My first experience with the power of prayer came at the tender age of about 4 or 5. My parents had always taught me to pray and we had many family prayers but, this is the very earliest I remember of having such a direct correlation of a prayer and a...

On the road...again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Those Fruitful Lunch Hours   Over the years, the Footloose Forester had developed a modus operandi for achieving some of his planned free time activities.  He was not unlike other people who had both...

The Msub serves as an exceptional example of a robust mountain bike designed for stand-up riding. I recently embarked on a thrilling journey alongside Joe, covering a challenging 4-mile ascent that laid the groundwork for an exhilarating downhill experience. The decision to remain standing throughout the ride added an extra layer...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Resentment-update Why do acts of resentment linger in our memories?  We remember our most shameful acts, we remember our failings, and we remember our most embarrassing moments.  And it is also indisputable that at some level of consciousness,...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   KMB662…939…4-16   He remembers faces and most names, but not all.  Those mental blocks explain a person’s propensity to block certain unpleasant memories but do not explain the inability to recall happy events from the past. When it...

What Can I Give Him?   Christmas Eve: Circa 1934 A Country Church             Jack and Shug Carriker, their six kids packed into their old 1928 Star Car, pulled into the bare dirt parking lot of a little church located in the countryside about halfway between Drumright and Oilton, Oklahoma. ...

    Though I am dog tired from a day trip to Virginia to check on my 90-year-old Aunt Eunice, I want to share with you an amazing instance of synchronicity (if such be a word).     I made the trip from Ohio for the nursing home’s Christmas Party today.  Here is...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Smoke Along The Rubicon Trail     From among the few categories that form the framework of the storyteller’s letterhead of the Footloose Forester: Essays, Stories, Adventure, Dreams , this chronicle and a delicious story is based...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Deforestation, Reforestation, and Afforestation   The continuous evolution of digital technology across written, audio, and pictorial media has resulted in each medium of expression having an ever-improving capability to create and to share our personal expressions of...

The Merry Cherry Farm, Williamston, North Carolina ​ The green John Deere tractor coughs to life like a prehistoric animal awakening from a dormant winter.  Its long, pipe-like nostril sends smoke out the metallic lid, creating a faint ding, ding, ding that can be heard from the sleeping windows of the...

Passages: Large families: Thanksgivings. Many years of lots of noise, Lots of family around - conversations solving world's problems - crowded house - seated cheek to cheek around a large table with a "children's" table off to the side. Years pass. Those children who were seated off to one side or...

When I was 14 or 15, I started working in the family business started by my grandfather and run, at that time, by my father.  I continued to work in the business through college.  In the first semester of my sophmore year of college, I was facing a dilemma I had...

Chapter 8 Back to Marsham     We lost dear mum in nineteen fifty seven.  She died from cancer aged sixty four.  I was heartbroken.  Two years later, I married Jean.  A few years after being married, I took my wife Jean and my first born to Marsham to see Queenie...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Eureka! Koa is a Superstar Getting to travel into rural areas in The Third World gives the traveler a perspective you won’t find in the glossy photos of glamorous magazines. Whereas most people can relate to a stroll...

Killed in Action   I was just about leaving for work the next day, when a telegram arrived.  I didn't want to open it as they were always bad news.  My mind went back to the time when we received one telling us that Joe had been wounded.  I opened it...

 Brothers in Arms               In spring of nineteen forty four, Fred came home on leave, after completing his initial army training.  Just like Joe and Charlie, he had sprung up pretty quickly only more so.  He must have been about six foot two and he seemed to have filled out...

The Army Call Up In the May 1942, Joe received his call-up papers.  He too, just like Charlie, had to join the infantry (PBI) he had to do his initial six weeks training at Tidworth, in Hampshire.  Joe now being in the Rifle Brigade was always kept on his toes, as...

Moving Back to Bethnal Green     All us evacuees were given the choice to go back home, once we had reached the age of fourteen.  Fourteen was the age for leaving school and starting work.  My birthday being in March, meant that it wouldn't be long before I would be...

Angels and Heroes Exercise "Feeling Gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it." - William Arthur Ward   An 'Angel' is the one whose kindness and love sustained you as you have grown, faced difficult times and personal loss. A 'Hero' is the one who inspired you...

A Family at War   In the spring the following year, I suppose that I had been evacuated about eight months by then, another kind of evacuation was taking place.  Everybody seemed to be talking about Dunkirk.  Ted Clarke told me about how we were sending boats across the channel, all...