1Jan 26, 2024
In the morning, after Riley pads downstairs with the edges of her pajama bottoms dragging the floor, pooling just slightly around her bare feet, she pauses, just out of sight in front of her desk. I don’t have to look to know that even as the sleep still clings to her eyes, she’s flipping over […]
2Aug 11, 2023
“Are you Adam’s mom?” Our young friend Becky asks me, lightly fingering a little-girl hairclip at the side of her head, looking up at me with wide, quiet eyes of fathomless blue. I feel touched by the hint of wonder in her expression. Becky must be in the third grade. I had watched earlier as […]
3Aug 4, 2023
When I open the email about Adam’s blood work, I have just finished telling the Lord that I don’t understand why everything always has to be so hard. I know that everything and always are sweeping, emotional words, but God is a sweeping, omniscient God who doesn’t need me to “pretty up” my feelings. I’ve […]
4Jul 28, 2023
I sit in the hammock swing on our screened porch, waking, cradling my coffee cup in my hands, watching the steam curl and rise out of that mug toward the dark, lacy outline of the evergreen trees bordering our neighbor’s yard. I smile gently at those trees, at the way they look right now, black […]
5Jul 21, 2023
I pray with Riley at night. After she brushes her teeth, she comes to get me, shows up beside my bed like she used to as a child, and I lay aside my book and pull my body back out of bed and slow step my way across the hall to her room. Sometimes I […]
6Jul 14, 2023
“Need to go upstairs,” Adam says, the very minute Kevin mentions that we should play a game together after dinner. We gather around the family table, but Adam feels no compulsion to stay, may in fact find the relational atmosphere a bit overwhelming. When we ask him questions during the meal, Adam puts down his […]
7May 12, 2023
I am a stiff-necked woman. I smile as I think it, laying in the floor on an exercise mat that has seen better days, head on a folded beach towel I grabbed from the closet. I count dust bunnies peeking out from their warrens—deep under the TV cabinet, beneath a wild tangle of electrical cords, […]
8Apr 7, 2023
Josh and Riley bend over the island in the kitchen, a wedding planner splayed open in front of them. Riley’s hand bobs over the cover page, where she carefully writes their names, not formally, the way I would have, just Riley and Josh. In truth, almost everything about this is different for them than it […]
9Mar 24, 2023
Beside me, my phone vibrates like a bee trapped in a jar, zooming frantically from side to side, beating its wings against the glass. I lift it and flip it over so that the screen blinks on and I can see that the vibrating heyheyheyhey is not the emergency I had imagined it could be […]
10Jan 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 […]