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 […]

It’s funny how injuries live on long after they’re gone, like ghosts. They even change how we move, but then, inevitably, we bump against them and curse! ourselves for forgetting, smarting over the suggestion of a bruise arising again, as dark as a brooding storm. Everyone knows that once you’ve bitten your tongue, it’s hard […]

“Bite,” I say, smiling broadly, spooning some yogurt into Riley’s mouth as she slides tiny earrings—butterflies, taking flight—into her ears, her hair water painting shade into the shoulders of her uniform shirt.  She laughs wild, buoyed by the knowledge of love, and I am meanwhile transported back to early days, when I spooned pureed vegetables […]

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, […]

Kevin and I have curiously studied the rule of margins for years, have even developed a lingo for our real-life observations that, where little margin exists, something will always come along to take up even the tiniest bit that remains. Ask me if I feel squeezed, especially this time of year, and if, in the […]

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 […]

Maybe it started with the letterboard sign that caught my eye in September, when it shouldn’t have felt like Fall outside but did, when something inside my heart pulled me toward surrender. I decided to actively anticipate the change of season, to savor the subtle shifts in the light of day, the darker nights, the […]

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, […]