“No Band-Aid.  Not right now.  I don’t like it,” Adam says, the ‘don’t’ coming across pointedly, as though Riley might otherwise misunderstand the rising volume, the sharp tone, in which he speaks.  She kneels in front of him, her knees pressing into the floor, brassy hair swinging against bright cheeks, gently tugging at the heel […]

Lift me up The music erupts, like a cry, swelling suddenly in the dark. As if before I had no idea I had fallen asleep, I inhale on the crescendo, watching, watching the stage, feeling how the Breath—the ruach, expands and lifts me. In one way or another, we’re all looking for a good raising, […]

In the late afternoon on Maundy Thursday, I crash, feeling my own slow crumble as I curl into a corner of the couch and tentatively flex, cataloguing the cramps in my feet.  Sometimes, as I consider the years stretching on and no end in sight to the needs in front of me, I feel a […]

As Riley and Adam and I run beneath a sapphire sky, I keep time in blooms like lace gently swaying in trees that just weeks ago still stood beseeching, their empty limbs desperately reaching for God.  And now, it’s as though creation breathes again for the first time, newborn, naked and filling with life, all […]

All I ask, Riley sitting beside me at the bar in the kitchen for lunch, us with our bright-fresh salads, glint of forks, napkins folded in neat rectangles, is, do you want to say the prayer? Umm, that’s okay, she says, I’m good, and then, her voice wavers, and her eyes suddenly fill with tears. […]

Unraveling heavy things, my friend tells me a story about taking her kids to see the dinosaur exhibit at the museum. “In the beginning…” She doesn’t use those words, not exactly, but she might as well have, because right from the beginning it feels as though her story belongs to me too somehow, belongs to […]

“Uh oh, I lost track,” Adam murmurs, when suddenly I press the brake a little too hard and the car lurches, at the exact moment when also I resentfully glare at the massive dump truck lumbering and grunting just ahead, when secretly I tuck a selfish, incredulous why into a shadowy part of my heart. […]

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 […]

On a Wednesday, I sit waiting for physical therapy, twisting my stiff neck to look as a woman walks in with an ash-black smudge right in the center of her forehead. This looks like no accidental blemish I’ve ever seen, and for a moment, feeling a little uncomfortable for her, I wonder how it came […]

“You with your hand rubbing your forehead,” my friend says to me, chuckling, the computer like a window fusing her home and mine, and us with our rumpled faces, talking quietly in the early morning, talking of life and how it’s hard. I do not, until the moment she says this, realize what I’ve been […]