11Apr 5, 2024
All I ask, Riley sitting beside me at the bar in the kitchen for lunch, us with our bright-fresh salads, glint of forks, napkins folded in neat rectangles, is, do you want to say the prayer? Umm, that’s okay, she says, I’m good, and then, her voice wavers, and her eyes suddenly fill with tears. […]
12Mar 22, 2024
“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. […]
13Sep 22, 2023
By the time Riley comes to find me for our prayer, I have slid so far down into my pillows as to be almost completely horizontal, and, to be honest, I keep falling asleep, so the book in my hands keeps lightly knocking me in the nose and waking me up. I have read the […]
14Aug 4, 2023
When I open the email about Adam’s blood work, I have just finished telling the Lord that I don’t understand why everything always has to be so hard. I know that everything and always are sweeping, emotional words, but God is a sweeping, omniscient God who doesn’t need me to “pretty up” my feelings. I’ve […]
15Jul 28, 2023
I sit in the hammock swing on our screened porch, waking, cradling my coffee cup in my hands, watching the steam curl and rise out of that mug toward the dark, lacy outline of the evergreen trees bordering our neighbor’s yard. I smile gently at those trees, at the way they look right now, black […]
16Jul 21, 2023
I pray with Riley at night. After she brushes her teeth, she comes to get me, shows up beside my bed like she used to as a child, and I lay aside my book and pull my body back out of bed and slow step my way across the hall to her room. Sometimes I […]
17Jun 23, 2023
“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 […]
18Jun 16, 2023
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 […]
19Jun 9, 2023
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, […]
20May 12, 2023
I am a stiff-necked woman. I smile as I think it, laying in the floor on an exercise mat that has seen better days, head on a folded beach towel I grabbed from the closet. I count dust bunnies peeking out from their warrens—deep under the TV cabinet, beneath a wild tangle of electrical cords, […]