My brother read my diary when I was eight, teased me at dinner in front of my parents and that was the end of the diary. It can be a dangerous business…
Browsing Tag
new novel
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My parents died two years ago within a month of one another. I didn’t realize the grounding their physical presence gave me until they were gone. They were my connection to childhood,…
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Lumberjacks were lousy with bedbugs and lice. Common knowledge in the 1880’s was to avoid the hemlock tree. Lumberjacks thought this slow-growing, long-lived evergreen that lent elegance to the landscape brought blood-sucking…
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Consume 9000 calories a day? Lumberjacks did. My grandfather, Wilhelm F. Hartman, cooked meals for Michigan’s lumberjacks from 1886 until well into the 1920’s. When this experienced woodsman made breakfast for his…
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Lumberjacks at one time in Michigan’s history were as common in beer joints as millennial men are today. The ‘jacks of a hundred years ago share a similar language with men today…
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Last October I walked through Woodmere Cemetery near Standish snapping photos of grave markers, looking for my great grandmother’s stone. I tramped along the track that looped through the grounds and found…
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Meet my grandfather, Wilhelm F. Hartman, oldest son of Frederick and Wilhelmina Hartman. He left the Port of Bremen in Germany in October of 1882 with his mother and two brothers, and…