I was born in the upper peninsula of Michigan on the Lake Superior side. We had a little cabin 12 miles out of town that my dad had ordered from Florida, and it was shipped to Michigan. And it had flaps on all four sides, so it was very difficult to heat—impossible to heat. But it had a very shallow roof which meant we had to go out there in the middle of winter and shovel off the roof so…
I grew up on a farm. We’re sitting out on the deck the other night and it just brought me back to the old farmhouse. My mother loved to sit out on the top porch deck in the evenings, and we would sit there—my brother, myself, and my mother—and those warm summer nights just watching the fireflies and the satellites. In those days satellites were a big thing, to see them go over. And I remember the creak of the…
I was raised in southern Indiana. And we have the knobs. The knobs aren’t as big as mountains, but they’re rolling hills. And a ranger told us that during the ice age, the reason we have such a variety of colors in trees is the way the ice age was. People go to the north east, that’s all red. But in my area of the country, it’s a full color spectrum: you have the reds, the oranges, the yellows, it’s absolutely…
Mother had a black cast iron Dutch oven. And their home had burned when she was a child, and that was the only thing that was salvaged from her home. And later she gave me that cast iron Dutch oven. If you’ve done any reading, cast iron is very good nutritionally. The iron comes off in your food, and it’s healthy for you to cook in cast iron.
I don’t know if it’s what you’d call a treasured possession, but it was at the time. I was about, oh, fifth grade or so, and my parents finally agreed to let us have a dog. They got that way because the neighbor’s dog had puppies and we were pestering them to get a dog, so you know how that goes. So we walked over to the neighbor’s and picked out a puppy. It was some kind of collie…
This was difficult for me. Everything that I have is a treasured possession. Everything I see, I can think about making something out of it, or working with it, or creating something in some way. So I guess the possession I have that I should be talking about is creation. I’m always wanting to create something. Every house I’ve ever owned has needed to be rebuilt, so I’ve set about doing it. It’s everything I find: “I could use that…
Well, I keep a small black stone in a creature bag at home. I found her illegally on a mound in 1992, and what I love about her is she sits in the palm of my hand if I hold her and—it’s a her, the stone—I get it out of the bag anytime I need a mother. My mother’s long gone, but I call this my mother stone, and she just sits there and I think about it for a…
Describe a treasured possession. I’ve got all kinds of stuff. Tools, things I’ve had for years, so I just grabbed something off the top of my head. I picked this mayonnaise spatula. My parents had a sandwich restaurant back in the ‘70s and I think I just got it out of Mom’s drawer before any of the other kids, and I don’t know if they would have wanted it or not. But, you know, it’s just been around for so…
I think my prized possession at the moment is probably a notebook that I’ve had for a really long time, and it’s small and just…it’s pretty simple. Our neighbors who live up the street who we don’t know very well had kids, and they’re grown up now, and they had a whole box full of various school supplies that were never used, and they gave it to us. One of them was this notebook, and I used it as my…
When I was younger I got a peacock feather quill for my birthday, and I really liked writing with it a lot. I loved birds when I was younger, I think it reminded me of Harry Potter ‘cause they always write with quills.