I love to sit on the cool dark porch just before dawn, listening as birds twitter and sing at such volume I imagine their banditries and bevies and breasts crowding the limbs of the trees with jumpy, sometimes swoopy chaos.  There comes a disembodied tuning, the calls and responses not unlike the huddled collaborations of […]

“I guess it’s about that time,” Kevin says, his morning voice soft as new day, whisper-light as that dawn blush warming up the quiet blue sky over the treetops, those trees, still unlit, wearing green as deep as night. I hear timid pops in the joints of his rocking chair as he stands to go […]

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 […]

My sister-friend and I sit close in the middle of the morning, me, with my hair still wet and my face scrubbed clean, bare feet tucked up, she, perched on the corner of a cushion of the couch, but we might as well be—I’ve said this to her before, receiving her easy laugh—floating on our […]

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 […]

On a getaway vacation, Kevin and I explore new terrain, hiking through El Dorado State Park in Colorado.  El Dorado means the gold or the gilded, a term that became popular in the gold rush days, when at another time people crawled this craggy land looking for the gold veining the Colorado Rockies, living hard, […]

I sit by the sea, digging my toes into soft sand, soothed by the crashing waves.  The sparkling vastness of the water glimmers behind my reading, God’s letter in my hands, soft from all my folding and unfolding. A prayer plants me like a seed buried to live in a wild, fertile love so big […]

Friday morning sun lightly peeks around the edges of the curtains.  I sit snug in the corner of the sofa early feasting on God, and Adam paces the downstairs rooms before school, his feet padding out a metronome count—this this this this THIS—against the floor.  This this this this THIS, this this this this THIS, […]

You know the days can slide right by—Monday becomes Wednesday becomes Friday becomes Sunday, routines going by like a blur of houses armored clapboard-neutral outside the dusty car window.  I can flat out miss the extraordinary in my ordinary, moving way too fast, slipping over a stretch of asphalt. This morning, I snagged, caught on […]