Never use harsh abrasives on your cast iron skillets. Here, our border collies Diggity and Lucky show how it's done at our cabin.

An oak leaf I found on a recent walk out behind our cabin. The leaves surrounding it are maple leaves.

I made you a leaf arrangement I think you'll enjoy. The big yellow leaf is a tulip poplar, the reddish leaves are sassafras and the orange one is sour wood. I found these leaves while walking through the forest last week.

While looking for locust logs, I pried a piece of bark off an old locust tree and found this bat hunkered down underneath. I felt bad and hope it finds cozy home before winter weather sets in.

I recently came across a letter I wrote many years ago (2009) to my friends Thies Matzen and Kicki Ericson. At the time, they were sailing through the Southern Ocean on their sailboat Laurent Giles-designed sailboat Wanderer III. What a fun throwback to the era of pen and paper letters. Thies and Kicki are currently living on Westpoint Island in the Falkland Islands. I visited them a few years ago. Click here to read about what life on a sheep… Continue reading →

Julia hangs with Lucky and Diggity, our rescue border collies. This has been a rare quiet week for the two of them. The week before, Diggity got bit in the face by copperhead and it swelled up big as pit bull's.

Our neighbor had this sign nailed up on her old barn and I wondered if the horse was still alive - that is, if Secret's Bad Bullet was a horse.

This is the couch on our hay barn. It used to live in our cabin but Julia and I still sleep on it from time to time. It's right next to where the mules and horses spend the night and they come over and stare at us while we sleep. That's a nice feeling, like they're watching over us. Or maybe they just want us to get them a flake of hay.

Ronald Hudson is the mule man of North Carolina. I bought my mule Polly from him almost twenty years ago. When he says, “What you need to do,” and tells you a story, you need to listen.