That breeze today, it tickles my cheeks, warm Autumn winds dancing over rising hills, an invisible thumb tracing the lines of my face. I press my hand flat against the pages to keep them from drifting up. That hand, it’s my mother’s hand, perpetually tanned, rooted with veins like a stretch of earth beneath a […]

He doesn’t want to cut the bushes. “Please don’t cutting the bushes,” Adam says to me first thing when I walk in the kitchen on Saturday morning, bending low as though unless he’s close to my ear I might not hear, that voice of his deep and gentle. I glance at the white board where […]

“At least I’m doing something,” Zoe says, shadow-mumbling, making reckless half-spins in my office chair, turned to face Kevin and me, coffee mug cradled in her hands. “I mean, I’m trying.” I wait for a wave of hot coffee to crest and spill over the side of her mug, wait for it to drip from […]

In the morning, we friends gather on Zoom, collecting on a screen the way we once surrounded coffee shop tables, dropping handbags on the floor, dragging over extra chairs, only now new windows open into presence in front of us like blinking eyes, and here I sit at home with my wet-from-the-shower hair, and we […]

In our many hours of learning, we learn how to pray. I pass out empty index cards because my children, who find it hard to function without discernment of the edges, need discrete lines, spaces they can see in which to realize and organize real hopes into real petitions. The moments to consider, to plan, […]

Riley hears us on the stairs, the push-pull comedy of Kevin and me moving a desk up to the room from which Kevin now works most of the week. She hears her dad pouring out his strength; hears me straining to lift when the desk snags the edge of a step; hears both of us […]

One way or another, the virus infects us all. In conversation, we make lists without realizing it: lists of things we can’t do, how this quarantine limits, what it takes away, our disagreements with decision-makers. In place of the usual discourse about our venturing lives, in place of thanks-giving or our witness to excellent and […]