On the Fridays when Josh spends the day with us, Riley, Josh, and I have conversations about what they’ll do for each other in-case-of-seizure.  They sit at the bar, our couple, their fingers interlaced, while I stand in front of them at the kitchen sink, my hands preoccupied with washing. “Now Josh,” I begin.  He […]

As she walks, baby girl holds on to my friend’s finger for dear life, just the one, in a white-knuckled grip. “You can do this on your own, sweet girl; you don’t need me,” my friend is saying, her coffee forgotten and growing cold on the kitchen table. Baby girl keeps taking those exaggerated steps, […]

“Are you Adam’s mom?” Our young friend Becky asks me, lightly fingering a little-girl hairclip at the side of her head, looking up at me with wide, quiet eyes of fathomless blue.  I feel touched by the hint of wonder in her expression. Becky must be in the third grade.  I had watched earlier as […]

When I open the email about Adam’s blood work, I have just finished telling the Lord that I don’t understand why everything always has to be so hard.  I know that everything and always are sweeping, emotional words, but God is a sweeping, omniscient God who doesn’t need me to “pretty up” my feelings.  I’ve […]

I sit in the hammock swing on our screened porch, waking, cradling my coffee cup in my hands, watching the steam curl and rise out of that mug toward the dark, lacy outline of the evergreen trees bordering our neighbor’s yard.  I smile gently at those trees, at the way they look right now, black […]

I pray with Riley at night. After she brushes her teeth, she comes to get me, shows up beside my bed like she used to as a child, and I lay aside my book and pull my body back out of bed and slow step my way across the hall to her room.  Sometimes I […]

“Need to go upstairs,” Adam says, the very minute Kevin mentions that we should play a game together after dinner. We gather around the family table, but Adam feels no compulsion to stay, may in fact find the relational atmosphere a bit overwhelming.  When we ask him questions during the meal, Adam puts down his […]

At the water park, we wait in a sunny line on a meandering sidewalk bordered by honeysuckle just past the bloom, holding our rafts, rafts that will soon take us down a waterslide.  As a group, we exude anticipation, a chattering hope spurred on by the whooping sounds of delight we’ve heard all along our […]

I stand on my tiptoes a little now to brush Adam’s teeth, reminding myself not to hum aloud the thread of praise weaving through my thoughts because Adam will feel as though, while he’s already telling me it’s time to finish with his teeth, he must also ask me to stop humming, please, because the […]

At some moment toward the end of every sweet vacation–this time while cool, briny waters lick at my feet and the sun warms my bare shoulders; while I meander along and consider that the ocean looks both a clear, clean green in the rise of the waves and like quicksilver on the surface—I begin to […]