It’s an old, familiar, childhood question.  If you had just one wish, and you knew it would come true… It’s a genie question, hovering in smoke, the answer thought-whispered over snuffed out candles, wispy and curling.  Just once, it was a question of Biblical proportions, only God posed it differently, to a young king:  Ask […]

We walk across a plank bridge, our feet thickly thumping, and a thin brown leaf drifts from the overhead canopy and twists down down in the breeze, grazing my arm.   In tiny, hidden places, anticipated Autumn begins to set the woods on fire, just barely.  We pause to admire a smoldering swatch of delicate […]

Home and kids settled, I run upstairs and slip on my walking shoes, tugging at the laces.  Sometimes the only thing I know is that I need God.  I slip my keys and my phone in my pocket and promise to be back soon, and I move, carrying water, heavy in one hand.  I’m thirsty, […]

We are growing stronger here, together. I say this to her as we walk along the beach, leaving impressions of our feet in the sand.  With every purposeful step, the soft shore sinks.  The salty sea rolls over our footprints, filling the heels, the toes, making briny tidepools and minuscule islands—our own desolate Lilliput, soon […]

Sometimes reluctance drags at the edges of a smile like invisible weight.  It feels as though the pudgy fingers of some ominous, unforgiving beast stick fat at the corners of the lips and pull down, pulling some rather not place, forcing a rather not feeling.  Reluctance is a bully.  It hauls you in the deep end and […]

He places the card in my hand, lightly fingering the rough fold, the paper blue like a storm in the middle of the afternoon or the ocean in places very deep.  I look at the flat, incongruent edges and see fibers; wet, bruised pulp; dye on someone’s fingers.  It’s remarkable to see the beginnings of […]

“Dad, will you pray with me?” Those are the first words that register, disembodied in the darkness.  Those words, maybe six of the most powerful words there are, rouse me completely from thick sleep, even though she addresses her dad.  With my eyes closed, I can see her huddled down close to him, bare-kneed, wrapping […]

For them, this was a game.  For me, this was a lesson in trust. “So, see, what you want to do is collect four queens from the middle,” Zoe says, gesturing expansively toward the center of the table.  “If you get the Rose Queen, that’s very good, because you can immediately draw an additional queen.” Adam […]

“What’s wrong?”  I stand at the bottom of the stairs with one foot propped on the nearest step waiting for her answer, counting the bits of things–bright sock fuzz, some kind of crumb–caught in the nap of that foot-worn carpet.  One more beat of silence and I’ll run up, one answer and I’ll bend down […]

I put a damp cloth in Adam’s hands and point toward the bathtub.  “Go ahead, wipe it clean, now.” “We don’t have to clean the bathroom,” he says to me, because he doesn’t like scrubbing bathtubs any more than most of the rest of us.  And that’s his new thing, as if life spins on […]