Return to the Braided Prairie: A 2024 North Loup Photo Memory

When I returned to North Loup, Nebraska this summer to bury my mother, I realized I hadn’t been back to that beautiful village for 40 years! It seemed impossible that I’d been away from the braided prairie for two generations! I discovered the last time I visited North Loup was in 1984 when I published a photo memory. Today, 14,600 days later, I present a new photo memory of the North Loup that raised me, and that lifted all the hopes of my curious childhood in far away in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Obey Your Children

There are times when children are right and parents are wrong.  We’re so often trained to think that children know nothing when they actually know quite a lot when it comes to their thoughts and feelings.  It’s just too easy for parents to overrule their children just because they “say so” and because they’re older and taller and heavier than the kids below them.  Sometimes parents need to obey their children.

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Great Blog Posts Demand Excellent Article Rewriting

Our beloved Boles Blogs author Nicola just finished writing an incredible, and memorable, stretch of connected articles that absolutely deserve our devotion and celebration!

Over the past 20 days, our Nicola wrote 18 articles for publication.  These were not simplistic blog posts.  These were intricate posts packed with photographs and personal insight.  Many Boles Blogs articles average 300-500 words, but Nicola’s works in this stretch averaged over 800 words per post and many doubled that number.  That’s over 15,000 words written in 20 days!

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Traffic Jams in Portugal: Rural Road Hazards

Here are some of the rural traffic jams in Portugal. We do not get many of them — but here are some of the common causes.

First, a farmer leaving the fence with openings so the cows can cross the road from one pasture to another to get water.


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An Old Man and a Lost Wife: Ten Sentence Story #177

A couple are visiting a family friend; one who stepped in to save the home of one of their parents after their eviction from a country where they had farmed for years, employing local people, feeding and educating local families and whose recovery from their loss of everything was then about to be lost again in their own countries’ revolution.

A word was given and later a simple legal paper signed, a house changed hands for nothing and was saved for their family, now many years later the time had come for that house to be sold.

Continue reading → An Old Man and a Lost Wife: Ten Sentence Story #177