Unraveling heavy things, my friend tells me a story about taking her kids to see the dinosaur exhibit at the museum. “In the beginning…” She doesn’t use those words, not exactly, but she might as well have, because right from the beginning it feels as though her story belongs to me too somehow, belongs to […]

“Uh oh, I lost track,” Adam murmurs, when suddenly I press the brake a little too hard and the car lurches, at the exact moment when also I resentfully glare at the massive dump truck lumbering and grunting just ahead, when secretly I tuck a selfish, incredulous why into a shadowy part of my heart. […]

For the better part of an hour, I listen to our engaged couple getting ready to go for a walk. They arrive at the moment together after lunch, having noted and discussed at length that, in the plan I had helped them create for the afternoon, a walk comes next.  I hear them still processing […]

On a Wednesday, I sit waiting for physical therapy, twisting my stiff neck to look as a woman walks in with an ash-black smudge right in the center of her forehead. This looks like no accidental blemish I’ve ever seen, and for a moment, feeling a little uncomfortable for her, I wonder how it came […]

“Have you changed your sheets recently?”  I ask over lunch, just as Riley stabs at her salad with her fork, catching up a bit of lettuce, a brilliant coin of carrot. It’s true of us all: we can think no one knows where we’ve been, that no one knows we’ve walked right off course for […]

Adam shows up at the brunch table on Saturday morning wearing his glasses, a little smudged, because he’s still learning to clean them, and I treasure it up, because he has chosen to wear them on his day of rest. Here I am too, drawing my chair–blue, like a summer sky—up to our table, also […]

A friend says, the text coming in gently, it must be hard for you to let her just walk through that door. Yes, I type.  Yes. I sit in the car, waiting while Riley digs her bookbag out of the trunk, talking to herself in a soothing, rhythmic way.  She turns to look at me […]

When I get out of the car at the library, I see three children huddled together on the front lawn, their feet hidden in the dewy grass, their bodies turned, their eyes fixed on an old bottle-green minivan.  Immediately, I feel a kind of kinship with them, recognizing my spiritual self somehow in the baby […]

I watch Riley’s face as she describes her first in-person day in vocational school, how animated she has become, how her eyes shine and her smile deepens, her voice lilting while she recounts all the details to a close friend of mine who, having come over with a tray of baton cookies in her hands […]

I can hear Riley running behind me now, feet crunching on the glittering asphalt, her breaths ragged and shallow, and I smile, remembering a conversation I’d had with her about breathing.  Riley has been training to run a 5K. Here we all are, just a few days past Christmas, on the other side of the […]