I call it my spot, that place right beside where I seem to melt into him like a carefully sculpted, invisibly bonded part; that place I best know how to fit.  It is a place carved in the shape of me. In the early morning, this is how we pray:  He reaches for me, and I […]

Go. Saturday morning and this is what he says, when I am struggling to wake up, when I am trying to remember how to think. How many miles today?  You should go.  Enjoy it. Enjoy it? Really? Weary growls through my bones. I switch on the lamp beside the bed.  Let there be light. He has […]

Maybe—when I capture it here in flat black letters and solid lines, when I carefully trap the moments still within the boundaries of words—it will not appear as romantic as it really is to me: the two of us, finally side by side again at the end of the day. But then, the true value […]

At the chiropractor’s office, we take up the whole row of cervical traction units against the wall—Riley, Adam, Zoe, me.  We all know the routine.  We slip the padded bars behind our heads, rest our chins on the thick foam in front, grip the ends of the chin bars with our hands.  Riley and Adam […]

In the last fifteen minutes before we rush off to school, I gather her hair in my fingers, smoothing the strands with my thumbs. I trace the unseen bumps and grooves along her scalp and map them in my mind, the geography of her, the feel.  I know the landscape by heart. Before I can […]

Today, just this:It sounds like a simple thing, like frivolity scattered over a day, like something a mother says before she sends her daughter out to make a presentation of herself: Remember to smile. But it’s just this the Spirit whispers to me, just these three words planted in the middle of an afternoon, just […]

In moments at the end of a day–when I feel like I could cry, and the tears gather dark and cloud-heavy in the back of my throat—they arrange their bodies around mine as though together we are some wild arrangement of art, some carefully styled sculpture. And, we are. I can tell you what the […]

Our living is a wandering…and a return home. We have lived the same story in vast repetition since the couple left the Garden, since they glimpsed the two trees for the last time, barely touching the leaves with their fingers as they passed.  And since that time, when they believed for just a moment too […]

By the time we make it to the greenway, it’s late morning.  I unload a bike for Adam—a beach cruiser, because he likes to keep things uncomplicated, and then I hand the girls their scooters.  The air is brisk, but the sun burns bright, and ahead of us, the sky is brilliant cerulean, almost sapphire. […]

Raindrops meander down the windowpanes this afternoon, blurring my view.  All day I watched those clouds fill, watched them turn their heavy gray, and now the emptying makes thin spaces for light.  From all the sharp cracking, the twisting of tree limbs, the lurking dark, a new sky will come, and soon. New always, always […]