51Jul 17, 2015
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 […]
52Jul 3, 2015
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 […]
53May 29, 2015
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 […]
54Apr 17, 2015
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 […]
55Apr 10, 2015
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 […]
56Mar 20, 2015
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; […]
57Dec 19, 2014
In the moonlight, her eyes sparkle. She never wears makeup, doesn’t really even prefer it, but she made a concession tonight, for dance. Just now, as we leave the building, a brisk wind lifts a few errant strands of hair away from her ears. The stars rest glittery on her cheeks. I hold the door, […]
58Oct 17, 2014
I don’t know how much time I have left. Afternoon, and autumn leaves wander and twist to the earth, fluttering through the grass and along the sidewalk. The sun makes a blaze of the trees. I stop for a moment just to see, putting down my work, stunned by the fragility of life. I […]
59Oct 3, 2014
This week, a departure for Kevin and me, a Sabbath rest: Tucked away, pulled back from the busy road and held–but lightly–by the trees, we hide beneath the fog. Sound is magnified here, somehow, or perhaps it is that other noise removed leaves room for hearing birdsong, the cheeky chatter of squirrels, the deep-throated gurgle […]
60Sep 26, 2014
Deep, empty night, and we brush our teeth, looking across at each other with eyes like moons. We both feel hollow-carved, like vulnerable husks reaching hungrily for rest. I have no thought except for the feel of the sheets beneath my legs. And then, a crash. Kevin and I look at each other briefly, asking […]