the head.

I discovered that apples without brown spots tasted as good as, and were more eatable that apples with brown spots.

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