Temperatures Up, Leaves Down

It’s 66 degrees and sunny, up here in what we call NEPA – Northeast Pennsylvania to you. Outside my window, the leaves have gone through whatever color they might have had and are now brown as pennies. They are increasingly going from their spring and summer home to cover the ground and street/roof gutters. It’s the smart people who sweep them away from the storm drains before a rainstorm, as well as during, so we don’t get lakes where the streets used to be. They’re much too fragile to do anything with, but I wonder if we could mash them up and use them in our driveways and on hills to give our cars some traction in the snow? They would not damage the road surface, pollute our streams or track salt into the house.

Everybody has a story…

Joseph Knorr, a local resident, passed away recently. "Prior to his retirement, he was employed as a tool and die maker by Diamond Manufacturing. He was responsible for making the die for the front grill on the first Mustang."

Sara Schafir, another local resident, also left us the other day. "Sara was a Holocaust survivor."

Tragic deaths are just that, but sometimes their reporting makes you stop and read it twice, wondering if the coroner can spot the obvious. "A man was run over by a train [two locomotives and 23 freight cars]… an official cause of death was not determined yet." (Yes, there can be other reasons, but it sure reads odd.)