An Arkies Musings

My An Arkie's Faith column from the August 18, 2021, issue of The Polk County Pulse. It was a cold, murky, November day, and nineteen-year-old Duane was knee-deep in the mud of a French beet field. He was bandaging men and dodging bullets as the only medic with a machine-gun platoon of Patton’s Third Army. Machine-gun rounds and intense mortar fire filled the evening air as the young medic worked, rapidly bandaging the lacerated chest of a sergeant. Suddenly a burst of gunfire split the air, and Duane saw a rifleman about fifty feet ahead slump into the mud, desperately grasping his throat. He saw that the man was thrashing violently, and immediately started crawling through the mortar barrage and machine-gun rounds. When Duane reached the rifleman, he found that his throat was ripped open, and his windpipe slashed. The injured man fought frantically for air, but his face was turning blue from suffocation. Duane quickly examined the wound, then took out his pocketknife. He had no s...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the August 11, 2021, issue of The Polk County Pulse. The little girl with curly golden hair carefully made her way down the steep stairs the went from the kitchen to the basement. She had asked Mommy if she could go downstairs to see Grandma. She loved spending time with her Grandma and could not remember a time when Grandma didn’t live in the basement at the bottom of the stairs. When the little girl with curly golden hair stepped into the dimly lit basement, she saw Grandma sitting in a chair, sewing quilt blocks together. Grandma’s eyes lit up as she looked up and saw her granddaughter. Setting down her sewing, Grandma said, “come here and let me pick you up.” She set the little girl on the very high bed with two mattresses. The girl loved Grandma’s bed because it was so high that she felt like a princess when she was on it. Sometimes Grandma asked the little girl to spend the night, and she looked forward to sleeping with Grandma on the very high...

 My An Arkie's Faith column from the August 4, 2021, issue of The Polk County Pulse. My phone dinged, notifying me that I had a text message. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and checked my messages. The text from my wife showed photos of pallets of sod in my backyard, with workers laying the sod in nice even rows. “It’s finally happening,” I thought. “We have been waiting a long time.”  Over a year ago, we started a renovation project in our backyard. Our house is almost thirty years old, and the deck at the back of the house had deteriorated. I decided to replace the deck with Trex composite decking. After replacing the decking, we planned to pour a cement patio below the raised composite deck. I called several concrete finishers but could not get anyone to make a bid on the project. After several months, I learned about someone who did concrete work, and I hired him to pour the slab and build steps. The job that he did was terrible. Several people who saw the finished pr...