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, […]

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 […]

Oh! Riley says, sitting up straight, this a surprised, delighted sound bubbling up from her heart, an awareness awakening her, if temporarily, from a tired after work descent, her spine having already begun its curl toward sleep. “I heard back about my requests.” Keep awake, Christ urged repeatedly, because it takes intentionality to disengage from […]

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 […]

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 the elevator, I can feel it, the waves of stay-out-of-my-way coming off of the one woman who happens to be riding when we roll in with all our too much, not, I do not mean, the suitcases rolling in with each of us like little sidecars or the backpacks slung over our shoulders. Really, […]

“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, […]

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 […]

We take up an entire row in the airplane—Kevin with Adam on one side, me with Josh and Riley on the other.  This placement, of course, has been strategic: the young one with the most fear smack beside his Father, so close he can feel the warmth of him, can hear his dad living, breathing […]