Kith & Kin

Fredericksburg, Ohio, 2010. It was the mid-1970s. My first cousin Peggy and I were both teens, and we were standing together at the top of The Cliff. The Cliff bordered my grandparents’ property and overlooked a portion of the village of Fredericksburg. Someone once told me it was about 140 feet high, but in my memory it seems much higher than that. It was cluttered with trees of various girths and scrubby weeds and rock outcroppings all the way down, and its base disappeared into the shallow water of Salt Creek. Mom and Dad and the grandparents had one rule about the cliff: Stay Away From It! So, being compliant children (as all children were in the 1970s), we obeyed. Until we got somewhere they couldn’t see us. We kids had a secret hideaway called “the Cliff House.” It was really just a little indentation in the rocky cliffside that you got to by holding on to a small tree as you went over the edge and stepped into the indentation. Its floor was maybe eight feet from the edge...

Someone knocked over Grandma’s mailbox. My mother-in-law came home on a recent Tuesday afternoon to find that her mailbox, located in a neighbor’s front yard across the street, had been knocked flat. Our first assumption was that the trash truck had knocked it over, but a neighbor claimed he had seen a passing driver hit it. (This neighbor is an undisputed oddball, not known for his honesty, so we’ll never really know what occurred.) The mailbox and post were plastic, but inside the post was a two-by-four for strength and a four-foot length of heavy pipe for stability. Whoever hit the mailbox must have been traveling at some speed, because the pipe was bent ninety degrees where it entered the ground. Shopping Mom gave me cash and asked if I would purchase another mailbox for her, remove the existing wrecked one, and replace it with the new one. Being a dutiful son-in-law, I willingly agreed. Have you shopped for mailboxes and mailbox posts at Home Depot? There are approxima...

Why do dads tell Dad Jokes? I’ll tell you why. We think they’re funny. We really do. And we tell the same ones over and over again because we think that sometime, somewhere, someone is going to laugh at one of them. So the next time your dad tells a corny joke that he’s told you a hundred times, laugh uproariously at it. Fall on the floor and roll around if you’d like. Maybe he’ll figure that since that one finally got a laugh, it’s time to retire it. Or maybe not. Anyway, here are a few of my own illustrated Dad Jokes. LEGAL NOTICE If you hurt yourself falling on the floor and laughing at any of these, I absolve myself of all responsibility. Copyright 2023 by Steven Nyle Skaggs, Father