The spirit of a too-late Friday night is still coursing through my veins early on the first Saturday of November as I drive east into the Virginia countryside for my very first foxhunt. I’m late, and it doesn’t help that directions to the hunt’s meeting point (one imagines this is the case with most of them) involve such distinct landmarks as “a country road” and “two hills.”

Until January of this year, I had never been to Las Vegas, for obvious reasons. The “Sin City” marketing campaign never appealed to me, because despite the claim that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” I knew that’s never really been true.

I distinctly remember the summer immediately following my graduation from college. It was my first such season without academic bookends and I was hoping it would mark a restful reprieve from “real” work.

I had just finished adjusting my fascinator to the properly impractical angle and was taking in the scene of the festooned and foolish with satisfaction, eager to join in. The 145th Kentucky Derby had all the makings of the fine affair Hunter S. Thompson so memorably described in 1970 as “decadent and depraved.”

Suddenly, through the blue veil of my cockeyed millinery, an energetic street salesman came into view. I actually heard him before I saw him. He was hocking T-shirts that said, “Donald F*cking Trump,” and “I’m the F*cking President.”

CareerCast just released its annual list of “the worst jobs in America,” and for the fourth year running, newspaper reporter came out on top.

The rankings take into account “hiring outlook, income, stress, and environment.” Newspaper reporters apparently face a bleak future as online media replaces print papers, fake news is more interesting than real news, and the population becomes increasingly illiterate (the latter is based on this writer’s first-hand observations).

For anyone not living near a ski resort, this is the worst time of year. Christmas is by now a distant memory, except for some mocking reminders that arrive in the mail and are tossed in a pile of dread. New Year’s resolutions have been abandoned at a rate rivaling 50 percent of marriages. And football has forsaken us again for many long months.

The doldrums are abounding (if, indeed, doldrums possess enough energy to bound). Although it’s truly a bleak time, it’s also brimming with potential! The short, dark days of winter, unlike any other time of year, afford us the ideal opportunity to indulge in and cherish the most basic and exquisite of all human pleasures: coziness.

This winter, I went back to the woods. The backwoods.

My homeland is Central Pennsylvania, and I returned there to celebrate Christmas with the family and to help out with the coal furnace during the bleakest time of year (more on that later).

I just read a headline on the Daily Mail (I know, I know, I get what I deserve): '[Singer] Demi Lovato says they are no longer sure they want children — admitting life in their 30s without kids is "pretty nice" — as they open up about coming out as nonbinary and pansexual.’

There is paradox among 'outdoorsy' people that manifested itself to me in an indelible way over the weekend.

Being something of a 'crunchy con,' I took part in the Pennsylvania Environmental Council’s Public Lands Ride — a group bicycling event that tours riders through Moshannon State Forest — that happened to take place on opening day of archery deer season this year.

My twin brother, who is much cooler than I am and lives in Washington, D.C., rolled into the Pennsylvania Wilds, our native land, for a visit recently. There, he offered me the chance to drive his brand-new BMW X1 — a luxury, subcompact, crossover “Sport Activity Vehicle.”

The little thing was qick and responsive, so much so that forceful habits formed from driving less state-of-the-art vehicles (read: old) made my driving jerky at first. The front cabin felt wide open with barely-there window pillars. The seats were roomy and comfortable. And once I got used to the light-touch steering and ultra grippy brakes, driving the X1 was pleasant.

With Christmas right around the corner, the supply chain crisis, and what or whom to blame for it, is a hot topic this season.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal recently published a pair of articles about a purported nationwide shortage of truck drivers causing delivery delays. According to Business Insider, however, the reports of a driver shortage are “overblown.” Time, too, rebutted the claims with a column declaring that “The Truck Driver Shortage Doesn’t Exist.”

They got him! Another prominent white male called out by the mainstream media for being racist has had his career destroyed, tossed down the memory hole, never to drawl about beer, trucks, or girls ever again!

Or did they? In January 2021, the 28-year-old, mullet-rocking, cutoff flannel shirt-wearing, small-town Tennessee country music star Morgan Wallen arrived home late at night (or early in the morning?) with his friends and yelled by means of farewell to one of them, “Take care of this p****-ass mother******  — Take care of this p****-ass n*****.”

If you’ve ever read a headline along the lines of “Kardashian Family Worth Combined Zillion Dollars” and wondered how a gaggle of uneducated, tawdry, plastic people with a combined vocabulary of Joe Biden manages to account for, like, 10 percent of America’s GDP, you obviously haven’t visited a cosmetics store recently.

