Lee Martin

This morning I find myself in my native southeastern Illinois on a day that promises to be summery: temperatures in the mid-80s and plenty of sunshine. In fact, I’m writing this from the public library that I used during high school back in the day when there was still something called a card catalog and…

One night, when I was in grade school, our landlord took me to a baseball game. It was the night of the second Clay/Liston championship fight, May 25, 1965. I was nine years-old. Our landlord was a man named Louie Hiskes. He lived in our small string of apartments in a larger one that formed…

My wife and I have a mallard duck—a hen—sitting on eleven eggs that she’s camouflaged well in our landscaping. You really have to know where she is to see her. On occasion, she’s gone, seeking food, I assume, although now Cathy has made that easy for her by putting out some cracked corn. Mostly the…

Richard Ford’s story, “Optimists,” begins like this: All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a…

Two incidents this week have me thinking about the importance of forgiveness—not just forgiveness of others, but forgiveness of ourselves as well. It’s an important lesson for any teacher to learn—and believe me, we learn it again and again and again—the lesson of how to get past one’s own mistakes and shortcomings. We want to…

My wife and I are moving to a new home this week, so I may be off the grid for a short while. I’ve moved a number of times in my life, and each time I’m reminded of how important it is for us to adjust our vantage point from time to time. Writers have…

The salesman said it would take us about thirty-five minutes to put the desk together, so this morning my wife and I did our signature pinky swear as we united and readied to face those fearful words, “Assembly Required.” Six hours later, we were frazzled, weary, snippy, hungry and by-God fed up with the task…

I love this time of year, these early days of spring. I particularly love seeing daffodils in bloom. We had a bed of them in the fence row along the side of our farmhouse, a house that now has fallen in on itself and gone to ruin. Those daffodils are still there, though, and will…