Floyd Tomkins

— 15th — (1987) Ronald Reagan

Recent events I like to recall center around canoeing small streams and ponds, poling about the frozen Dead Stream and Caribou Bog on skis, making maple syrup, stalking fish, and absorbing heat from a wood stove on a cold night. It's a smug pleasure to rattle off the names of local places and rural occupations as if I had long and easy acquaintance with them, and I'm grateful for this opportunity. Other, less idyllic, items in my history include child care, moving (again, soon, to Sitka), shoveling snow, quasi-single parenthood, cutting and splitting wood, maintaining two elderly cars, mud season, the annual frustration of a garden, buying and selling a house, painting it, disputation with a willful and ideologically devious four-year-old, and the urge to go back to school.