81Feb 24, 2023
“Mom Jones?” Riley’s voice stops me mid-confession. Jones, what Riley calls “our funny last name,” is a silly joke from years ago that eventually became a sign of Riley’s affection. I look at her, startled out of a full-on run to Jesus. In the space of the last hour, pride and comparison, mistaken identity and […]
82Feb 17, 2023
In the morning, Adam and I rush out the door on the way to school and I smile at him with his long, twenty-year-old bones and the bud of wisdom in his tender eyes and the snarl of hair at the back of his head where he never brushes, and I think of the strangeness […]
83Feb 10, 2023
While I dice the chicken, one hand gripping the knife, I teach Riley how to make potato salad. “So, what’s the next thing you need to do?” I ask her, nodding toward an armful of a silver bowl piled high with tender chopped potatoes. Two eggs, hardboiled with the potatoes, peek out from among the […]
84Feb 3, 2023
On Saturday morning, Kevin makes a sticky note schedule for Adam, then takes a picture of it and sends the picture as a text. Roughly sketched, it says, we will go to the grocery store, and then we will go for a hike. He leaves the actual note pressed on the edge of Adam’s favorite […]
85Jan 27, 2023
I laugh in disbelief. It is the initial sputtering sound of my mind and heart agreeing, I believe, help me in my unbelief, which is what I feel right now, even if my lips have yet to utter the prayer, as I laugh out loud over the mess of how-in-the-world splayed out in front of […]
86Jan 20, 2023
My body groans this morning, acutely I feel it crumbling, as Kevin and I head out for an early run, searching for renewal, and not just of muscles and tissues and cells. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, the apostle Paul wrote, and as our feet begin to tap staccato, I remember the […]
87Jan 6, 2023
Josh hands Riley a gift bag, jolly red and green, plump with surprises and spilling over with tissue, and we all sit forward, anticipating grace. All through Advent, I have been thinking: On the surface of things, at least according to the understanding of their time, Mary and Joseph should never have married. I’ve been […]
88Dec 30, 2022
I run my finger over the scars on the dresser in my bedroom, Grandma, twice etched, raw, like an incision in the wood in Riley’s handwriting. Always in twos. I murmur the dark echo of an old cliché, the shadow of an old joke still half bitter to me, but only by half, because God […]
89Dec 23, 2022
Home from carpool, I pull the wet, clean clothes from our washer and toss them, with a shake, into the dryer. I can hear Riley in the kitchen, her voice bright and morning-new, counting to Christmas. “Just 18 more,” she says, with enthusiasm, but I push the button on the machine and lose the rest […]
90Dec 2, 2022
Gently, I lay a hand on Adam’s back, feeling the knobs of his spine, hard and round beneath my fingers. Silently he watches as, with the other hand, I press a sticky note down on the desk in front of him. At the top, today’s date, scrawled quickly. When matters; it anchors the whole thing. […]