Blog

My favorite time of the year is watching the ice go out. By the looks of the black ice this morning and the open water along the shore, we only have a few days left to go.

A flock of ducks flew overhead this morning, disappointed that there was nowhere to land…

I’ve been swimming every evening since a heat wave hit the northwoods. After a cold blustery June, it seemed like summer was never going to come. Then hot and humid weather arrived at the beginning of July—it was 80-90 for a week straight (the 4^th of July parade in Tower was stifling)—and the water in the lake warmed up fast.

But no matter how warm the weather gets, it’s still a shock to dive into Lake Vermilion. And by shock I mean a good, wake-up-the-soul, shake-off-the-cobwebs kind of shock. It’s so enlivening to leap off the dock into that cold glacial lake and have the oppressive heat instantly washed away. For a moment I feel like the kid I was back in the 1960’s leaping off my Grandpa and Grandma Wilson’s dock on Lower Hay Lake north of Brainerd.

I like to swim just before sunset.  I took this photo last night from our dock, facing west toward Daisy Island.  I was about to dive in…

Hello,

Welcome to my new website. Thanks to my son Reid’s redesign, my site has a new look along with a journal/blog, which he claims is a necessity for a writer in the current publishing world. So though I’m more of a traditionalist, who’s spent more writing hours in front of a typewriter than a laptop, here goes…