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 the wall in my parents’ living room, our families run in long, hand-linked lines, crooked stretched branches of our family tree running across a grassy field, caught hurrying away from sunset, or so it seems, but really—I remember—we were only trying to distract our children from the family photography.  Perpetual motion machines, children, as […]

We take up an entire row in the airplane—Kevin with Adam on one side, me with Josh and Riley on the other.  This placement, of course, has been strategic: the young one with the most fear smack beside his Father, so close he can feel the warmth of him, can hear his dad living, breathing […]

“Do you think this is the hardest part, really, this anticipation?” Zoe squints a little, looking at me as she asks this.  In her blue eyes I see a sliver-sharp stretch of sky. We sit on the back porch on a Sunday afternoon, Kevin and Zoe and me, all of us restless and melancholy, sad […]

On the same day my sister-friend tells me in the morning that she has an alarm set on her phone to pray for me—just me, the chime stopping her mid-sentence, the two of us standing on a windswept corner anticipating rain–that everlasting reminder of God’s kindness, with a flurry of leaves skittering all around our […]

I love to sit on the cool dark porch just before dawn, listening as birds twitter and sing at such volume I imagine their banditries and bevies and breasts crowding the limbs of the trees with jumpy, sometimes swoopy chaos.  There comes a disembodied tuning, the calls and responses not unlike the huddled collaborations of […]