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 […]

Today, just a prayer, whispered, then fervid and carpet-muffled because that’s where I plant my nose.  I can’t seem to bend low enough to accommodate the feel of Him.  It’s a prayer I need, one I offer often in some garbled, half-torn way. But He knows all the parts, so I don’t have to remember them, […]

Days after Christmas, and their wishlists still hang on the refrigerator, curling slightly at the corners where our nearness, our brushing past, has gently reshaped the paper.  And of course, the lists have been moved a few times–carefully detached to travel with me to the store, lifted once or twice for closer reading, softly touched with an […]

The look on his face is stern as we approach, as though he knows already that there’s something suspiciously wrong about us.  I smile, because I’m pretty sure what he does must be tiring. He must have seen all kinds of things from that perch, watching the hundreds of us file through like worn mules […]