The Lone Prairie Blog

Photo used with permission. All rights reserved. When my sister got home from Christmas, she found that coyotes had slaughtered one of her ewes. A pile of warm guts was in the nearby yard, and out along the pasture fence line was the rest. “They ripped her apart,” she said, her voice steady but no doubt belying her feelings. “I had to walk a ways to find the ear with the tag so I knew which one it was.” She has had a rough few years on her little farm . The death of dogs, cat

Discover the five reasons failure must be a part of any success, and how to reframe the way you think about both success and failure.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved. What is success? On July 14, 2007, I wrote a blog post about a topic that I have revisited many times over the years in different forms. "What is success and failure in life? How do we know which is which?" That question, asked softly by the narrator of the PBS documentary Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern , a film about a farmer who was forced to sell at an auction and leave farming, has stuck with me since I first watched the

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved. Your screen will not always be with you. Maybe it’ll be an EMP. Or illness in a hospital bed with beeps and a broken TV. An apocalypse in which people fight for a single printed page. Maybe it’ll just be today. I worry about people who will arrive at some metaphorical waiting room in life, at a period of aloneness of starting over, or at the end of their life, without someone around to entertain them. Unless, of course, they’v

Dead Man's Hand. The gun has a trigger. © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved. Trigger warning: I’m going to get pretty ranty and offensive here. In early 2024, after hearing a distressing story about influencers and how they have impacted young people and changed the culture for the generations that followed GenX, I decided to spend some time trying to figure out what they were and maybe write about them by watching the videos they produce. 1   What a stupid idea. After

This is the tale of the holiday rental with the rotten potatoes.