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I was taught to identify birds from the paintings of the ornithologist, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, by my older brothers when I was 4 or five 5 years old. My oldest brother, Victor, was fanatically devoted to Purple Martins and claimed to have the largest colony of these swallows in the
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Florida’s ghost orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii) is found only in Florida and Cuba where it requires a highly specialized microclimate to grow and reproduce. When my daughter, Megan, first mentioned a mysterious ghost orchid found in the Florida swamps I had no clue what she was talking about. Due to
The diet in my Amish household in the Ozarks had many of the attributes that are now considered to be a healthy diet. We ate fresh vegetables and fruits in the summer and in the winter we relied heavily on large quantities of canned vegetables and fruit in Mason jars
During their childhood Amish children learn to speak three languages―at least in some measure. Their primary language is Pennsylvania German that originated in the Palatinate region of southwestern Germany and was the language the Amish immigrants brought with them when the earliest settlers arrived in Pennsylvania in 1737. Unfortunately,
My wife, Michele, and I returned from an extended trip to Italy and Vienna where we experienced art and history to the degree not possible in our country, whether seeing an opera in the venerated Teatro de Scala in Milan, the magnificent St. Stephen’s Cathedral from our hotel window
My dad hired a man with a bulldozer to clear land on our 400-acre farm in the Ozarks. When the highest hill on our land was being cleared, dad asked the bulldozer man to spare a red oak tree that stood at the highest point, and that must have
In the early 1950’s my parents, Old Order Amish, moved from southern Michigan to the Ozarks of northern Arkansas. They had found common ground with two other self-exiled families, the Rudy Wickey family from Ohio, also Amish, and the John Martin family from Pennsylvania, Old Order Mennonites. All
When I first became friends with non-Amish people while working at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City, I learned that most people detested travel by bus and avoided it at all costs. As an Amish boy, traveling by bus was exciting, we were introduced to big cities such St.
Diary and Journals I grew up in an Amish family on a farm in the Ozarks where we attended school in a one-room school house. My two younger brothers and I and were called the “three little boys.” When I was nine, a teacher gave me a small five-