On a new summer morning, while running through the thick, honeysuckle-scented air past a short, pear-shaped neighborhood street, we see our Eastern European neighbor, her silver-grey hair covered, as it always is, with a scarf the wind teases just a little in the back. We don’t know exactly where she came from originally, but she […]

On the same day my sister-friend tells me in the morning that she has an alarm set on her phone to pray for me—just me, the chime stopping her mid-sentence, the two of us standing on a windswept corner anticipating rain–that everlasting reminder of God’s kindness, with a flurry of leaves skittering all around our […]

I love to sit on the cool dark porch just before dawn, listening as birds twitter and sing at such volume I imagine their banditries and bevies and breasts crowding the limbs of the trees with jumpy, sometimes swoopy chaos.  There comes a disembodied tuning, the calls and responses not unlike the huddled collaborations of […]

“I guess it’s about that time,” Kevin says, his morning voice soft as new day, whisper-light as that dawn blush warming up the quiet blue sky over the treetops, those trees, still unlit, wearing green as deep as night. I hear timid pops in the joints of his rocking chair as he stands to go […]

The first day we visited Graeter’s Ice Cream on the edge of downtown Cincinnati, Jimmy, who is the owner, came out from behind the counter with coloring books and crayons for the kids eating ice cream with their grandma at the table next to ours, and then, walking over to our table with a wide […]

We sit down, expanded family stretched out in the middle of a row up at the top of the lecture hall where they’re hosting graduation for Josh’s and Riley’s college program, and my mama mind thinks, it’s a lovely view from up here, really, perched as we are like birds on a line, watching from […]

My sister-friend and I sit close in the middle of the morning, me, with my hair still wet and my face scrubbed clean, bare feet tucked up, she, perched on the corner of a cushion of the couch, but we might as well be—I’ve said this to her before, receiving her easy laugh—floating on our […]

Rain falls outside, a whisper of sound, and looking out the window, through drops like tiny diamonds on the glass, I soak up a saturation of breathing green, the thickness of leaves and wild, dazzling grass. Glancing back toward my phone, the Bible app open, my finger paused on a phrase, I wonder what it […]

On a getaway vacation, Kevin and I explore new terrain, hiking through El Dorado State Park in Colorado.  El Dorado means the gold or the gilded, a term that became popular in the gold rush days, when at another time people crawled this craggy land looking for the gold veining the Colorado Rockies, living hard, […]

I sit by the sea, digging my toes into soft sand, soothed by the crashing waves.  The sparkling vastness of the water glimmers behind my reading, God’s letter in my hands, soft from all my folding and unfolding. A prayer plants me like a seed buried to live in a wild, fertile love so big […]