A drug increasingly being prescribed for treating sciatica has been revealed to be no better than placebo, in research recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers also found that people taking the drug pregabalin reported nearly twice as many adverse effects as those receiving the placebo reported.

Country Connections by James and Ellen Perry
Circa 1954: Rose Hill School, five miles north of Maynardville, Tennessee, on Highway 33
Jerald, Johnny Milton, Howard, Dan, Jerry, and Larry, let me tell you what I heard the teachers talking about. I just heard the big room teacher tell the little room teacher that Frank Carter will be here Monday in the big room ’til he gets all the big boys straightened out. I heard that he has three or four boys beginning with Ken to get a lesson in humility by his paddle Monday morning.

That may seem like a strange question, but when you are in your nineties and have been retired as long as I have, you would understand. Retirement is not all it’s cracked up to be. Oh yes, I have Social Security and a small pension from my husband’s work. Money is not the problem. Mine is a “people” problem.

The land that is now Big Ridge State Park was once an area filled with small family farms. It is hard to picture what the landscape might have looked like a hundred years ago. The wooded forest hides most of the evidence. No structures were left standing after the TVA first acquired the land.

With maple syrup, the common assumption is that it’s a New England thing, produced in places like Vermont. But during European settlement times sugar made from maple sap was the only available sweeter besides honey.

Chicken Cordon Bleu conjures up a picture of a complicated dish. This one is not. Make it with rice. I am always looking for easy recipes that mimic complicated ones. There is more than one way to get a flavorful dish out of a chicken breast. Try this one and see what you think.

“Jesus Loves Me” is called a child’s song, but I sometimes still sing it for myself, even as a grownup. The lyrics are by Ana Bartlett Warner but they were first published in 1860 by her sister Susan Warner as a poem in a novel entitled Say and Seal. The music was later added by William Bradbury in 1862. In the novel, the words are spoken to comfort a dying child.
I especially love the beginning lines from the first stanza:
Jesus loves me this i know,
for the Bible tells me so

My poor mother. I still remember the look of frustration on her face. No, she wasn’t trying to get me take a bath, or worse, sit still. She was trying to get me to take my medicine.
As a child, I had a mental block about taking pills because I was terrified of getting of getting choked on them. Had that happened to me? Nope. Had I seen that happen to anybody else? Nope. It was a byproduct of my overactive imagination.

At some point during my high school years, I remember attending an assembly that seemed to occur on the spur of a moment. At least to my memory there was no announcement other than the one given for us to go to the auditorium.
I don’t remember if girls were present at this assembly. I do remember that Principal Joe Day introduced to us the speaker, a man with a common-sounding name. He turned out to be anything but common.
The speaker’s name was Jack Brown. He told us his life story that day.

I remember well the first time I suffered a back problem. I was a teenager, probably about sixteen, and I was at the home of Marie, my youngest sibling on my father’s side. I was playing with her son Billy, my nephew, who was a few years younger than me. Other of my nieces/nephews/Billy’s cousins might have been there, but I only recall for sure the two of us.