EDITOR’S NOTE — Dan and Jody Spark take turns writing about country life each Monday in The Armchair Mayor News. COLUMN — It seemed so right, yet my heart retched watching. The sun was low in the west, about to dip below the mountain, and the pastures were golden. Long shadows were cast from the old broken-topped birches on the shoreline. Dan lumbered with a heavy weight shrouded in a white cotton blanket toward the bank as I followed behind. As I looked at the sky, the sun, the land, the light, a clear picture snapped in my mind bracketed with pain and remembrance. He stepped over the makeshift barricade to the river and I was brought back to the week that led up to this day. “No, girl,” I said holding my elderly redbone coonhound’s hips at that same barricade. “You can’t go down there.” She looked down the bank at the ducks on the river and knew I was right. She would collapse on the way down. I was taking her for what would be her last walk around our property. She walked gingerly as I held her back end, aware she could fall at any moment. She … Continue reading Where the red tree grows