Lift me up The music erupts, like a cry, swelling suddenly in the dark. As if before I had no idea I had fallen asleep, I inhale on the crescendo, watching, watching the stage, feeling how the Breath—the ruach, expands and lifts me. In one way or another, we’re all looking for a good raising, […]

As Riley and Adam and I run beneath a sapphire sky, I keep time in blooms like lace gently swaying in trees that just weeks ago still stood beseeching, their empty limbs desperately reaching for God.  And now, it’s as though creation breathes again for the first time, newborn, naked and filling with life, all […]

All I ask, Riley sitting beside me at the bar in the kitchen for lunch, us with our bright-fresh salads, glint of forks, napkins folded in neat rectangles, is, do you want to say the prayer? Umm, that’s okay, she says, I’m good, and then, her voice wavers, and her eyes suddenly fill with tears. […]

“Uh oh, I lost track,” Adam murmurs, when suddenly I press the brake a little too hard and the car lurches, at the exact moment when also I resentfully glare at the massive dump truck lumbering and grunting just ahead, when secretly I tuck a selfish, incredulous why into a shadowy part of my heart. […]

For the better part of an hour, I listen to our engaged couple getting ready to go for a walk. They arrive at the moment together after lunch, having noted and discussed at length that, in the plan I had helped them create for the afternoon, a walk comes next.  I hear them still processing […]

“You with your hand rubbing your forehead,” my friend says to me, chuckling, the computer like a window fusing her home and mine, and us with our rumpled faces, talking quietly in the early morning, talking of life and how it’s hard. I do not, until the moment she says this, realize what I’ve been […]

“Have you changed your sheets recently?”  I ask over lunch, just as Riley stabs at her salad with her fork, catching up a bit of lettuce, a brilliant coin of carrot. It’s true of us all: we can think no one knows where we’ve been, that no one knows we’ve walked right off course for […]

Adam shows up at the brunch table on Saturday morning wearing his glasses, a little smudged, because he’s still learning to clean them, and I treasure it up, because he has chosen to wear them on his day of rest. Here I am too, drawing my chair–blue, like a summer sky—up to our table, also […]

A friend says, the text coming in gently, it must be hard for you to let her just walk through that door. Yes, I type.  Yes. I sit in the car, waiting while Riley digs her bookbag out of the trunk, talking to herself in a soothing, rhythmic way.  She turns to look at me […]

In the morning, after Riley pads downstairs with the edges of her pajama bottoms dragging the floor, pooling just slightly around her bare feet, she pauses, just out of sight in front of her desk.  I don’t have to look to know that even as the sleep still clings to her eyes, she’s flipping over […]