Author: Vic Socotra

Joy in a Time of Challenge

Here at Refuge Farm we celebrate a morning of Joy with a time of challenges. You know some of them, and we do not claim to know them all. We know that we have affirmed our faith in the glory of a universe in which we hurtle through the void on a living globe filled […]

Henderson Field

(Splash had this montage of old pictures of a little airfield in the Southwest Pacific. It is now called “Honiara International. American Marines called it something else a number of years ago.) Our Attorney had business of her own elsewhere. It is a weekend, and she had “business elsewhere,” which we assumed to be personal […]

New World in the Morning

Moscow sunk. No kidding. In the draft to this, the Writer’s Section used a sailor expression rather than the sanitized version. We held off in the account yesterday morning of shouting “Moskva Sunk!“ which was part of the narrative that was going around. It was such a dramatic story the group thought it was probably […]

Navigating a New World

(Slava-class warship Moskva in the Bosphorus last year, looking better than this morning, by report). We tried to swing the conversation away from Ukraine in the Weather Report this week. You saw a glimpse of the drumbeat from overseas. China is restive. Japan is considering re-orienting its military, once strictly limited to defensive purposes since […]

Weather Report: Spring Dislocation!

This is a day to celebrate country living! The Spring is upon us in spurts that remind us that progress is erratic at times, but the process is immutable. They say things will cool again in a few days, back in sweaters on the back deck for smoke breaks we call “bird watching.” That sounds […]

Life & Island Times: Beach & Bonaventure

With the Empire’s cooperative spring weather and good fortune, we took W’s mother out to lunch along Tybee Island’s North Beach. It was a splendid way to pass an afternoon on one of her last days with us here in the Empire. We added a brief side tour of the island’s funky junk stores. With […]

Field Investigation

We had the meeting late this morning, since two of us had to go perform a Field Investigation. Normally, that involves putting down the steaming mug of Chock Full O’ Nuts and looking southeast down across the pasture now starting to shout brilliant GREEN in the placid Piedmont Spring awakening. This was a different matter, […]

Arrias: Earl Weaver, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vlad Putin

Editor’s Note: I keep feeling like we are trapped in a high school “Modern European History” seminar when we covered the Great War and Depression in like, two or three class periods and everyone went “How could some conflict about an execution of some prince guy in a country none of has has heard of […]

Fact Checking the Queen

(Mac chats with a nice English lady at the Dedication of the World War II Memorial at Arlington) It is a weekend, and we watched a moderately old film on the flat screen we share in the Bunk House at Refuge Farm. We have a cis-gendered sort of viewing schedule, carefully adjusted to the possible […]

Life & Island Times: Emmet Park — A Palm Sunday Stroll

W and her mom had finished their Palm Sunday devotions and were raring to eat at a small place along Bay Street much beloved by locals — B Matthews. With tables scarce for brunch, we decided to spend our hour-wait strolling the park across the street. Overlooking the Savannah River, Emmet Park was renamed in […]