John Valentine

In glacial moments of personal calamity, both real and imagined, I’ll sometimes take to the woods, just looking for signs of my next move. As my family prepares to transition from what-has-been toward a what-might-be, I wander, looking for clues to what will happen. I used to tell the kids that all they could do […]

Our youngest chickens are getting on in years. They’ll be 4 years old next month. So laying an egg each day isn’t the first thing they think about in the morning. Rather, I imagine, they’re thinking, “Move over Missy, give me some room on this roost!” or “Where’s the guy with the greens?” But as […]

When our children were young, we tried everything to get them outside. Sure, our family life inside was filled with the kind of drama you’d call gloriously ordinarywhich pasta for dinner, whose turn it was to feed the dogs or get the phone, and how best to gather everyone around the woodstove hearth every evening. […]

The errant woodpiles tell the tale of the season’s approach. Once hidden by textured layers of greens, our tin-covered fortresses of firewood now dot the winter landscape deep into the forest. Years ago, a friend offered me a well-past-its-prime shed, complete with barn-board siding, framing and a roof. All I had to do was haul […]

The espresso-fueled American was having too much fun walking down Prinsengracht Streetno agenda, no deadline, no phone, even. There was a family rendezvous in three hours, but time meant very little on that sunny Amsterdam afternoon. Only two weeks ago, I was that guy. My family had eaten lunch at a local falafel shop and […]

My once-brilliant Saturday was veering off track as I crossed from rural Orange County into suburban Durham, and the flashing blue lights in the rearview were not a good sign. Just an hour ago, I coveted a typically ambitious weekend morning to-do list, so I’d left the house to mow. The chickens were demanding greens, […]

You pray for rain and pray for rain. Finally, the sky lets loose, and the tomatoes explode. Thick-skinned and wrinkled after so much heat, sagging on the vine, the poor tomatoes sometimes just can’t absorb all the surging, fresh nutrients that wash in after a storm. If you’re the home gardener on the sidelines, you […]

The flag of the rusty red metal mailbox was up. Just like that, my end-of-day, wiped-out mood evaporated. I had been hot, tired and hungry five minutes agoor “hangry,” a word my daughter recently brought home from college. Swerving off the road and onto the shoulder, I anticipated carbohydrate rejuvenation. In our rural neighborhood, mailboxes […]

The renegade watermelon vine (or is that a cantaloupe?) grows south three inches a day, progressively exiting its bed among the tomato cages. The tomato enclave looks like an industrial power grid, a safety net of monster production machines; still, the vine marches ahead. After all, it’s a volunteer, a freethinker even, making its daily […]

During the days of “Eat the Rich,” “Smash the State” and Kwai Chang Caine (“Yet, it is eyes that blind the man, Grasshopper”), a bunch of us moved into an old farmhouse on 60 acres and tried to share everything. Toward the end of the first summer, the house grew too crowded, so we started […]