Just awake and still unwilling to peel back the covers, I rub the sleep from my eyes, giving thanks for rest.  My phone, flipped on its face on the bedside table, begins to vibrate and jump like an insect trapped and beating against the window. “What is going on?” Kevin says, stirring beside me. I […]

As long as I lay down and drink rivers of water, I can avoid the spinal headache, that thunderous, gripping madman storming through my mind bent on dropping me to my knees.  It broods, heavy, hiding behind some banded muscle with its club lifted, daring me to move. This, then, is the valley. From here, […]

When finally God begins to move me and I carry our quiet conversation back into busier thoroughfares, I find Adam emptying the dishwasher in the kitchen.  He stacks plates and tosses clean silverware into the drawer with percussive clatter, and this with the morning barely an hour old.  The coffee pot still gasps and sputters […]

On the other side of a migraine, my Riley begins to sing: From the ash I am born again Forever safe in the Savior’s hands I stop folding and let the warm towel fall from my fingers, listening. She missed worship today, let her head fall like a rock on my shoulder during the opening […]

“There will be a lot of hugs today,” she says, drawing me in with arms growing long enough to catch the world.  Her brassy hair falls against my cheek and lightly tickles my hands as I press them into her back.  I count her ribs, the knobby vertebrae in her spine.  She feels strong, solid, […]

At the end of the day, when I walk in from the shore with the sunset on my cheeks and my skin still warm from the sun, I find the text: I know you’re at the beach, but I just had to tell you what happened today.  The text comes from one of Adam’s gifted […]

My friend and I walk until our tender feet tell us to turn around, after stretches and stretches of water-textured and glittering sand.  The shore begins to rub away our blunt edges, until we become warm and worn and honest.  My friend lifts her finger, silently stirring the air so as not to stop the […]

Sometimes, there aren’t words.  Instead, there are smells–rotten and sour and wrecked. “Mom Jones?  Oh, where is she?” I hear Riley before I see her, hear her thinking out loud down the hallway, peering into rooms, twisting that rope of sun-gold hair absently into an uneven bun.  Her hair captures so much light I expect […]

Knife taps against cutting board and the onion cries.  The delicate scarlet rings fall, hiding the slicing scars, all those crisscrossed lines like a haphazard tally of breaths.  If only the flavors–peppery and sun-soaked and honey-sweet–lasted as long as the evidence of our cooking.  A sigh slips as I turn my burning eyes away from the […]

We–I mean all of us–used to send more mail; we had baskets of pre-selected cards and special pens, pretty stamps and seals.  We even went to parties to learn how to emboss and bought accessories to make art deliverable by post.  Despite our busy lives, Stampin Up is still a thing.  I checked. Automatically, those […]