“I didn’t even realize he was wearing his sweatpants,” I say to my friend, gesturing with one finger toward my son, over to the back of the auditorium where Adam now paces, ankles showing blank below lanky black, just above those bruised-up tennis shoes he likes.  I’m not even sure that the elastic on the […]

I don’t know how we accomplish anything without each other. The day drifts away and we fall into order at the table, stamps and labels and letters in thick stacks in front of us, ropey veins like roots—more pronounced by the passing of years—rising from the backs of our moving hands.  You’d know we belonged […]

In like a breeze after school they come, swift and rattling the edges of things, scattering papers and shoes and the crumpled wrappers from their lunches.  Riley’s cheeks bloom pink with the exhilaration of arrival, as though they’ve been far away and flying and have only just landed home, in from some place now only […]

They are inside the gas station maybe 5 minutes.  The girls and I wander in while father and son linger at the pump, and then they follow us in, more efficient, by far, than we.  Early morning, and ours is the only vehicle left at at least eight nozzles, though the three dusty spaces beside […]

My phone vibrates against the bar top, suddenly shaking the metal tray beside with a vibrant zing. Sighing, I reach for my coffee mug, slowly inhaling the drifting steam.  Too early.  But our peaks and valleys do reverberate, contagiously. I lift the phone, reluctantly scanning the notifications.  Hurricane could come our way, and just the […]

“I love you.” He says it slowly, the way he says everything, but lifting the word you, as if in emphasis.  It’s not enough just to fling the words into the air above her head and walk away.  He knows this.  Purposefulness has been a recent goal.  So instead, Adam bends his lean frame toward the […]

Show time, and my friend’s four year-old daughter refuses to sing.  From where I sit some rows back from the stage, I have the perfect view of her eyes—wide, expressive, and determined; dark pools surrounded by sweetness.  She frowns, one of those grimaces that betrays an effort to remain fierce and resolute, shaking her head […]

When Loggerhead turtles hatch, they are the same color as the sand.  We have to lean down to see, after a  friendly woman—a stranger wearing a pink baseball cap and salt-smeared eyeglasses—beckons to us, backlit by the sunrise.  Initially blind, we wonder what she could possibly have to show us in the middle of that broad stretch […]

I walk in from my first round of morning carpool, and she sits at the bar, twisting a long ribbon of brassy hair around her finger.  Through the open door that extends our home past the threshhold and anchors it truly as part of a much broader world, I can hear the birds tweeting madly, […]

From the worn table–an oval thing, brown like the hull of a nut and rubbed with a history of fingers, a delicate kaleidoscope of tiny butterflies drifts, falling lightly on our living room carpet. I scoop up the thin, papery things with one hand as I walk by, kneeling just the moment, and carefully dump […]