I don’t know her name–not the sound of her voice, not even the shape of her smile. As it is these days, because of the mask she wears, her eyes—dark and determined and locked on mine–are all I know of her, those eyes and that hair, curling dark around her head in short, wild corkscrews. […]

“I just hope God let’s me learn how to drive,” Riley ventures. Her voice waivers; the flicker from the TV only half lights her face. I don’t have to see her clearly to know that her ocean blue eyes glisten wet, threatening a storm. “I know,” I say and Kevin nods. Riley has talked about […]

The kitchen smells savory-rich, of comfort and warmth and vacation, of salty, sizzling bacon, slowly melting butter, and just lightly, of syrup. This morning, we cook up breakfast sandwiches assembly-line style, sipping coffee and talking, our voices rising and falling among the clatter of plates and pans. Here and there, a chuckle, a yawn, a […]

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 […]

Weary fingers, mine, and tangled in her hair, weaving, weaving, weaving the wet strands in thick ropes down her back. For at least fifteen minutes every day, Riley and I become the reflection of generations of others before us–their angled arms, their busy fingers, their bodies bending, tending. Riley, still and waiting, tilts her face […]

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, […]

On the screen, a dozen boxes, a dozen tiny windows into lives and homes, begin to stack like bricks placed by an invisible hand. You can see me, with my bad posture and my tired eyes, a blinking stone already added to a living, breathing, growing thing. Zooming (Have we already verbed that word?) feels […]

Blooms litter the street, floating down from the pear and cherry trees like flat fairy carpets, like petals tossed to soften the footfall of a bride. I feel out of place here in my tennis shoes, but am I? I glance at the sky–cloudless, blue like the sapphire sea around God’s throne. Everywhere, the Holy […]

In the late afternoon, while I stand in the kitchen strategizing, with ingredients for four different meals sizzling or simmering or slicing under the knife, with mixing bowls and crumb dotted small appliance parts gathering at the sink, I realize I have run out of spoons, and I don’t mean the kind I use for […]

In the late afternoon, having satisfied my heart on sweet conversation, I convince myself to take our mother-daughter mugs–empty now, but still warm in my hands–to the sink. But in that pregnant moment between the decision and my middle-aged groan, Riley squeezes into the chair beside me. It’s a chair and a half, but there […]