Good morning, Gentle Readers! It has been quiet since the 4th of July, which used to be a fairly large holiday here in the United States of America. Which is not quite as united as they used to be, but that seems the nature of things these days. The President traveled yesterday to deliver an […]

Tuesdays are a cool day. Well, hot if you are in the Piedmont of Virginia. The Writing Staff could feel it’s embrace growing amid the mild wisp of smoke rising down by the Loading Dock, one of the centers of our human interaction. It used to be that way in the public buildings of your […]

We were doing the reading this bright and sunny Monday morning to try to grapple with what is going on in this wild and exciting world. The Writing Section betrayed bewilderment at some it- you know, grunts and intermittent groaning. A whiff of tobacco smoke from those most recently returned from the Loading Dock area […]

The humidity is hovering on the upper end of the dew point we like best. There will be a couple months of swelter coming, the steamy languor of Virginia’s Piedmont summer. But that is a constant in these parts. The other part that is not usual is the scope and drama associated with the generational […]

History was big this week. Yesterday, they carefully dismantled the statues down in Charlottesville of General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Those two were fairly big in Refuge Farm history, since General Lee started his campaign toward Gettysburg here, and just over at Cedar Mountain, Jackson got some of his reputation. The cast-metal statues […]

Do you still read the paper? I mean, do you trundle past the front door and actually open it to stoop and retrieve a bundle of newsprint to scan while pouring scalding coffee down your gullet? It used to be normal. It has been a journey. Decades ago, I was a New York Times subscriber, […]

I don’t know about your viewing habits, but as a retiree, I find ‘staying up late’ to be anything beyond eight o’clock in the evening. I try to catch Tucker Carlson when the evening medication has not dulled my senses overmuch, but can’t say I often make it beyond the introductory monologue. Last night was […]

Socotra House LLC wants to express regret for a delay in new Footnotes to explain that we have no animus to any of the screwy ideas now festooning our public life. The disturbance in the Intern Bunkhouse was unfortunate, law enforcement was not called, due to problems with potential selective enforcement, and we wish to […]

The Holiday- the one yesterday that commemorates the ouster of the British King from these shores- enabled abolitionists to outlaw the abominable institution that still scars our world. It took a while- the better part of a century and the end or undoing of nearly a million lives to do it. Every family was affected […]

(The Gnome at lower left signifies his allegiance in Arlington with pride). The current malaise abroad in the land is sort of astonishing. You haven’t even heard the term “malaise” in a couple decades. We know it from former President Jimmy Carter’s speech in 1979, the year I was living on an old ship in […]