It’s a park now, mown green-space and graveled paths owned by the city of Williamsburg Virginia. But when I was a boy, not so much older than my son is now, “Government Property” was a tangle of tidewater forest and marshland where earthen battlements – remnants of the civil war – lay hidden in, Read More

One thousand two hundred and twenty-eight generations ago, my ancestor lay curled in a shallow depression scratched from the soil of a low African cave, listening to the night. Fear and Hunger waged a Great Battle in him.  Fear was mighty and terrible in its strength, neither reasoned nor conceptual. It was real; a knowing in my ancestor,, Read More

(or Rivanna, Part 2) I am a man now, thirty something, and far from innocent, but my desires at least have grown more comfortable, their barbs crimped by conflict and compromise.  I bristle still at boundaries, but their effrontery is less personal and I’ve long since learned to circumvent the ones that I can’t, Read More