It’s nothing, really, just a wide mouth mason jar, glass catching and bending Light the way gifts do, filled with our favorite homemade granola, Mexican Hot Chocolate, the flavors warm and rich and spicy, like life. It’s nothing, really, but somehow, it’s also everything when I walk it outside to the kind driver who takes […]

“Bite,” I say, smiling broadly, spooning some yogurt into Riley’s mouth as she slides tiny earrings—butterflies, taking flight—into her ears, her hair water painting shade into the shoulders of her uniform shirt.  She laughs wild, buoyed by the knowledge of love, and I am meanwhile transported back to early days, when I spooned pureed vegetables […]

The brush, she, my sister, my friend, dips in vibrant pink, like satin ribbons or the tender curve of a lip, and then deftly applies, with the flick of her wrist, a twist, the kind of poetry artists use to produce a delicate petal, cupped and open, waiting, maybe, for rain. I watch her work, […]

In the hallway, I find dots of blood, tiny and faint, each pressed by the ball of a foot, maybe, into a miniature Rorschach, the lot of them an evidential path of wounding I follow from just outside the laundry room all the way down to Adam’s bedroom door, where they abruptly end. I am […]

In the elevator, I can feel it, the waves of stay-out-of-my-way coming off of the one woman who happens to be riding when we roll in with all our too much, not, I do not mean, the suitcases rolling in with each of us like little sidecars or the backpacks slung over our shoulders. Really, […]

“In my lifetime, I’ve thrown so many stones,” I’m saying to a close friend, my hand wrapped around a coffee mug, my fingers absently rubbing the shiny porcelain, but what I’m thinking about, what I imagine regretfully, is the cool hardness, the heft, of my judgements and criticisms, gracelessly hurled. What a dark miserable truth, […]

We pull into the hotel parking lot at eleven o’clock at night, the light long since gone and with it, our energy. Adam and I sit in the truck and wait while Kevin goes inside to check in, and I stare out the window looking for stars, counting pools of electric light illuminating the parking […]

Bea and I have been talking, lightly, about the weather.  August has felt milder than usual; we’ve already felt Fall drifting in on leaf-rustling breezes. We’ve enjoyed our thoughts of cozy things. Bea schedules transportation for the city, and she told me to ask for her by name, made up her mind to be a […]

Adam reminds me, leaning in at the table on a Saturday morning, his face all open to hear, that everyone needs a good rehearsal of hope, that good words re-heard can refresh a soul. We all feel in need of a fresh perspective. Adam has offered me his arm, and as I talk to him, […]

On a new summer morning, while running through the thick, honeysuckle-scented air past a short, pear-shaped neighborhood street, we see our Eastern European neighbor, her silver-grey hair covered, as it always is, with a scarf the wind teases just a little in the back. We don’t know exactly where she came from originally, but she […]