By NANCY PATRICK I am currently reading novel fifteen in Louise Penny’s series featuring main character Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté of Quebec, Armand Gamache. By this time in the series, Gamache has cleaned up a corrupt police force as well as the Sûreté’s academy that graduated immoral, inhumane, and power-hungry officers.  Inspector Gamache maintains his integrity throughout the series.

By NANCY PATRICK People have many opinions about pets—cats, dogs, birds, hamsters, snakes, and even iguanas. I’m not judging anyone for preferring one over the other, but I love dogs. During my childhood, my family had at one time or another all those animals except snakes and iguanas. As an adult, my first pet was a sweet little Chihuahua named

By NANCY PATRICK Today’s social climate presents many challenges. I’m not sure if the cause for the rise in depression, violence, climate change, suicide, and lethargy has one diagnosis. Some blame much of the dismal atmosphere on COVID. I agree that the two-year pandemic changed our world in some irreversible ways, but I’m not so sure we can blame COVID

By NANCY PATRICK Every group or organization I have ever belonged to had rules, sometimes called Codes of Conduct, Dress Codes, Bylaws, Constitutions, Codes of Ethics, Business Ethics, or Criminal and Civil Law. Most people accept socially approved laws because they realize their necessity to avoid anarchy and chaos. An old adage that has always puzzled me says, “All’s fair

By NANCY PATRICK There are so many possible answers to that question. A popular song has a great answer: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.” I certainly wouldn’t argue with that suggestion. Love can forgive many sins and transgressions and would go a long way toward calming the world’s turbulence. I have given the question a lot

By NANCY PATRICK Some say the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. Perhaps society perpetuates that sentiment with news of mass shootings, attacks on ethnic groups, wars all over the world, and plain meanness, hypocrisy, hatred, and exclusivity. Recent puzzling incidents of unprovoked violence have added doubt, fear, and trepidation to an already fragile social climate. How can

By NANCY PATRICK I have lived in Abilene most of my life—and that’s a long time. Excluding the times I lived elsewhere because of career moves, I have lived here forty-one years. I grew up here in the fifties and sixties, attained my education here (first grade through M.A. in English), and have made my home here since 1990 when

By NANCY PATRICK Canadian author Louise Penny has written an intriguing series of novels that feature main character Armand Gamache. The series has eighteen books so far, and though I would really like to read them sequentially, I have thus far had to take whatever the public library has on the shelf. By reading them out of sequence, I have

By NANCY PATRICK How much empathy can one heart muster? I find myself aching as I see images and hear stories of the crises around the world. I tend to over-invest myself in others’ lives, but I cannot ignore the pain occurring to fellow human beings.  Earthquake in Turkey and Syria I cry as I watch the rescues of those