Columns

With each passing year, I feel even more blessed to be well enough to take an autumnal sojourn with my Lady Jane, this past October, to our border state of Michigan. In that state, the nation’s 11th largest, when the talk comes around to peninsulas, it’s all about the Upper and Lower to either side of the Mackinac Bridge that serves as a five-mile-long line of demarcation.

My number of new friends has exploded in recent weeks. All of a sudden I’m incredibly popular. It’s staggering.

In Ohio, real estate agents must be licensed with the Ohio Department of Commerce. There are two types of licenses for real estate agents in Ohio: real estate salesperson or real estate broker. Each real estate salesperson is required to be affiliated with at least one real estate broker.

Busy is a word we all use this time of year.

It was never as high-profile as “Rudolph” or “Frosty,” but it’s worth noting that the animated special “The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas” turns 50 on December 17.

As I was reading about the current legal challenges regarding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, I, and I’m sure many others, immediately thought about the triumphant Selma-to-Montgomery March in Alabama 58 years ago. Over 2,000 civil rights marchers led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his wife Coretta, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and a young John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during their 54-mile trek to Montgomery to push for national legislation to protect the rights of Blacks to vote. A little over a century had passed since the Emancipation Proclamation, and African Americans, while citizens by law, were still suffering great injustice in the Deep South. The Voting Rights Act was needed as a safeguard while exercising their God-given right to fully participate in our nation’s democracy. When the VRA was initially enacted on August 6, 1965, it was viewed as upholding the 15th Amendment, which bars the federal government and states from denying a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act brought a legal end to the southern Jim Crow laws. Since the late 60s, the VRA has been amended five times, but now the core of this landmark measure is in serious jeopardy.

I have never been a big cheese, even in my own house, but my house is now home to a big cheese — a box of Vermont cheddar — which recently arrived on my doorstep thanks to a lovely lady with big brown eyes, long lashes and a beefy figure.

A common question is repeated these days from Alaska to Maine: What will we do with the leftover turkey? It’s as much a part of the holiday tradition as the dressing and pumpkin pie.

While news stories these days are largely centered on Israel’s war with Hamas and a bumbling, stumbling, president who rarely makes any sense, the COVID virus still afflicts us. This fact became all too real when I recently contracted it (despite being previously vaccinated I might add).

While the origins of many words and expressions are often easy to pin down, others are shrouded in a blanket of vagaries. Often the best that can be determined by etymologists is when the word or expression first began to be used, and such is the case with the term “tall tale.”