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 […]

This is such a crazy time, isn’t it?! In the end, it is something in every way tiny–a broken hairband, actually, popping and snapping against my fingers–that finally breaks my resolve.  It’s always that way with a slow crumble.  Millions of rips–unseen, unheard, unhealed–weaken the muscle until finally the barest graze finishes the work. I stand behind […]

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 […]

The hour turns, and my friend waves me over, patting the chair beside. All evening, we have all only wanted to surround her, this iron-strong friend strong enough yet to admit that she needs us to lift her.  It takes a brave woman to allow the veil to fall—whisper-light—from her face, to sit uncovered and honest, to […]

I hear the door open, and with that sound comes the volume of her sadness, the distinct sound of brokenness.  Tears always steal her breath the way they still steal mine, and before I can see her I hear that awful gasp, the way she hungrily stuggles for air.  She cries with her whole body.  The […]

Hello there! Good morning to you, he calls.  He has a brightness I can feel before I see him, even though I realize as I look up that his gear—suit, helmet, even the bike—is all black, like the deepest part of the night. I’m suddenly aware that I’ve been staring at the pavement, while he […]

Thank you, Lord, that we have plenty of food to eat. It’s a simple thing he says holding my hand, breathing deeply before God, just as I sit down with a sigh, just as I’ve gotten it all wrong and lost my grateful perspective. Five minutes and it’s time to take Zoe to school.  It […]

In the morning, the rain comes, and I do what I have determined to do more and more these days:  I stop to see, to gather up the feeling of the breeze lifting my hair away from my cheeks.  I spy a plump cardinal hiding just inside the gardenias bobbing gently by the steps, an elegant […]

So, I’ve been hurting over something we do to each other.  I say we because I’m guilty too, we because we’re in this together, we because it takes all of us to change our culture. In my life, the repetitive strategy of the enemy often looks like this, just with different supporting details: Flashback nearly twelve years, […]

I confess that when she comes to get me, I do not want to get up. I just picked up my book—Dorothea Frank’s Plantation, and I have precious few moments to mind-leap on down to the Lowcountry and shut out the world.  Every time this author punctuates a sentence with the word yanh, I smell the […]