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 […]

So, I’m sitting here in tears, can bearly see the screen for the flow of grace, like the soft rain falling just beyond the window.  I count gifts all the time, because it’s one of the most powerful ways I know to keep these dim eyes glued on Truth, and this one gusts in to fill […]

“I understand sometimes she has a hard time, and I don’t mind.  I don’t.  You know?  I let things go.  I don’t make a big deal,“ she says quietly, sipping thoughtfully, sitting carefully across from me at a dot of a table. If we could but offer each other this, that we all make unintentional mistakes.Zoe jiggles […]

Afternoon, and noting the time, we drop the things in our hands, gathering and folding into the car.  We turn corners and lift our hands, flat shields against the blinding sun, mutually complaining about the sight-stealing while we give thanks for the warmth, huddling into our seats.  You cannot see my face, for no one […]

She follows me upstairs, after we return from some festive errand, and we drop our bags on the floor.  She touches my shoulder, gripping me lightly, catching my gaze. “Will you do something for me?” She asks, as though the possibility exists that I will say “no,” though we both know I never would. “Sure,” […]

Early morning and the coffee steams.  I wrap my fingers tightly over ceramic, breathing in the morning, stopping hungrily beside a window to gather up the light breaking in the sky, the emerging lines of trees, the faint colors of gold and orange and emerald. I feel desperate for a few moments of quiet waking. “NO, […]

This week, a departure for Kevin and me, a Sabbath rest: Tucked away, pulled back from the busy road and held–but lightly–by the trees, we hide beneath the fog.  Sound is magnified here, somehow, or perhaps it is that other noise removed leaves room for hearing birdsong, the cheeky chatter of squirrels, the deep-throated gurgle […]

From a grassy field roadside, I gather up the picture of a broken barn with history clear tumbling from it’s splintered walls, the jagged boards dark, like the trunks of trees.  These planks, hewn from deadwood dragged, shaped over sawdust piles, sanded, treated, painted; nailed sharp, clean, with a satisfied whack—these planks caught the sweat […]

Sometimes life strips us clean of words, and we sit together, quiet.  And maybe it’s that way so we’ll stop to listen. We walk through the rain and into the funeral chapel, gathering damp hugs on our way through the door.  We sit first, and then we stand, winding in long lines past photographs and […]