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My favorite house of dreams and longing that was meant to be only that
I think most of us have ideas about what our “dream” house would be if we could perfectly imagine it, find it, or or even build it . That’s because…
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John Van Dalen
1
Porch sitting
It provided hours of carefree daydreaming at the family home downtown that we parted with last year; now there’s a big void, for sure
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John Van Dalen
Portrait of Lone Star: The ghost town that won’t disappear
Visiting the nearly abandoned town of Lone Star, about 80 miles from Charleston in Calhoun County, SC, is truly to step back in time. I’ve been to this…
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John Van Dalen
2
The power of memories that come from the deepest, farthest places within us
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness. Sarah Orne Jewett…
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John Van Dalen
August 2023
I, too, always dreamed of faraway places whenever I heard that long and lonely train whistle in the night
The loneliest sound on earth is a train whistle in the night. From an online journal It’s not the who, what and where memories I savor from my…
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John Van Dalen
6
Email letter addressing the materialist, empirical worldview and why it is only part of the larger picture of life
The following is an excerpt from a writer who regularly challenges my own worldview and beliefs. This is a good thing, for it means that I am not…
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John Van Dalen
Encounter: A long ago revelation on a ferry boat ride across the Mississippi River
Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” Indeed I do! As the years pass without a visit back to the city where I was born and lived for the first…
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John Van Dalen
Remembering the heavy toll of depression, but also the very real possibilities of a new life and new beginnings
Flash back to the end of summer, 2017, one of those fatefully significant years in my life. I had retired only a few months before, and I was having a…
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John Van Dalen
2
A Tale of Two Rooming Houses
When you’re starting out on the long and winding road to the future, as when you have just graduated from college and moved away from your hometown, you…
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John Van Dalen
July 2023
The beauty of crape myrtles in bloom help assuage somewhat the fierce, furnace-like heat of this July
Few plants give us what the Crape Myrtle does, a myriad of foliage colors in the spring, a virtual kaleidoscope of flower colors from summer into the…
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John Van Dalen
2
Sand castles and endless, carefree summers at the beach
Heat waves stretching across large parts of the globe are straining power grids and shutting businesses that can’t keep their workers cool. Some of the…
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John Van Dalen
2
The passages of life: not enough time? What comes after “adulthood?” “Elderhood?”
I am impatient these days: there is not time enough in this one llife. I need more lives; I have made plans already for three or four. I could easily…
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John Van Dalen
© 2023 John Van Dalen
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