What a fine use of time and place Mr. Kamholz makes. Reading him changes your mind. I leave his page rested, reflective and not a little envious of his powers of discovery and pleasure.

Doug writes his heart out in as lovely a love story as I would want to read. Hungry for Wisconsin views and Wisconsin apples, I'm headed to the kitchen to slice and rate a Maryland apple from this year's unusually good crop, maybe a Jazz or a Nittany or an Empire. Thank you, Doug.

Wow! Take me back country roads! Doug writes a 21st century Illinois edition of the New Deal's WPA American Guide Series of America's states. He makes me envious and ready to take to Illinois' backroads again. How much I missed in my long-ago years covering Illinois grace notes for Illinois Times! Reading Doug, I'm primed to go on the road again.

Brilliant! I don't see how you could possibly top this one—but you do each time.I fear the New York Times will steal yo from us.

Thank you! I think I'll not bother. A few years back, when I was still editor of Bay Weekly, an inexperienced writer who'd done a Booth assassination tour offered locally queried me on a story about it. Eventually I agreed and worked on it with her, but all along I had reservations about giving space to the assassin—worse because Lincoln was my neighbor as I lived 14 years in Springfield, Illinois.

Greetings, Karen: I heppily sent your words out widely from New Bay Books Constant Contact account. Shall I add you to the list? For that one or all? Where are your Maryland roots? I was shocked to learn thu a combination of Family Search and the inherited genealogy work of a friend, Dave LInthicum, who now turns out to be my distant cousin, that one English line of my family settled in Anne Arundel County very near the place Bill and I have lived for 34 years.

And what a treat Karen's words are! I'll be sending them along to the family and using them for a new mailing. This book, our first, meant a great deal to me as it was the bridge between my old career—30 years as a newspaper editor—and my new one as a book publisher. Audrey Scharmen had written for Bay Weekly and our thousands of readers since our earliest days, back in 1993, as New Bay Times. Her essays were so comforting, giving a deliberate projection of order to a sometimes unruly world, a little like watching All Creatures Great and Small back on PBS in a new version. Essay by essay she won my, and my readers' hearts. Then she pulled an unprecedented trifecta: first prize (for "local column" in our size range, up to 20k distribution) three years running, each year judged by different press associations around the country. In 2020, when New Bay Books was gestating, Audrey was, alas, no longer with us. But her daughter and son-in-law, Peggy and Michael Lynch, wanted to preserve Audrey's work in a book. Over the years, I had gathered the diaspora of her columns spanning a dozen years. Meanwhile, I had discovered that the multi-talented artist Suzanne Shelden—of Calvert County, Maryland, where Audrey and her aviator husband Merrill lived the last chapter of their lives—made books as well as paintings. The forces combined to produce Arpeggio of Redwings, named by Peggy Scharmen Lynch from a line in one of Audrey's most moving essays inside cover art Peggy had also created. Thank you, Karen, for sharing with many Marylanders the thrill of Audrey's work.

If Towles' Studebaker changes color on the road, did he need an editor or it get a paint job? Maybe I'll read to find out. If I've got that much time on my hands. Was not a fan of Gentleman, which I started (and dropped) twice. But I've just finished Gwen Florio's The Truth of It All (more to come about that good book) and am bookless—except for New Bay Books' many diverse and thrilling authors, who I read every day.

I had no interest in Gentleman, but this title is making me want to snatch the book out of Bill's hand. Now, given what Karen has to say, I'm not so sure. Maybe The Four Winds instead. But not until I finish Gwen Florio's The Truth of It All, my third by this Montana author and journalist, each unfolding in a different context, two with Montana and two with Iraq as settings or points of conflict.

As close as I am to this evocative description, I want to be closer. I want a place at the table. This scene, this experience, shaped young Mary Louise's future as she herself moved to Chesapeake Country, Churchton in southern Anne Arundel County, and found a new identity as a writer, covering oysters, crabs and Maryland life for New Bay Times/Bay Weekly. No surprise that her book of those writings, published by New Bay Books in 2021, is titled My Date with an Oyster and Other Stories of a DC girls discovering Chesapeake Country.

Oh boy! What fun!

Surprise! I expected naked dogs

Send a picture …

Ah, thank you for another way of looking at it. Mine is always of the moment rather than of the life.

I love clock-less days when I can live in the eternal present until the sun persuades me of time's passing. But calendar-less days, pleasant as they can be in the present, slip into the void of history. I can take a portion of their disappearance, but too much scares me.

Fascinating. I love your collection. Mine is verbs, but it's packed away in Bay Weekly's files. What a wonderful construct you're making into a story. Admirable method. Enviable discipline. Do share some of the story, please. And thank you for starting this forum. I think it will become something.