This four-lane road, the last main thoroughfare before Adam and I get to school, snakes about in hills and curves sometimes tightly compressed and sometimes stretched and rising.  It’s a good analogy for life, this drive, for the way we all get pushed and pressed, the way a day can feel like a long, blind […]

Josh and Riley bend over the island in the kitchen, a wedding planner splayed open in front of them.  Riley’s hand bobs over the cover page, where she carefully writes their names, not formally, the way I would have, just Riley and Josh. In truth, almost everything about this is different for them than it […]

I wait through traffic with a prayer on my heart.  Adam sits beside me, bobbing his head in time to the music—what a beautiful Name it is, having dispensed with my pick-up pleasantries about his day with a perfunctory, “Good,” as in, it was good and that’s all there is to say about it.  As […]

In our living room, Josh and Riley stand side-by-side, she, with her hair yanked up in a high ponytail, yanked, like she suddenly does when her mind can’t be distracted by something like errant strands of hair tickling her cheeks, and he, with his face completely open, ready and waiting for whatever I introduce.  They […]

In the new, pink light, Kevin and I set out on a run, past trees covered in bridal blossoms like lace trailing down, limbs cupping silken petals in shades of plum, and bushes tossing lemon-yellow blooms on the ground in front of them.  It’s early yet, and Spring has sprung. I can tuck my head […]

“Mom Jones?”  Riley’s voice stops me mid-confession. Jones, what Riley calls “our funny last name,” is a silly joke from years ago that eventually became a sign of Riley’s affection. I look at her, startled out of a full-on run to Jesus.  In the space of the last hour, pride and comparison, mistaken identity and […]

In the morning, Adam and I rush out the door on the way to school and I smile at him with his long, twenty-year-old bones and the bud of wisdom in his tender eyes and the snarl of hair at the back of his head where he never brushes, and I think of the strangeness […]

On Saturday morning, Kevin makes a sticky note schedule for Adam, then takes a picture of it and sends the picture as a text.  Roughly sketched, it says, we will go to the grocery store, and then we will go for a hike.  He leaves the actual note pressed on the edge of Adam’s favorite […]

I laugh in disbelief.  It is the initial sputtering sound of my mind and heart agreeing, I believe, help me in my unbelief, which is what I feel right now, even if my lips have yet to utter the prayer, as I laugh out loud over the mess of how-in-the-world splayed out in front of […]

At the end of Adam’s dinnertime prayer—thank you, God, for lemon chicken; thank you, for green beans, always specific gratitude for the foods he likes to eat and complete silence on the foods he doesn’t, uttered in his deep, pausing voice over our table, our steaming plates of food, our linked hands–tonight, Riley carries on, […]