It’s nothing, really, just a wide mouth mason jar, glass catching and bending Light the way gifts do, filled with our favorite homemade granola, Mexican Hot Chocolate, the flavors warm and rich and spicy, like life. It’s nothing, really, but somehow, it’s also everything when I walk it outside to the kind driver who takes […]

In the hallway, I find dots of blood, tiny and faint, each pressed by the ball of a foot, maybe, into a miniature Rorschach, the lot of them an evidential path of wounding I follow from just outside the laundry room all the way down to Adam’s bedroom door, where they abruptly end. I am […]

Every day from the bathroom upstairs where Riley showers, the music pours, pooling on the floor and sliding under the door and seeping through the ceiling until the whole house floods with worship. God, I’m on my knees again/God, I’m begging please again/I need you/Oh, I need you It might as well be that we […]

“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 […]

“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 a new summer morning, while running through the thick, honeysuckle-scented air past a short, pear-shaped neighborhood street, we see our Eastern European neighbor, her silver-grey hair covered, as it always is, with a scarf the wind teases just a little in the back. We don’t know exactly where she came from originally, but she […]

The first day we visited Graeter’s Ice Cream on the edge of downtown Cincinnati, Jimmy, who is the owner, came out from behind the counter with coloring books and crayons for the kids eating ice cream with their grandma at the table next to ours, and then, walking over to our table with a wide […]

We sit down, expanded family stretched out in the middle of a row up at the top of the lecture hall where they’re hosting graduation for Josh’s and Riley’s college program, and my mama mind thinks, it’s a lovely view from up here, really, perched as we are like birds on a line, watching from […]

Rain falls outside, a whisper of sound, and looking out the window, through drops like tiny diamonds on the glass, I soak up a saturation of breathing green, the thickness of leaves and wild, dazzling grass. Glancing back toward my phone, the Bible app open, my finger paused on a phrase, I wonder what it […]