by Mike Bendzela In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville’s effusive review of the Massachusetts writer’s collection of short tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, Melville utters, under a cloak of anonymity (“a Virginian Spending July in Vermont”) one the most homo-erotic bits of praise imaginable for another male writer: “[He] shoots his strong New-England…

by Mike Bendzela I do not remember whether one of our cats had killed it or whether I had run over it with the lawn mower, but I do remember peeling the poor milk snake’s corpse off the grass and walking across the yard with it dangling from my fingertips, en route to the manure…

by Mike Bendzela It sometimes wrenches my own credulity when I think about it: The sweeping and violent imaginings of a Southern fake war adventurer, college as well as high school drop-out, and binge-drinking, adulterous sometime-screenwriter, whose pissed-off wife once bonked him on the head with a croquet mallet, became encysted, like a wasp’s gall,…

by Mike Bendzela You could tell we were on the last leg of our journey to Kentucky when, after we had crossed the Ohio River at Portsmouth and entered the curvaceous roads of the Appalachian Plateau, the puking began. At the time, we were a family of six crammed inside Dad’s 1963 white Ford Fairlane…

by Mike Bendzela Some people are haunted by words others have spoken, or by events they’ve seen and heard in various media, or by embarrassing episodes from their pasts. I can be just as vulnerable to being haunted by such things, but lately something seemingly trivial has stayed on my mind. Perhaps this is because,…

by Mike Bendzela This concludes the story from last month about the ongoing restoration of a Maine farmhouse by woodworker Don Essman, who is also my spouse. Over the years, Don had built up enough trust with the southern states descendents of the historic property to be permitted to live on the farm rent-free, in…

by Mike Bendzela One of the last of the traditional wood craftsmen in New England was born in the nineteen-fifties outside Boston, appropriately, historic home of many spindle turners and chair caners, lumber joiners and paint-stainers. His most vivid memories of the period involve his grandmother’s house in Cambridge, including the smell of cabbage from…

by Mike Bendzela Tending to a partner who manages a chronic illness means I don’t travel much. Luckily, he has been stable for some time now, meaning he continues to jack up portions of the farmhouse to replace rotted sill timbers, lay pine board flooring in the kitchen, and repair chairs, doors, and woodwork throughout…

by Mike Bendzela We recently found out we have new neighbors. Millions of them. I had seen signs in the blond appearance of the upper limbs of some trees on the other side of the field across from our Maine farmhouse. I have been waiting a long time for them to show up, so I…

by Mike Bendzela Back when our local university still believed that a survey of English literature was a prerequisite for a “higher” education; before a drop in enrollments triggered a huge budget crisis culminating in hiring freezes, “retrenchments,” and amputated departments; I still taught an Introduction to Literature course that allowed me the freedom to…

by Mike Bendzela In a kindergarten classroom in the mid-1960s, a kid named Mikey steered clear of the boys stacking large toy blocks on top of one another and knocking them down again–so obnoxious—and instead went and sat at the table of girls making beads out of salt dough and stringing them together on a…

by Mike Bendzela “. . . I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.” —Thomas Hardy Cultural phenomena such as sports, pop/rock music, movies, television/mass media, politics, and religion/holidays have little hold on me anymore. Over time, I’ve eschewed these largely social activities. Call it adaptation; I’m not fit for…

by Mike Bendzela By “worm” I mean not earthworm but larva of the infamous lepidopteran, Cydia pomonella, or codling moth. The pom in its species names comes from the Latin root “pomum,” meaning “fruit,” particularly the apple (which is why they’re called pome fruits), wherein you’ll find this worm. It’s the archetypal worm inside the archetypal…

by Mike Bendzela During the twelve years I was a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician-Basic in my little town, I arrived onto scenes with patients suffering varying degrees of distress. I would first assess them, then help stabilize and package them for transport to the hospital; and if I was lucky, I would be assigned to…

by Mike Bendzela I lie on a futon in a little room tucked in a turret of an old funeral home-turned-apartment building in Binghamton, New York, listening to election returns coming in over my clock radio. It is a Tuesday night in 1984, the year of Orwell’s never-ending fever dream. Madonna and Prince and Michael…

by Mike Bendzela The words are fine, and some of the concepts they represent rather appealing, actually. It’s the usages to which they are put that bug me, usages that are by turns deceiving, dishonest, obfuscating, bogus, hokey, and euphemistic. There is a theme binding them all together, one concerning us humans’ exploitation of the…

by Mike Bendzela How happy to have discovered the history of other species, as well as our own. How fortunate to be alive during the time when the evolutionary puzzle has been so masterfully worked out, assembling a picture so stunning in its completeness, that mere school children now know more about Darwin’s great idea…

by Mike Bendzela I begin writing this essay the morning after dumping into the woods the sixth porcupine I have had to kill this growing season. It used to be that I would not see any evidence of porcupine damage in my apple trees until early August, but this year I began seeing chewed-off branches…

by Mike Bendzela Today is a bit of an experiment. I take the row covers off of two forty-foot rows of beans (three varieties) as the plants have become so big so fast in the ungodly heat they are pressing against the cloth. Afterwards, in the early evening, I let the chickens out of their…

by Mike Bendzela As you slide toward retirement age, it becomes clear that you have not accomplished what you had hoped by this point in life and that the meaning of it all is still as unfathomable as it was when you were thirty. You have resigned yourself to the fact that you do not…