Rural Delivery

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1994. All rights reserved.
As Patrick Shannahan’s stock dogs work a herd of sheep they are quiet and serious. No movement is wasted. No turn escapes their attention.
Shannahan’s voice is soft but authoritative as he calls out commands to his trio of border collies. Meg and Spud and Hannah respond immediately, [...]

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1997. All rights reserved.

These are the dog days of summer, a time of year when creeks run dry, the air stands still and the sun beats down relentlessly, day after day, or so it seems.
These are the days when we rediscover shade, pools, and the contents of our freezers. Cooling [...]

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1993. All rights reserved.

I’m standing here in a bare-walled room contemplating a stack of cardboard boxes and wondering which contains the notes to the water rights article I’m working on. And I’m asking myself again why this is happening. What possessed me to box up my belongings, scramble whatever order [...]

Oliver Wendell Douglas finds the Haney Place advertised in The Farm Gazette, which he picks up from a news stand while on a business trip to Chicago. Compelled by a deep-rooted urge, he decides to go have a look. To get there, he changes planes twice, takes a bus from the county seat to Pixley, [...]

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 2005. All rights reserved.
I spent many hours of my childhood in chicken coops. If I wasn’t gathering eggs from my Grandpa’s laying hens or teasing his rooster I was likely with my cousins in the abandoned coop behind my uncle’s place that we’d claimed as a clubhouse.

Every home was built [...]

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1995. All rights reserved.
My yearling climbs stairs, again and again and again. His little boy face all set in concentration, he lowers one leg deliberately over the step, collects his balance, and then brings down the second.
He’s been going up and down this three-step entryway time and again for at [...]

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1996. All rights reserved.
“O, ay; as summer flies are in the shambles,
That quicken even with blowing. O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!”
– Othello, Act IV, Scene II
As spring gives way to summer, most [...]