I joke and call myself a hoop jumper, me with my hair flying wild around my face and my exercise clothes still on from before carpool; me with a pen in one hand, and a mess of papers stretched across the desk in indistinguishable stacks, some paper-clipped, some loose and, as Kevin would say, “flapping […]

I finish braiding Riley’s hair for school; she likes one thick rope down her back, the elastics double tightened, and I smile because already tiny errant curls have begun to escape around her face. Already, the freer part of her has begun to defy strict boundaries. Sometimes when she feels overwhelmed, she pushes those rebels […]

How easy it is to sink to that place where the smallest things we do for love don’t feel like love at all, to that shadowland where we believe wholeheartedly in withholding, where we forget that giving is the means to abundance. Adam sulks over his dinner, flicking his eyes toward me, his look pit-dark. […]

Fresh from the shower on an 80-degree day that feels thick with the promise of Summer, Adam spins–literally–into the kitchen wearing flannel pajama pants–buffalo check–and a salt-washed long-sleeved t-shirt as blue as his eyes. I wonder how he doesn’t instantly feel that sticky prickle of after-shower sweat at the base of the neck and the […]

Just home from a walk with a friend–skin flushed with sun; fallen petals from the cherry trees stowaways in my hair, on the edge of my shirt, even precariously crumpled against one sticky ankle–and Riley comes to meet me at the door. I hear her carefully set down whatever she has in her hands; I […]

Riley sits at the bar, fresh-faced and bright, if still a little rumpled with sleep. She looks like Spring, like the first day of sapphire skies; like new flowers with blushing, velvet leaves; like anticipation; like hope sitting right there on a bench in my kitchen., and it’s striking to me because it’s the opposite […]

This cluttered morning, sweaty with exercise, I bend myself into a stretch that makes me sigh with pleasure. Nothing feels better to me after a workout than the patient extension of sore and weary muscles, that resting pull that draws out pain with so much tension. Routinely, I pull my shoulders down, away from my […]

This morning, I feel the outer crumbling, how slowly I waste away–not me, but the shell of me; the me you would recognize; the me you could touch, at least while we’re here. A cellular avalanche starts the moment our bodies begin to breathe; but breathe God and the opposite happens too. The resurrected body, […]

I don’t know her name–not the sound of her voice, not even the shape of her smile. As it is these days, because of the mask she wears, her eyes—dark and determined and locked on mine–are all I know of her, those eyes and that hair, curling dark around her head in short, wild corkscrews. […]

It starts as a joke, Kevin drawing Adam back after we finish cleaning the kitchen and Adam starts the nightly pilgrimage to his sanctum sanctorum; Kevin asking Adam to give all the things Adam is withholding–a hug, a backscratch, a bit of lingering attention. Adam endures, but only with perfunctory investment–the hug, light and limp, […]