Monthly Archives: October 2025

Wingspread Zine for October, 2025


Spreading wings in a perplexing world
October, 2025                                                    James P. Hurd

Please forward and share this ezine with others. Thank you.

Contents

  • Writer’s Corner
  • Blessed Unbeliever 
  • This month’s story: “The Returning”
  • This month’s puzzler:
  • WINGSPREAD Ezine subscription information
  • Wisdom

Writer’s Corner

Dedicated to people who love words. Words are miracles that brand humans as sentient creatures―creative, inventive, exploring. Taste the words as they roll around on your tongue; let them fill you with wonder.

Want to browse archived WINGSPREAD stories? Click here, then click under “archives”     https://jimhurd.com/     These stories include memoirs, stories about bush flying, personal essays and other topics.

Here are a few examples:

“Why do I Make Stupid Mistakes?”
https://tinyurl.com/4b36sest

“A Blessed Death” https://jimhurd.com/2025/01/

Writer’s tip: If you’ve seen a metaphor used before, don’t use it. So many metaphors are hackneyed and trite (a purring engine, flat as a pancake, as bright as the sun)  Try to think of fresh metaphors.

Word of the month: A “contronym” is a word with two opposite meanings. For example:CLEAVE – to split apart (“Cleave the log in two”) -or- to cling to (“Cleave to your principles”).

Task for you: Incorporate two new words into the next paragraph you write. You may even, like Shakespeare, make up your own words. Try turning a noun into a verb (“The baby aped her mother’s motions perfectly.”)

Book of the month: Christian Reflections. C.S. Lewis (Walter Hooper, editor). 1967. Nerd alert—sometimes Lewis is hard to read. And yet here he reflects on important issues: Unanswered prayer, ethics, Christianity and culture. Ironic that even right-wing Christians have “adopted” this pipe-smoking, bourbon-drinking Oxford don who accepts evolution and speculates about purgatory! However, he lends his great mind to powerful Christian apologetics.

BLESSED UNBELIEVER novel

Available in paper or Kindle version at Wipf and Stock Publishers, Amazon https://a.co/d/9su5F3o or wherever good books are sold.

New story: “The Returning”

Fifty-four years ago I traveled from Venezuela to Pennsylvania for our wedding. Now I’m tearing up entering Pennsylvania for the first time without Barbara. I learned to see this world through her eyes―now I love the place even more than she did.

     This year spring has come early to Lancaster County—green meadows of alfalfa, new-leaved trees, gardens of tulips, daffodils and phlox, the faint smell of spread manure. We pass eternal stone barns with their earth bridges rising to the second level. We hear the clip-clop of passing grey and black buggies.

We find the Willow Street Mennonite Church is thriving—lots of young families and children with many of Barbara’s relatives sprinkled in. A good Easter service. The promise of new life even as we memorialize its ending. I hear the “Lancaster lilt”—”youse staying for dinner? . . . it spited me . . . outen the light . . . there’s more pie back . . . baby’s all cried up; maybe she needs drying . . .”

To read more, click here: https://jimhurd.com/2025/10/01/the-returning/

Leave a comment on the website, subscribe and share with others. Thanks.

You can also access this and other recent articles on Substack:  https://jameshurd.substack.com/p/the-returning   

This month’s puzzler (thanks to Car Talk Archives)

 An off-duty policeman is working as a night watchman in an office building.

He’s doing his nightly rounds, and he comes to a closed door. Behind the door, he hears voices.

He hears people talking, and an argument seems to be taking place. Raised voices, and yelling. Then he hears one of them say, “No, Frank! No, don’t do it. You’ll regret it.”

And then he hears what sounds like gun shots. Bang, bang, bang.

He burst through the door. What does he see? A dead man on the floor, and the proverbial smoking gun.

Now, in the room there are three living people. A minister, a doctor and a plumber.

He walks over to the minister and says, “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent.” 

How does he know that it was the minister that pulled the trigger?

Good luck. 

 (Answer will appear in next month’s WINGSPREAD newsletter.)

Answer to last month’s puzzler: 

With the velociraptors pursuing you on Isla Nublar, your life depends on taking the correct fork in the road. You meet two guys—one always lies; the other always tells the truth. You get only one question. So what would the one question be to make sure you could get to the dock?

Here it is. 

I would look at one of the guys and say, “If I were to ask the other guy which road takes me to the dock, what would he say?”

Here’s why.

