I pray with Riley at night. After she brushes her teeth, she comes to get me, shows up beside my bed like she used to as a child, and I lay aside my book and pull my body back out of bed and slow step my way across the hall to her room.  Sometimes I […]

“I’m concerned about Adam’s schedule for the summer,” Riley says to me, folding her hands in front of her and digging one toe into the outdoor carpet on our back porch. The hinges of the door haven’t yet stopped screeching, and a great wind rustles the leaves of the trees, and I take a deep […]

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 […]

In the hallway at our neurologist’s office, as Riley and I breeze along behind the medical assistant on the way to an exam room, I realize again how much my daughter has grown up. It’s a flaw of ours as parents, that while we encourage and facilitate growth in our children, we lack proficiency in […]

In the waiting room, I sit on a cushy sofa beside a water feature that transforms the wall into a waterfall. Rivulets gurgle, trickling down over curvy metal panels–shiny blue, polished silver, suggesting the play of light over undulating bodies of fish, a pulling current. The water disappears behind a panel at the bottom. I […]

The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing. I say it so quietly no one can hear, with my useless hands jammed under my thighs. From the exam room in the oral surgeon’s office, I watch as the dental assistant walks my son across the hall for x-rays. Her long hair, shiny with florescent light, […]

The Spirit says, pray, so we do. Happy Friday, friends!

We walk down the tree-lined sidewalk, pilgrims to Knowing, our bodies dappled with sun and dark, blotting leaves, our feet climbing a shadowy canopy. The air is thick with rain that just won’t fall; we glance up at a few steel-colored clouds backlit and rimmed in sunlight. We have logo-printed ponchos they gave us at […]

I joke and call myself a hoop jumper, me with my hair flying wild around my face and my exercise clothes still on from before carpool; me with a pen in one hand, and a mess of papers stretched across the desk in indistinguishable stacks, some paper-clipped, some loose and, as Kevin would say, “flapping […]

Fresh from the shower on an 80-degree day that feels thick with the promise of Summer, Adam spins–literally–into the kitchen wearing flannel pajama pants–buffalo check–and a salt-washed long-sleeved t-shirt as blue as his eyes. I wonder how he doesn’t instantly feel that sticky prickle of after-shower sweat at the base of the neck and the […]