For three days and nights my wife worked. She pricked her fingers with pins and needles. She went without sleep at night and soldiered through the next days with those hollow zombie eyes, cooking food and making sure the boys stayed reasonably clean, as clean as any 4- and 5-year-old needs to stay during summer break. She measured their bodies while they slept. And once, that I know of, she trotted up above the garden with a ruler to get readings on Fools, the goat eating the tree line up there. 

It doesn’t matter if Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Lee Harrell wins his defamation suit against Sunny Daze owners Michael and Linda Dix. His boss won’t regardless of the outcome.
Harrell filed a civil suit against the convenience store owners, asking for $600,000 - $500,000 in punitive and $100,000 in compensatory damages – because a Web site maintained by the Dixes claims Harrell lied in court. 

This black oil has nothing to do with gas prices.
In the hands of Roni Pattison, it’s a shadow, an eyelash, a boulder.
Combined with other oils in blues, reds and yellows, it becomes a vibrant portrait of a grinning child or a grazing horse.

I was kind of hoping that just maybe No. 756 wouldn’t happen. 

Impossible as it seems, I heard a Christmas carol playing on the radio last week reminding us that it’s less than four months until the official start of the 2007 holiday season on the day after Thanksgiving. Rather than encouraging me to hurry out and complete my Christmas shopping early this year, it reminded me of Jimmy Stewart portraying George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was originally produced in 1946 yet is replayed every Christmas season.  Stewart wonders what would make his life more perfect and searches for happiness and satisfaction in all the wrong places instead of right in front of his eyes.

Look out Judge Thomas O. Jones. The Democrats and Republicans, the ones who in the spirit of bipartisanship voted for “civil remedial fees” aimed at bad Virginia drivers, are bound to head off on an “activist judge” witch hunt soon. 

A limited number of tickets for tonight’s sixth annual Agape Food Pantry Concert & Dessert are still available at the Wytheville Office Supply on Main Street in Wytheville. Tickets for the 7 p.m. performance cost $20 per person.

Photo by Dan Kegley
Brenda Umbarger, executive assistant of operations at Smyth-Bland Regional Library, watches deliverymen position a new sculpture at the front of the main branch Wednesday. Umbarger and library director Patricia Hatfield said they fell in love with “Fallen Log,” a lost-wax cast bronze sculpture by Randolph Rose, when they saw it in an exhibit at a conference in Washington, D.C., in June. The sculptor had reduced the price, and Umbarger said the library’s friends group presented the sculpture to the library. The Randolph Rose Collection is based at the World Arts Center in Yonkers, N.Y. 

This summer, I’ve appreciated the blessings of refrigerated air:
Cold glacial chunks of pink watermelon on a muggy afternoon. A jar of ice-cube-clinking lemonade forming beads and a wet ring on the counter, and which you hold to your hot face before swigging. The lovely, soul-restoring bliss of chilled chocolate milk, falling through the floors of your innards like a rich cold river, bringing old memories and hopes to life.
Then, there’s my car. I have no AC because I rarely used it in my last car, and don’t drive many long stints on the sun-beaten interstate.

The baby bird, according to my youngest, got hit by the swing set.