Here we are in the thick of the morning rush, my foot pump, pump, pumping the break, and she asks, “Mom, what are your plans for today?”  We move along the roadway like a pebble in a clogged stream, jerking irregularly, moving one moment and then suddenly not.  It feels as though I have to […]

I walk in from my first round of morning carpool, and she sits at the bar, twisting a long ribbon of brassy hair around her finger.  Through the open door that extends our home past the threshhold and anchors it truly as part of a much broader world, I can hear the birds tweeting madly, […]

From the worn table–an oval thing, brown like the hull of a nut and rubbed with a history of fingers, a delicate kaleidoscope of tiny butterflies drifts, falling lightly on our living room carpet. I scoop up the thin, papery things with one hand as I walk by, kneeling just the moment, and carefully dump […]

Waiting at the stoplight on the way to school, drizzle dotting the windshield, and I grab my phone to take a picture of my daughter.  The cloud-cast makes her skin look more alabaster than olive-gold; makes her blue-gray eyes look stormy. “What’re you doing?” She asks.  But I catch the hint of a smile, just […]

She comes to find me on the porch, settling lightly on the double rocker next to me, shimmying her body close to mine.  The warm wind picks up a stray piece of her hair and plasters it across her forehead.  She leans against the pillows, considering me briefly, reaching up to tuck that wild strand […]

Her hair blows against my cheek, just one errant, brassy strand.  She laughs, and I laugh with her, taken by those eyes that have always been as blue as the sky just before a storm.  “You know, this is how it would have to be with us,” she says, lifting a hand toward the door, […]

My daughter is sixteen, so for her birthday we throw a big party at the building where our church meets.  And I receive this: a solid view of friendship. “Do you need help?” My friend asks, not in a maybe-I-can-do-a-few-things-if-it’s-convenient kind of way, but the way she always does, as though she’s already climbed up on that […]

Middle of the afternoon and I’m goofy-grinning over an armful of sorted socks, their neat little knots all white like dumplings; grinning even as they bob out of my arms and roll on the floor.  I’m not going to lie.  Something satisfies me about folding laundry.  I love those warm stacks with the clean-tucked edges, […]

Early evening, and already I feel splintered and scattered and sore from carrying the day.  It has been one of those—the kind of day that wakes me before the sun, pressing into me in the emptied hours, and then sends me chasing time and late for everything; the kind of day in which, right from […]

“When I struggled so much with anxiety, God taught me to pray,” Riley says, lifting her hand and turning it over, as though neatly wrapping the words, a gift.  And then, when later we reach for each other’s hands, she quietly asks God to help her brother talk to us.  Maybe she’s just following Zoe’s lead. […]