1Mar 15, 2024
For the better part of an hour, I listen to our engaged couple getting ready to go for a walk. They arrive at the moment together after lunch, having noted and discussed at length that, in the plan I had helped them create for the afternoon, a walk comes next. I hear them still processing […]
2Jan 26, 2024
In the morning, after Riley pads downstairs with the edges of her pajama bottoms dragging the floor, pooling just slightly around her bare feet, she pauses, just out of sight in front of her desk. I don’t have to look to know that even as the sleep still clings to her eyes, she’s flipping over […]
3Sep 15, 2023
The same day that I sit in the hammock chair on the porch reading Ezekiel, my bare toes curled and hardly touching the wood planks of the floor, my body twisting slowly in the newborn morning, Kevin gently says to me, “I think you need one of those days when you leave your phone on […]
4Aug 25, 2023
On the Fridays when Josh spends the day with us, Riley, Josh, and I have conversations about what they’ll do for each other in-case-of-seizure. They sit at the bar, our couple, their fingers interlaced, while I stand in front of them at the kitchen sink, my hands preoccupied with washing. “Now Josh,” I begin. He […]
5Apr 7, 2023
Josh and Riley bend over the island in the kitchen, a wedding planner splayed open in front of them. Riley’s hand bobs over the cover page, where she carefully writes their names, not formally, the way I would have, just Riley and Josh. In truth, almost everything about this is different for them than it […]
6Mar 17, 2023
In our living room, Josh and Riley stand side-by-side, she, with her hair yanked up in a high ponytail, yanked, like she suddenly does when her mind can’t be distracted by something like errant strands of hair tickling her cheeks, and he, with his face completely open, ready and waiting for whatever I introduce. They […]
7Jan 20, 2023
My body groans this morning, acutely I feel it crumbling, as Kevin and I head out for an early run, searching for renewal, and not just of muscles and tissues and cells. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, the apostle Paul wrote, and as our feet begin to tap staccato, I remember the […]
8Jan 6, 2023
Josh hands Riley a gift bag, jolly red and green, plump with surprises and spilling over with tissue, and we all sit forward, anticipating grace. All through Advent, I have been thinking: On the surface of things, at least according to the understanding of their time, Mary and Joseph should never have married. I’ve been […]
9Aug 19, 2022
“I guess it’s about that time,” Kevin says, glancing at the clock and then at me, meaning time for us to set aside our books and our lazy attitudes, time to get dressed in our wedding clothes. I think of the dress I bought, hanging upstairs on a hanger in the closet, the silver brocade […]
10Oct 22, 2021
Into the thin of night, during those turbulent hours when panic threatens the best of our rest; during those hours when the conversations of young friends become so exposed that with raw, sleepy voices they begin to truly know each other; during those hours when so many souls bound for home finally drift away; into […]