Rural Delivery

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1989. All rights reserved.
Standing in a field just a few hundred yards from the place where he was born 70 years earlier on “a cold February morning,” the retiring rancher eyed the crowd gathered around his dismantled windmill.
An auctioneer cried out from the center of the throng, “Last chance! Two-twenty-five, [...]

by Michael Hofferber
Copyright © 1992. All rights reserved.
On a golden afternoon in early autumn I return to a mountain lake I’ve visited many times over the years, dating back to when I was a child at summer camp. Some sense of connectedness brings me back, time and again, to reacquaint myself with familiar waters and [...]

Real cowboy hats don’t have feather bands, nor do they come in mink fur or shades of mauve. The real thing, like the Stetsons and Resistols of old, is 100 percent fur felt. It’s sturdy enough to weather gully-washers and to withstand horse’s hooves, and it comes only in basic colors: good-guy white, bad-guy black [...]

Out here we pretty much ignore the TV weather forecasts. They aren’t accurate more than half the time, so we’d do as well flipping a coin.
It’s not that meteorologists in these parts are poorly trained or that our weather is particularly tricky. They’re just demographically handicapped. They forecast weather for their primary viewing audience, the [...]

by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1996. All rights reserved.
Hard frost again last night. My footsteps leave dark impressions on the ground. The breath of the cows rises in clouds as they huddle together like football players at Soldier Field on a December Sunday.
Fewer grasshoppers now, I notice. They used to scatter through the wheat stubble [...]