As our nation navigates a “return to normalcy” in a post-Covid world, one return most workers won’t be making is to the office. And as an estimated 40.7 million American professionals plan to be working fully remotely within the next five years, expect the great political divide to widen as liberals and conservatives move farther apart, both ideologically and physically.

Pennsylvania winters can be unyielding. Though the extreme, single-digit temperatures and mounds of sometimes-onerous (but always beautiful) snow come and go, the bleak, overcast skies tend to overstay their welcome, hanging around like a monochromatic weight on one’s psyche.

I struggle to enjoy summer. So each year, when the last frost drifts away to Australia, or wherever it goes, I grit my teeth and remind myself of the most “hot girl summer” moment I’ve ever had, and look forward to reliving the pleasure of lawn mowing that brought it about:

Pennsylvania’s liquor laws are... vintage. But not in a single-malt Scotch kind of way that means they improve with age.

The state legislature did move the needle to the right side of draconian in 2016, but the Philadelphia Inquirer’s 1983 assessment of “Pennsylvania’s backwardness” being “a hangover from the administration of Republican governor Gifford Pinchot, who was elected on a ‘dry’ platform in 1930,” remains accurate.

Summer is fading fast, and though, according to my calendar, “the Autumnal Equinox” (is that the newest model of Hyundai?) isn’t until September 22, all the things we love about the season — swimming, county fairs, outdoor drinking, the August congressional recess — are essentially over after this weekend. And while people mark Labor Day in different ways, one of the best is with a barbecue, one of the few culinary traditions America can truly call its own.

There is a property on the outskirts of my little Central Pennsylvania town that I’ve always thought was a junkyard. At last month’s township supervisors’ meeting, I learned the couple of acres bestrewn with broken-down old vehicles, rusting tractor trailers, an off-kilter mobile home, some dilapidated campers, scattered mechanical accessories, a dumpster and a trampoline is actually someone’s home.

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over.

The number of Americans who believe in God has reached an all-time low, according to a Gallup survey that’s been tracking our nation’s “values and beliefs” since 1944.

For a God fearin’ woman such as myself, it’s a disheartening statistic. But we are told never to abandon hope, and recent events — the Supreme Court rulings against abortion and in favor of prayer, a million swing voters switching their registrations to Republican, Keeping Up with the Kardashians finally airing its last season — betoken a more God-centered future.

This Memorial Day I found myself at a grassy spot along La Prele Creek, resting my horse and having lunch out of the back of a Ford Explorer, with an eclectic group of new friends who had also volunteered to help the Cross family on their annual spring cattle drive.

The political arena is hotter than ever with fights raging over rights and freedoms and all that good American stuff. But one topic missing from these debates only gets the attention it deserves for about a week every year each July: the right to keep and bear fireworks. It's a right heavily restricted in sixteen states and straight-up illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, home of the Boston Tea Party, that act of defiance that sparked our patriotic tradition of blowing things up.

Never did I think the day would come when I would be writing about West Virginia coal miners and Lululemon’s “Hotty Hot pants” in the same article. What truly strange times we live in.

There’s an automotive parts manufacturer in my hometown. The company has grown over the course of its 19-year life, from around 20 employees two decades ago to 45 full-time employees today. Despite the dirty nature of much of the work, the facility is kept clean, open, airy, and bright. There are no shavings on the floor or fumes in the air. The men who weld, bend, blast, and powder coat the metal parts and send them to the warehouse for packaging and shipment do so energetically.

When the mugginess of a northeastern summer begins to oppress your spirits, there’s only one thing to do: convince yourself the grass is greener — or safer, at least — on your side by heading to a place where people have it even worse.

Winter’s bleakest days have set in. “The holidays” are a distant memory. Rose-colored resolutions to wake up earlier, eat healthier and exercise have gone the way of Dry January — all a wash, as you quickly discovered the only antidote for your Seasonal Affective Disorder was something equally cold and dark.

America is enduring a mental health crisis, and you need go no farther than your local Barnes & Noble bookstore to see evidence.

There’s nothing like the sound of automobile engines at wide-open throttle, whirring by like a squadron of World War Two fighter jets in dive-bomb mode. But at the Lime Rock Park racetrack, the adrenaline-pumping hum is made even more riveting by the fact that you hear the overture of baritone bees before you see what’s making it.

Travelers road-tripping across Pennsylvania this summer, take heed: a war is brewing in the center of the state.

Buildings have been flattened. Families have been torn apart. The threat of an emerging third power regularly captures headlines and fuels the local rumor mills.