Here we are, home at last, our bags scattered on the floor in the doorway, dropped, like my young adults still discard their backpacks after school. You know the feeling, or at least I hope you do, what it’s like to come home after you’ve traveled away, when the touch of other places still clings […]

Down the stairs Riley comes, hair dangling in dark, wet, cheek-sticking ropes that send water wandering her neck in drops.  Fresh from the shower and wearing her donut-printed pajamas, she keeps a quicker pace than usual, purpose the wind beneath her feet.  She takes the stairs one foot at a time, instead of at a […]

So often we don’t need words; we need an embodiment of love.  We need compassion as a posture, protection like a shielding movement, one body curling over another. Let’s don’t just talk about love, the apostle John once wrote, let’s practice it. “You need to learn to pay attention to more than just the words […]

I wash Adam’s feet almost every day, soaking the diabetic’s precious, never-ending walk, his steady, vulnerable progress, in tender keeping, using a home remedy I found online, a mixture designed to slough off dead skin and soften calluses.  You wouldn’t believe it maybe, but mouthwash features in the short list of ingredients, and so, the […]

For me, recovery is the hardest part of sprinting. Watch beeps and I look down, silently counting how many more intervals I have yet to go on this run, because the part I dread isn’t the sprint itself but the breath-starved gulping that comes when the effort is over.  Resolved, I spring forward, legs and […]

“Riley, before I met you, I was all alone,” Josh says gently, his voice a quiet trumpet. He stands in the middle of our Baltimore hotel room, gesturing toward her with one hand clawed around a balled-up t-shirt.  The thought has made him pause in his packing, as though it must be acknowledged before he […]

On the phone, the cheery woman from Miracle League Baseball (MLB) asks, “So what do you know about us?” Given Adam’s particular interest in baseball, I had filled out an online application for him. I relay to the woman what Josh, having played for years, has told me sometimes half-grumble, that in an MLB game, […]

On the day my sister-friend gave me the picture that sits, small and pretty in a driftwood frame, on my writing desk, she said, “I’ve painted a dream for you, a tiny writing cottage beside the sea.” She does not know of the dozens of books I’ve begun and not finished, all of which begin […]

The morning after an event, a friend sends a group picture. Phone ding, watch buzz, and here I am in the crisp birth of morning, opened to God like a newborn settling in for sustenance. I sit in the quiet beauty, eyes closed, hands empty, soul wholly-gulping the intimate holy.  This oneness I know to […]

Adam’s delight. This my friend—my sister—texts after looking at the pictures from our trip, just those two words and a series of hearts, having arrived in seconds at the treasure I will carry with me long after even our memories of summer have faded.  Adam’s delight, that wild smile stretching wide across his lean face, […]