Early Monday morning on the run, I feel it full, the gnawing hunger growing in my fasted body, my stomach only a pleasing kind of empty; the gnawing hunger growing in my slowed mind, like shadows licking at the edges, making everything dim with an alarming sense of lack. Hungry, but hungry for…what? My body […]

In the early evening, my friends and I almost curl around a table scattered with puzzle pieces.  We gently share loose bits of our lives while we look for patterns of color and shape, our voices meandering lightly with our fingers, picking up topics and discarding them—laughter tinkling, or a sigh of concern drifting through […]

I keep coming back to this, Adam quietly ferrying gifts out the front door, packing our cars the day we traveled to my parents’ house for our annual family Christmas, how he met me at the foot of the stairs again and again, accepting boxes and baskets from my hands with silent happiness even though […]

Out on the run in the early morning, the light barely an hour old, Kevin and I wake up to the day together, having just come awake again to God, our blank hands turned up, open and empty. For years, it’s been like this, the two of us sipping our coffee in the predawn, desperate […]

Up the hill and around the curve, our nonpartisan feet beat out a unified rhythm, our graying hair slipping out of knots and flying free of caps, my friends and I speaking of how, during the viciousness of election season, the rotten, tongue-flung mud has splattered us all.  Guiding one another by the direction of […]

“This is where your shoulders are actually supposed to rest,” my physical therapist says.  She has taken muscle and bone in capable hands and has literally rotated my shoulders back and down, holding them carefully in place as I lay, yielded, on her therapy table. “I’m sure it feels weird, though, because your muscles have […]

Here we sit, Josh’s mom–my friend Camille–and me, two sisters, on a velvet sofa in a coffee shop called Lucky Tree, twisting cups in our open hands, talking, as mothers do, of life-giving. Oddly, it strikes me that when we get up and leave this place, an impression of our bodies will remain, lightening the […]

This morning a verse that I’ll carry all day, like a go bag or, a staff that bears my weight and steadies my feet: Continue steadfastly in prayer, staying awake in it with thanksgiving. I sat on my parents’ back porch for a while just receiving provisions, grace, from God, sipping coffee while the day […]

How much pain do you feel right now?” On the intake forms at the doctor’s office, Riley assesses her pain level at a ten, on a scale from one to ten, and watching her click hard on the notebook-sized computer provided by the office staff, I lean over and repeat my explanation. “So, one means […]

I wash Adam’s feet almost every day, soaking the diabetic’s precious, never-ending walk, his steady, vulnerable progress, in tender keeping, using a home remedy I found online, a mixture designed to slough off dead skin and soften calluses.  You wouldn’t believe it maybe, but mouthwash features in the short list of ingredients, and so, the […]