So many times this week I’ve whispered the words—running under stunning blue skies; exhaling beside grassy spaces where dewey spider webs glow like hundreds of silver threaded veils seemingly abandoned by impetuos ethereal brides; in the dying light of the afternoon, when the work still stretches, teasing at the edges of impossible.  I say it […]

I hear the door open, and with that sound comes the volume of her sadness, the distinct sound of brokenness.  Tears always steal her breath the way they still steal mine, and before I can see her I hear that awful gasp, the way she hungrily stuggles for air.  She cries with her whole body.  The […]

I love wide, open spaces, those places that could never be arm-measured, that overflow conceivable depth and stretch further than sight; spilling over, covering completely, unbound, unheld, uncaptured. So today, because I need reminders, God sends us in a different direction, turning left on a road instead of the usual right, and this just as I […]

In the morning, the rain comes, and I do what I have determined to do more and more these days:  I stop to see, to gather up the feeling of the breeze lifting my hair away from my cheeks.  I spy a plump cardinal hiding just inside the gardenias bobbing gently by the steps, an elegant […]

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 […]

I confess that when she comes to get me, I do not want to get up. I just picked up my book—Dorothea Frank’s Plantation, and I have precious few moments to mind-leap on down to the Lowcountry and shut out the world.  Every time this author punctuates a sentence with the word yanh, I smell the […]

I like doing this with you, she says, and I look away from the wild roses just beyond us in the yard, their bold red beauty twisting madly toward the limitless sky, jutting elegantly through the slats.  Their freedom completely captures me, that and the way they’ve doubled in size, the way they reach in the […]

I like the way God built me.   She says it like it’s the simplest thing.  The words fall easy, fluttering elegant, lighting on a twisty varicose vein that branches pen-thin across my thigh.  I had been tracing the bruised lines with my finger.  These spidery betrayers invade, cracks in the shell of me suddenly […]

We wander down the grocery aisle, me with my head buried in a list, Zoe pushing the cart, Riley walking just behind, quietly trying to breathe. Zoe reaches toward me with her eyes.  I feel the gaze grab hard, and I look up and toward my daughter.  Zoe sucks in her belly and stiffens her […]

For a moment, just breathe. Morning run under bluest skies, and the warmth of the sun splits apart the crisp, cool evidence of a night safely passed.  The trees, red and swollen, change the tone of the landscape, pregnant now with possibility.  Spring comes suddenly, like a first breath, a startled gasp exhaled as relief; […]