“What’s wrong?”  I stand at the bottom of the stairs with one foot propped on the nearest step waiting for her answer, counting the bits of things–bright sock fuzz, some kind of crumb–caught in the nap of that foot-worn carpet.  One more beat of silence and I’ll run up, one answer and I’ll bend down […]

We wind our way along Pier 60 just as the sun dips, melting gold right into the ocean. I stand a moment and just breathe, watching the way the waves rise, wind-shaped right out of the glass sea. The pier is a flurry of activity as the city gears up for a festival on the […]

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, […]

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 […]

In the crisp of morning, we wait for school, snatching glimpses toward the door.  Adam reaches for me, flicking my ear with his fingers, saying I love you in a way all his own.  He tilts his head away, his expression lost, crinkled and preoccupied.  I wonder if he contemplates the angle of the new light beaming […]

It only takes a moment for things to crumble. At day’s end, twilight throws last rosy beams across the kitchen table, lighting up flecks of glitter melted into the clear coat years ago during some school project, making Riley’s golden flyaways shine like a gossamer crown faintly visible on her forehead.  She has just finished […]

Stinging words curl through the grapevine like searing smoke, and I gasp, suffocating.  I am distracted by a black storm, by the flicking tongue of a squint-eyed snake bent on spreading its own dark poison.  The deception threatens the fixing of my eyes.  Except. Except that God is my Father.  And He hasn’t left me […]

I love everyone. Riley rainbow-writes the words on her hand in letters that look faded against her skin, some big, some small, some crooked where the pens slip into the valleys between her fingers.  It’s a God thing to write love into surfaces, into souls, into the tissue of our hands, but for her the […]

So, I’m sitting here in tears, can bearly see the screen for the flow of grace, like the soft rain falling just beyond the window.  I count gifts all the time, because it’s one of the most powerful ways I know to keep these dim eyes glued on Truth, and this one gusts in to fill […]