161Jan 24, 2020
After dinner, gathered around the blessing-table, our emptied, sopped-up plates abandoned like islands, our bodies weary from the day, we feast on family. “We should play a game,” Kevin says, and I get up to look in the cabinet where we keep them. Adam follows, towering behind me, swaying like a pendulum. For Adam, stillness […]
162Jan 17, 2020
Come with me; I want to show you something. Watch your step; I’ll hold the door, the usual business kind with the glass panes reflecting our faces, my windblown hair, that stubborn purse strap sliding off my shoulder. End of the day and we’re both a little rumpled, right? I look over my shoulder and […]
163Jan 3, 2020
In the middle of prayer, my friends and I huddled holy around that old table, I hear Riley on the stairs. “Yes,” she says, her pure voice rising sweet with ours, her assent like a clasping hand, an enveloping arm. It’s as though she’s come upon our group hug and wrapped herself around us. And […]
164Dec 20, 2019
The young man meets us in the parking lot, at the spaces reserved for guests. Before we can get out of the car, he’s walking purposefully our way, wearing a t-shirt that says, Welcome. And so it should be with God’s people, always wearing the welcome of Christ, always walking purposefully toward opportunities to love. […]
165Nov 29, 2019
We stand in a huddled line, breath like mist in the frosty cold, our hands stuffed in our pockets. Seven minutes until the DMV opens, and we wait like a semi-orderly herd of sleepy sheep staring expectantly at a storefront door. “If we had a YouTube channel, this would be the episode to watch,” I […]
166Nov 22, 2019
Riley and I sit against the foot board of the guest room bed, Shaker planks pressing into our backs. “How long will the tornado warning last?” She asks me, looking over at my phone, the radar map I’m scrolling. I stare at the blobs of color–red, yellow, green, spreading them bigger with my fingers to […]
167Oct 4, 2019
“You need to get with it,” I say to Riley, like I do nearly a dozen times a day, then I jot down the phrase. Get with it. I taste the words a little, stare down at the shape of them, the jerking movement of the letters. Kirk Byron Jones has me watching my language […]
168Sep 13, 2019
We sit, Kevin and I, on metal locker room benches dotted with holes, our bodies carefully sandwiched between a woman in a kerchief–silver-gray hair slipping out at the edges, and a herd of boys climbing over their mother. Mom smiles weakly when we say hello, studying the numbered slip in her fingers while one of […]
169Aug 9, 2019
Kevin walks into the living room, where the morning light turns golden and Adam’s music makes a mini city of silver disc towers in front of the stereo. The room swells with harmonies. Adam roams, a lanky builder carefully settling one more disc atop one pile and then turning to lift a disc from another. […]
170Jul 26, 2019
I remember sitting at a too short Formica table, overflowing a child-sized chair, in the play area where a couple of bright, shiny women evaluated my then two-year-old Riley. Riley, distractedly pushing platinum corkscrew curls away from her eyes, lined chunky animals along a busy, primary carpet in a long, snaking line. It looked like […]