Month: November 2025
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Notes from the heartland (Part 5: Home)
I am home now after my road trip, a road trip long enough to permit some reflection. If you’ve read my previous posts, you won’t be surprised that I’ve been reflecting on our place in history. We Americans are living in a challenging time right now in terms of historical storytelling. Challenging but not unprecedented.…
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Notes from the heartland (Part 4: Nebraska)
Starting out from Fort Worth yesterday, my canine companion and I traced the Chisholm Trail up to where it peters out near Salina, Kansas. From there we headed due north on a lonely stretch of US 81 into the endless plains of southern Nebraska. Between the Platte and Elkhorn rivers, the terrain changes to gently…
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Notes from the heartland (Part 3: Texas)
Happy Rudesgiving! I can’t remember when Rudesgiving originated, but with such a geographically dispersed family — and with each of my brothers having their own families and in-laws — we needed to come up with our own convenient time to gather. So, for several years we’ve been finding an off-peak weekend to meet up. This…
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Notes from the heartland (Part 2: Kansas and Missouri)
It’s our second day on the road to Fort Worth, and Spence and I are traveling through the rolling hills of the Kansas and Missouri borderlands. Yesterday I told you a little about my 3x great-grandmother’s brothers, John and George Hitz, and how they settled in Iowa with their mother Maria Tontz Hitz after the…
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Notes from the heartland (Part 1: Iowa)
I’m on a kind of pilgrimage through America’s heartland with my trusty companion, my six-year-old Golden Doodle, Spence. This isn’t your average road trip; we’ll be traveling through time as well as space. We have a destination — my brother’s home in Fort Worth, Texas for our family’s off-schedule Thanksgiving (what we call Rudesgiving) —…
Deep Roots 