Mark Brown’s Blog

Ano Nuevo Collage • Mark Brown “Sometimes, just when you give up, your prayers are suddenly answered.” We had been hiking all day, out in the sand dunes between Franklin Point and Ano Nuevo Point, an area that few people ever went to, and one which to this day I still...

“We Need to Wait to Start the Wedding Until the Thunderstorm Is Over!” The Storm King We pulled up to Dave and Suzannah’s beautiful, leafy rural-suburban home in Croton-On-Hudson, an hour north of New York City near the Hudson River. The afternoon was hot, humid and...

One of your Great-Great Uncles was a general for the Union Army and his brother was a general for the Confederate Army during the Civil War.  This true familial tale of fratricidal brother-fighting-brother was told to me by my grandmother when I was young. My...

After reading between the lines and taking a parting shot, we all lived happily ever after, knowing that all is well that ends well. After I shot myself in the foot I was totally in my element but she got my goat so I started from scratch and went back to square one...

Where does the white go when the show melts?  Is that a 3 pointer? • Donner Lake, California • Photo by MMB I found this snowy query in an old journal of mine and posed this question to my friend Jenny, who has lived in Switzerland for over 40 years and knows...

I recognize that piano from Tehran 70 years ago.  Tehran I was sitting in my living room, the day after our 50th high school reunion in 2019 with my friend Eric and his delightful and razor sharp 94 year old mother, who had accompanied Eric to all of the...

Elegy for Carolyn She said:Every star is a grain of sand in the hourglass of destiny. And I said:The stars are dead people looking down on us with one eye. She was a stranger to herself and someone else was paying a visit to her life. Then she said:Each new life or...

You really nailed it this time! Nail Throne (30" high) and table created by MMB • Photo by MMB When I stopped building and remodeling houses for a living after training to become, and getting my first job as a graphic artist in my 20’s at Media 4, an ad agency, I had...

This is the future! The floppy future, in a black 8" cardboard case My uncle Malcolm McAfee was a Futurist before that was even a word. In the early 1970s, he gave family member a 8 “ floppy disk in a thin black cardboard shell for Christmas, before any of us had ever...

I love having a beehive in my bedroom! Honey Factories I walked upstairs in my friend Karen Aschenbach’s very old Vermont farmhouse and heard a low buzzing drone when she opened the door to her room. There was a large beehive inside the framing and the weathered...