Pop Home from Hospital! Halleluyah!

In the hospital Pop received callers–visitors and staff–as if he were a host in an elegant drawing room clad in a dressing gown instead of hospital regulation. But, the last night before he left after a 5 1/2 day stay, he didn’t sleep until 4 p.m. “It’s the strain of it all,” he told me. [...]

Inspiring Day at the Hospital with Pop and His Court

I spent yesterday at the hospital with my father (who experienced a small heart attack early Sunday morning) and my niece, Diane, who holds his medical records with meticulous care and kindness.
We have a division of family labor in creating a team to support my father’s ability to live alone. The medical portfolio belongs to [...]

Blog Action Day: Poverty in the Great Depression. “The Kind of People that We Are”—a poem by Erwin A. Thompson

Blog Action Day is today, with a focus on Poverty. Currently 9,394 Sites with an audience with more than 10,612,112 readers are registered in Blog Action Day 2008. Last year, I participated when bloggers focused on the Environment.
Read my post on how it’s “Easy to be green at the Carelton Hotel in San [...]

Thompson’s Western Tales Reviewed on Writers In the Sky

Click here to read Erwin A. Thompson Western Series book review.

Cattle Country and Back Trail: Two Tales from the Thompson Western Series
Erwin A. Thompson
ISBN: 0-595-40228-3
Publisher: iUniverse
$17.95 US
Reviewer: Gordon Randall

Buy on “Cattle Country and Back Trail” on Amazon by clicking here.
Randall begins his review by saying….”Turns out that Cattle Country and Back Trail by Erwin Thompson [...]

Riehl’s Writer Story on “How We Became Writers”

Joel Heffner is a man of many projects. One of his really fun ones is a site called “How We Became Writers: This is how we did it.”
He’s just posted my story of how I became a writer which includes my poem “Scribbler,” from “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.”

You can read the entire post by [...]

Riehlife Mississippi Floodstage Series Concludes with 12th post: nonegenarian looks back on lifetime of flooding

From July 4th to July 12th I’ve posted 12 entries written by Erwin A. Thompson giving a historical perspective on the Mississippi River floodstages through the years.
I sure hope you’ll have a chance to look through these as a series. It’s been a pleasure posting them. Hats off to my father, Erwin A. Thompson for [...]

1943 Floodstage “Home on Pass & Nearly Impassable,” by Erwin A. Thompson

The first time that a flood really affected my life was the flood of 1943. That was one of the big ones.
INBETWEEN ARKANSAS & TEXAS TRAINING CAMPS IN WORLD WAR II
Ruth and I were coming home from our tour of duty at Camp Robinson, Arkansas. Our unit was being moved from that location to Camp [...]

1973 Floodstage Mississipi River, “Never Happen?” by Erwin A. Thompson

In 1937 they closed the Alton Lock and Dam.
This dam had been loudly touted as the last thing needed for flood control.
I remember asking: “What are you going to do with the extra water coming down stream? Pump it out over the top?”
“No, it will never happen,” was the [...]

Floodstage! How our Old Gate Road became a life line to higher ground…by Erwin A. Thompson

EVERGREEN HEIGHTS LAYOUT: The Hilltop & Bottom Lands…and the Field Roads
HILLTOP
A lesson in the topography of our property would be helpful in understanding how these changes in river levels affected us and the community.
The Riehl farm at that time consisted of a hundred and fifty four acres. The original farm house (the Big Brown [...]

1993 Floodstage…500 year flood damage on a human scale, by Erwin A. Thompson

Riehlife’s FLOODSTAGE SERIES continues with Erwin A. Thompson’s explanation of sandbagging, pumps and dumps, and fixing up houses after the water goes down. –JGR
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In 1993 we had what they called the “five hundred year flood.”
SANDBAGGING
We tried sand bagging, there in the East Bottom, and it worked for awhile. But there are problems with [...]