HeyJaredRural Reflections - The Reboot
Sharing my grandmother's wisdom and my own thoughts about rural life, the natural world, family, floods, and more.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 27, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 9, 2026
Latest issues
Writing home (opens the original)
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Where I was last weekI didn’t post last week because I was in full-blown recovery mode, having spent the day at the Corridors: Blue Ridge Writing & Rhetoric Conference at Radford University, followed by a 5-plus-hour drive home. The drive out to Radford took me almost an hour less, but somehow no matter how many weeks of drought we have had, it often manages to rain when I have a substantial drive home. That, followed by the inevitable fog, which of course rolled in with the dark of night, slowe
25 years later (opens the original)
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A field in PennsylvaniaBy now, we all know the story of Flight 93, the only one of the four planes that did not reach its intended destination. As Rebecca Solnit writes: “the only direct resistance that day came from inside Flight 93, which went down in a field in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington, thanks to the valiant and quickly improvised response of the passengers and crew to the hijackers.”1In the 25 years since 9/11, I have lost count of how many times I’ve heard or read that the plan
Life in the before times (opens the original)
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If you were to read the pages and pages of notes I scrawled as I figured out what my book was actually about (“floods,” it turns out, is far too vast), you would see repeated instances of me trying to understand those times in our lives where we live in a “before time,” though we are almost always unaware of it.This line of thinking, of course, relates directly to the 2022 eastern Kentucky floods. On July 27, floods were mostly things to watch for in weather forecasts or disaster stories that un
In search of a more analog life… (opens the original)
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A new academic year beginsClasses start tomorrow and I have been on the computer so much that it feels like my eyes are crossed. It appears to be a necessary part of university life in the 21st century, and I guess I’ve gotten somewhat good at it (good enough, anyway). Still, truth be told, what excites me most is to get back in the classroom. I have full classes to start the first eight weeks, one in beginning French, the other in beginning Spanish.People sometimes ask how I feel about teaching
On living in a body in its second half-century (opens the original)
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Dear Grandma Ruth,I’m not sure what all you see where you are now, but you may have heard that I have once more messed up my knee.Let me rephrase that. My knee is once again messed up. Yes, I know that I should avoid the passive voice and that we’re not supposed to end sentences with a preposition. I also know that these rules were largely invented by men who aren’t writing from their study in the middle of a heat wave while practicing the surprisingly complex art of bending and straightening th
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