If you ask the truth teller, he is going to say, “The liar is going to tell you to take this road.” And that would be the wrong road, because he’s a liar. 

And if you ask the liar, he is going to point to the same road, because he has to lie about what the truth teller will say. 

So there ya have it. 

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Wisdom

  • Pre- means before, and post- means after. Using both at the same time would be preposterous.
  • Through prayer the Christ within us opens our eyes to the Christ among us.
    Henri Nouwen

Depending on each other: Every morning for years, at about 11:30, Yolanda, the telephone operator in a small Sierra-Nevada town, received a call from “James” asking the exact time. One day the operator summed up nerve enough to ask James why the regularity.

“I’m foreman of the local sawmill,” he explained. “Every day, I have to blow the whistle at noon, so I call you to get the exact time.” Yolanda giggled, “That’s interesting, All this time, we’ve been setting our clock by your whistle.”

Obsolete Insults & Colorful Terms

  • caitiff – wretched, despicable person
  • knave – dishonest man
  • varlet – rogue or rascal
  • coxcomb – vain, conceited man
  • scullion – kitchen servant (used insultingly)
  • slubberdegullion – slob, slovenly person
  • looby – awkward, clumsy fellow

Ode to the Married Man

To keep your marriage brimming
with love in the loving cup
whenever you’re wrong admit it
whenever you’re right, shut up.
                              Ogden Nash

                    Learning how to order coffee

This list will help you tighten your writing―eliminate unnecessary words. My personal opinion is that this list is absolutely necessary―it’s a true fact.

                                                Advice for parents

The Returning

How memorialize 89 years of life?

Barbara died in December. It is now April and my daughter Kimberly and I depart Minneapolis and travel east on a mission―to carry Barbara’s ashes back to Willow Street Mennonite, her childhood church, founded in 1710. It feels so right to bring Barbara full circle back to the place where she grew up immersed in her family’s dairy farm and in this Mennonite community surrounded by relatives and friends in beautiful Lancaster County., Pennsylvania.

This year spring has come early to Lancaster County—green meadows of alfalfa, new-leaved trees, gardens of tulips, daffodils and phlox. the faint smell of spread manure, We pass eternal stone barns with their earth bridges rising to the second level. We hear the clip-clop of passing grey and black buggies.

Fifty-four years ago I traveled from Venezuela to Lancaster County for our wedding. I learned to see this world through her eyes―now I love the place even more than she did but I’m tearing up as I arrive for the first time without Barbara.

We find Willow Street Mennonite Church thriving—lots of young families and children, with many of Barbara’s relatives sprinkled in. Even as we memorialize life’s ending, their Sunday Easter service promises new life. I’m enjoying hearing again the “Lancaster lilt”—”youse staying for dinner? . . . it spited me . . . outen the light . . . there’s more pie back . . . baby’s all cried up; maybe she needs drying . . .”

On Saturday, thirty people gather for Barbara’s memorial service. Joe Sherer, Willow Street minister, uses Barbara’s memoirs book to enrichen his remarks. I am humbled that Allen and Rachel (Groffdale horse-and-buggy Mennonites) have come, along with David and Sarah Lapp, the Amish couple who now farm the old Breneman farmstead. Both couples had to find car transportation.

I am blessed that all our children are here. Jeny has flown in from northern California and speaks of her childhood in the Hurd family. Son Timothy shares remembrances. When I rise to speak, I stand mute for several moments. Then, “Each life is sacred to God. Thus, it is fitting that we meet today to celebrate the life and faith of Barbara Ann Hurd Breneman. . . . When we moved to Colombia she comforted me after an airplane crash, nursed me through a bout of Typhoid fever. . . . Barbara was the beating heart of our home. Always loyal to her husband, a sacrificial wife and mother. She fiercely fostered our social, emotional and spiritual development. . . .”

The service complete, I retrieve the urn and lead the way out to the graveyard. In this cemetery lie Barbara’s parents, grandparents and other relatives. Don Breneman, who mows the graveyard; says there are 2200 stones. I apologize for giving him another one to mow around. I lower the brown wooden urn into the ground. We pray, leave flowers, then depart.

I feel at peace; feel that we helped Barbara circle back home to the place that formed her, the place where she now rests in the plot that awaits my future arrival. Sadness overwhelms me but even more, gratitude—for Barbara’s life; her blessed death; her great gifts to me, our family, our community and our world. I take comfort in our Lord’s words, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

May eternal light shine upon her.