It’s nothing, really, just a wide mouth mason jar, glass catching and bending Light the way gifts do, filled with our favorite homemade granola, Mexican Hot Chocolate, the flavors warm and rich and spicy, like life. It’s nothing, really, but somehow, it’s also everything when I walk it outside to the kind driver who takes […]

The brush, she, my sister, my friend, dips in vibrant pink, like satin ribbons or the tender curve of a lip, and then deftly applies, with the flick of her wrist, a twist, the kind of poetry artists use to produce a delicate petal, cupped and open, waiting, maybe, for rain. I watch her work, […]

Kevin and I have curiously studied the rule of margins for years, have even developed a lingo for our real-life observations that, where little margin exists, something will always come along to take up even the tiniest bit that remains. Ask me if I feel squeezed, especially this time of year, and if, in the […]

I wait for an hour to speak to someone in customer service, my phone on endless hold, that looping tinny music interspersed with your call is important to us messages playing in the background as I work while also, I am queued online for a chat window. When I clicked the button to chat with […]

Maybe it started with the letterboard sign that caught my eye in September, when it shouldn’t have felt like Fall outside but did, when something inside my heart pulled me toward surrender. I decided to actively anticipate the change of season, to savor the subtle shifts in the light of day, the darker nights, the […]

Every day from the bathroom upstairs where Riley showers, the music pours, pooling on the floor and sliding under the door and seeping through the ceiling until the whole house floods with worship. God, I’m on my knees again/God, I’m begging please again/I need you/Oh, I need you It might as well be that we […]

“In my lifetime, I’ve thrown so many stones,” I’m saying to a close friend, my hand wrapped around a coffee mug, my fingers absently rubbing the shiny porcelain, but what I’m thinking about, what I imagine regretfully, is the cool hardness, the heft, of my judgements and criticisms, gracelessly hurled. What a dark miserable truth, […]

We pull into the hotel parking lot at eleven o’clock at night, the light long since gone and with it, our energy. Adam and I sit in the truck and wait while Kevin goes inside to check in, and I stare out the window looking for stars, counting pools of electric light illuminating the parking […]

Bea and I have been talking, lightly, about the weather.  August has felt milder than usual; we’ve already felt Fall drifting in on leaf-rustling breezes. We’ve enjoyed our thoughts of cozy things. Bea schedules transportation for the city, and she told me to ask for her by name, made up her mind to be a […]

On the wall in my parents’ living room, our families run in long, hand-linked lines, crooked stretched branches of our family tree running across a grassy field, caught hurrying away from sunset, or so it seems, but really—I remember—we were only trying to distract our children from the family photography.  Perpetual motion machines, children, as […]