It’s as we pray at the end of the day, our bodies bending toward the ceasing, that Riley remembers loss, that she hears Kevin asking after comfort and peace for grieving loved ones and makes a sound like she’s been struck, a deep, penetrating noise that seems to rise from deep within her, trembling in […]

Adam reminds me, leaning in at the table on a Saturday morning, his face all open to hear, that everyone needs a good rehearsal of hope, that good words re-heard can refresh a soul. We all feel in need of a fresh perspective. Adam has offered me his arm, and as I talk to him, […]

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 […]

“Hey Riley?” Zoe’s voice comes light from my phone, which sits on the kitchen island in the center of the room as Kevin and I turn and twist around finishing dinner; Adam, announcing his echolalia, paces a fast, hungry track around the perimeter; and Riley sits at the bar facing us, wearing a listening grin, […]

Some invitations take a while to receive, and this one had surely waited for me, the corner of an old letter just barely visible at the edge, below a stack of things desperate for sorting, until came the day when, all that clutter finally gone, I at last took it up in my hands and […]

Three days I bake cookies as big as my hand—golden, caramel-sugar sweet, studded with chocolate and candy, a palm-full of sweet for the kids we will love in our church, with our church, on the last Sunday before Christmas.  A fat stack of self-sealing bags imprinted with snowflakes, for the cookies, sits on the bar […]

“Hey, are you still praying about that stuff on our prayer board?” I hear Josh ask this of Riley as we ease in at a stoplight, on our way home from their classes.  Filtered through the fiery trees, late afternoon sunlight bathes the world in warm pinks and golds.  In the rearview mirror, I can […]

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 […]

On the day my sister-friend gave me the picture that sits, small and pretty in a driftwood frame, on my writing desk, she said, “I’ve painted a dream for you, a tiny writing cottage beside the sea.” She does not know of the dozens of books I’ve begun and not finished, all of which begin […]