“Mrs. Henegar?  Mrs. Henegar!”  She calls to me from a stroll away, two picnic tables over, where she balances a fat bag of trail mix on her palm. I turn to look and with one finger, she pushes her glasses up on her nose, then digs ’round in the sack again.  Her fingers disappear beneath […]

We rumble over bridges, wheels rolling across weathered slats, dappled shadows stretching.  Zoe takes the lead, crouching low, blonde hair flying behind her in ribbons.   Kevin trails her gently, restraining his pace just enough to let her go.  Somehow at first, I’m in the middle, sandwiched between these I love–two blazing, two simmering.  The path […]

I read the passage slowly, letting it float in the air between us, letting it settle: In the beginning the Word already existed.     The Word was with God,     and the Word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through him,     and nothing was created except through him. The Word gave […]

The journal was a gift from my parents; the cover black, like pitch, like a blind dark day.  Butterflies explode from the corner, brilliant blue, buttery gold, every size, hundreds of them by surprise, overwhelming all that flat emptiness.  I run my fingers over the raised edges of their wings, feeling the fine lines, the […]

Clutching the mug–round, steaming, creamy-warm, in the snug space between twinkle lights and the gentle glow of dawn, I push back my chair, leaving the porch with its weathered slats and plump, happy cushions.  The house feels still, dark, lightly chilled from the brisk morning.  Just past a silhoutted wave to father and daughter on […]

Out of the corner of my eye, I see them kneeling in front of my son, knees pressed hard into the floor right there in front of the chair where Adam sits waiting for me, glancing at his watch.  I’m too far away to hear them, but I can tell that they’re talking to him, […]

It’s an old, familiar, childhood question.  If you had just one wish, and you knew it would come true… It’s a genie question, hovering in smoke, the answer thought-whispered over snuffed out candles, wispy and curling.  Just once, it was a question of Biblical proportions, only God posed it differently, to a young king:  Ask […]

To look at her, you’d not think her mighty, carrying that slice of notebook paper folded over her fingers, brassy hair tied in two smooth knots and pinned, finally, against her head and away from her face.  She insists upon nothing in her eyes when she’s about her business, checking off important things in a […]

We walk across a plank bridge, our feet thickly thumping, and a thin brown leaf drifts from the overhead canopy and twists down down in the breeze, grazing my arm.   In tiny, hidden places, anticipated Autumn begins to set the woods on fire, just barely.  We pause to admire a smoldering swatch of delicate […]

I have moments I collect like treasure–the moments I never thought I’d see, and this is one of them: I rush in late in the middle of a song and slide into a seat next to Kevin, picking up the melody, letting the words gather in my mind. What heights of love, what depths of […]