If it’s March, Holt and Balcom Logging Camp Museum in Lakewood is preparing for another year. As director, I’ll be meeting with curator Bob Brown and camp manager Dave Zuleger to plan our 2025 season, which includes field trips where hundreds of area fourth graders come for a hands-on experience in Wisconsin logging history.

We are quickly approaching the six-week vigil Christians call Lent. March 5 is Ash Wednesday. I fully appreciate this is a solemn and holy season, a time of penance and atonement.

My Kirby Omega Classic celebrated its 50th birthday right before Christmas. It’s old and past its prime, but it still does the job, just like my husband, Jon. It cost me a month’s salary, but my uncle was a Kirby salesman, so it was part family loyalty and part buy-the-best-you-can-afford. I have a newer one for the main level, but the Omega is all Jon’s for vacuuming his dead animals room downstairs. I met Jon 42 years ago on Feb. 4, 1983.

Commemorating Martin Luther King Day always takes me back to 1964 when I was a freshman at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee. A first-class academic institution, MMC was also a “finishing school” for pampered girls from wealthy families. Could a dairy farmer’s daughter fit in? I was about to find out. From the day I failed at driving a tractor, I was determined to go to college. I worked hard at St.

One of my most popular columns of 2024 was the one about psithurism, trees talking to each other.

Here at Otter Run, it just isn’t Christmas without Kathie’s Christmas Candy. There are four that I make every year — cashew/peanut clusters, blossom cookies, peanut butter balls and seafoam. Chocolate makes me break out in fat, and I don’t like super-sweet desserts, so I rarely eat the candy, but I do have fun making it. If you are reading this after Christmas, there’s no reason not to give one of the following recipes a try.