The Northcountry Chronicle

by W.D. Ehrhart I’ve just purchased a piece of the state of New Jersey. Really. It’s ten feet by ten feet and located in a lovely pine forest. Sooner or later—I’m 73 now, so I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for “later”—it will become my final resting place when I shuffle off this mortal coil and join the Choir Invisible. My wife will eventually be there with me, too, though she’s younger than me and thus has a better shot at “later.” But why South Jersey? I’ve never lived there and have no family connection to the area. All my life, I’ve been completely …

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by W.D. Ehrhart Lately I have been revisiting one of my favorite writers, Stephen Crane. Most famous for his novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, his collected writing—fiction, poetry, and journalism published by the University of Virginia Press—runs to ten full volumes. So enamored of his poetry was I that I still have a slim volume of his poems I “removed” (stole would be more accurate) from the Pennridge High School library back in 1965 or 1966. (In my defense, the town I grew up in didn’t even have a bookstore, and I wanted to possess those poems.) The best …

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by W.D. Ehrhart Recently, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a news report saying law students at Georgetown University were so upset by a professor criticizing President Biden’s determination to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court that they demanded “an office they can go to . . . if they want to cry, if they need to break down.”  They are demanding a Crying Room. Seriously? I dutifully wrote up an irate essay excoriating the “Snowflake” sensibilities of many of my Left Progressive fellow travelers, whose sometimes frivolous and inane demands make it so easy for the Radical Reactionary Right to …

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by W.D. Ehrhart The headlines these days are ominous. “Russia warns of retaliation if its demands are not met.” “U.S. allies are stepping upto counter Russia’s Ukraine threats.” “Blinken: No concessions in response to Russia on Ukraine.” “Will there be a war over Ukraine?” It’s enough to keep you awake at night. Russia may no longer be the Soviet Union, but it’s still the original Evil Empire: unrepentantly aggressive, a bully, eager to needle the West at every opportunity, willing to risk war to achieve its selfish aims. Or so our government and our mainstream media would have us believe. But once again—as Americans have …

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by Melinda Burrell Walking home from dinner, we heard an explosion. It wasn’t close, so we didn’t worry. The next morning, we learned a demobilized Serbian soldier had committed suicide in his garage with a grenade. That happened a lot.  Two weeks later, I was walking home by myself. The setting sun gilded the neighborhood. I stopped to admire a bloom-filled garden. Suspicious of me, the baba (grandma) emerged to investigate. In halting Serbian, I complimented her garden. She swooped down, picked an armful of dahlias, and handed them to me with a smile. I was stunned. How could I reconcile this kindness with the …

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