By Kellie Flanagan — MOUNTAIN AREA — I mumbled something about picking up a daisy bush at the nursery and grabbed my keys, knowing full well there were baby chicks at the feed store. I flew down the canyon to arrive before closing and, sure enough, under a bright light there they were, my hope for the future of the ...
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Forget The Turkey, Save Yourself!
Five Ways to Thrive This Thanksgiving – ANYTOWN, USA – This is the time of year we gather in America to express our gratitude and bond over turkey and football. Glossy magazines decorate the aisles of overflowing supermarkets, resplendent with cornucopia, while malls stock up on stocking stuffers as Black Friday looms and the season of consumption begins. The juggernaut ...
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Yesterday began with a morning job, meant to be finished before it got too hot outside. It ended up with a realization. Chores do that, sometimes. Our first spring in the foothills, we got chicks and I became sort of a self-styled chicken whisperer. Every spring since, until this year, I’ve had baby chicks in my office well past their ...
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Green Acres: Mountain Living At Its Finest – PROXIMITY One of the great and not-so-great things about living in a smallish town is that you may know everybody and everybody probably knows you. Give an errant driver the one-finger salute in the morning and guaranteed, by afternoon, you’ll run into that same friendly neighbor in some business or school or ...
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GREEN ACRES: Mountain Living at its Finest SNAMP Riding shotgun in the big truck on a bumpy forest road, I kept the window down. The smell of incense cedar warming up in the morning sun: that’s a great whiff. For half the trip my main thought was “man, this would never happen back in LA.” This was totally in my ...
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We’d always intended to move to the country, whatever that meant. Long before we married, Rugged Husband built a small, two-story cabin at Twin Lakes, outside of Bridgeport, off Highway 395. This was his parents’ retirement hideaway. Wes and Eunie spent countless hours fishing off an old MacGregor skiff. They played Pinochle and baked apple pies. Evenings, the ex-Navy carpenter ...
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THis trip was becoming a disaster and I could not have been happier. 3:00 a.m. and water pelted down hard on the tent. So loud it sounded like someone pummeling REI’s best with a rug-beater, sheets of Sierra rain hit and ran down toward Bass Lake. We were camping, my rugged husband and I, at an age when some people ...
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