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 […]

This morning a verse that I’ll carry all day, like a go bag or, a staff that bears my weight and steadies my feet: Continue steadfastly in prayer, staying awake in it with thanksgiving. I sat on my parents’ back porch for a while just receiving provisions, grace, from God, sipping coffee while the day […]

Here we are, home at last, our bags scattered on the floor in the doorway, dropped, like my young adults still discard their backpacks after school. You know the feeling, or at least I hope you do, what it’s like to come home after you’ve traveled away, when the touch of other places still clings […]

It comes to me, the freedom in not needing to know, like the tickle of a wild wind on my emptied palms, when a friend asks what time our flight, Kevin’s and mine, leaves for Boston. We walk down a greenway trail, around a bend I’ve never seen, in a place I’ve never been, near […]

My friend steps in the house quietly, glancing toward the desk where Riley sits taking an online college course, slipping her arms around me to pull me into a hug. “It’s good to see you,” I say softly over her shoulder, thinking that there’s nothing quite like feeling your arms full of friendship. She draws […]

“Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading,” Adam calls out, his voice dry and deep, an early crackling that sounds a bit to my imagination like the feet of God walking in the Fall of His creation. “Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading.” Adam’s a bird—my grandma used to say that about […]

“I’m concerned about Adam’s schedule for the summer,” Riley says to me, folding her hands in front of her and digging one toe into the outdoor carpet on our back porch. The hinges of the door haven’t yet stopped screeching, and a great wind rustles the leaves of the trees, and I take a deep […]

At some moment toward the end of every sweet vacation–this time while cool, briny waters lick at my feet and the sun warms my bare shoulders; while I meander along and consider that the ocean looks both a clear, clean green in the rise of the waves and like quicksilver on the surface—I begin to […]

In our house, we have learned to keep time this way, in days since the last seizure, but this is not something we carry along, not at all like some battered suitcase stuffed with all our worries and dragged along behind, but rather something acknowledged and touched by our hands and burned in the pasture, […]