The Good Wolf of the North

As Bob Seger would say "Now seventeen has turned thirty-one." Or in my case, thirty-two. Even better is this weirdo lyric by Ringo Star : "Now I'm only thirty-two and all I want to do, is boogaloo!" Whatever that means, but I guess I'm on board. I know that Age is just a number, a tally, and really quite meaningless, but I do feel different now that I've been thirty-two for two days. I guess it occurred to me that I am no longer on the fence, I am in my thirties now. I feel more confident, more solid. Once I was glass, but now I'm crystal, and more likely to chip than to shatter.  It's not that my values have changed a ton over the years. Ten years ago I was going to nursing school and writing on the side. I was a vegetarian and spent every moment with my faithful first love, Shera the dog. I was exploring the woods every chance I got, roaming the streets, partying and making bad romantic choices. If you held up a mirror to my twenty-two year o

Oh, the woods, how I miss them. To help make myself more complacent, agreeable, pleasant, I have started studying foraging. Now I know exactly how to identify a fiddle head fern and when to harvest it. I also know that you can eat pertinear every part of the cattail at some point during the year. I also know how to make Sumac lemonade. Are you impressed? So now I'm getting ready to stroll through one of the many metro area parks and start identify the flora. Of course I wouldn't eat it. Lord knows what's in the dirt it's growing from, or in the case of aquatic plants, the water.  Flash back to age 23: I was a young whip snap just out of nursing school and starting my first job at a nursing home. I was asked to witness the destruction of some meds and found there was a whole station devoted to flushing expired and discontinued meds into the sewer. My reaction was "Really? We just dump the meds into the water? What is this, 1895?" I know things are changing and

This is it. My first novel. I guess that's not true, I wrote three others when I was just a youngster. The first, written at the age of 10 or so, was about a big shot who crashed his private jet, resulting in the loss of his legs. Soon after, said big shot meets the woman of his dreams at McDonalds where she's ordering from the value menu. They marry and live happily ever after. A classic tale of unexpected fortune lost among the coloring books. The second novel I wrote when I was 17, it was titled Eighteen. It was about a bunch of teenagers traveling out to California. Once they get there they lived in a ramshackle shed on the beach. Before long that desperate teenage drama ensues and they go their separate ways, but not before one of them gets run over by a bus. The third, written when I was 19, is about a girl who moves to the big city and falls in love with a drug dealer who looks like Eminem, or at least he did in my mind. Between the age of 19 and 28 is an abyss in which

Well, it's been two years. I like to take my time in doing things, or so it would seem, but so much has changed since the beginning of the beginning, and why was the beginning marked by my graduation from college with an English degree? I mean, really, it wasn't. There is no beginning, there is only the idea that we get another chance to do things better. First of all, I changed the name of my blog from The Archer's Mark to The Good Wolf for the following reasons: 1) I have been a vegetarian for fifteen years and the connotations of an Archer contradict my morals in more ways than they compliment it. 2) Wolves are amazing and I love them. 3) I have always liked the legend (Cherokee?) about the two wolves. It goes like this:   A grandfather was explaining to his grandson that there are two wolves fighting inside of him, as there is in everyone. One is greed, sorrow, pity, envy, anger and hate. The other is kindness, patience, humility, trust, generosity and love. When th