“You with your hand rubbing your forehead,” my friend says to me, chuckling, the computer like a window fusing her home and mine, and us with our rumpled faces, talking quietly in the early morning, talking of life and how it’s hard. I do not, until the moment she says this, realize what I’ve been […]

“Have you changed your sheets recently?”  I ask over lunch, just as Riley stabs at her salad with her fork, catching up a bit of lettuce, a brilliant coin of carrot. It’s true of us all: we can think no one knows where we’ve been, that no one knows we’ve walked right off course for […]

Adam shows up at the brunch table on Saturday morning wearing his glasses, a little smudged, because he’s still learning to clean them, and I treasure it up, because he has chosen to wear them on his day of rest. Here I am too, drawing my chair–blue, like a summer sky—up to our table, also […]

A friend says, the text coming in gently, it must be hard for you to let her just walk through that door. Yes, I type.  Yes. I sit in the car, waiting while Riley digs her bookbag out of the trunk, talking to herself in a soothing, rhythmic way.  She turns to look at me […]

“So many people still have their Christmas lights out,” Kevin says, speaking our mutual thought aloud into the chilled night as we drive home, as we slow to absorb the weighty glistening that somehow makes everything else feel a little lighter. In every season, twinkling lights remind me of Jesus, the Light the darkness can’t […]

I can hear Riley running behind me now, feet crunching on the glittering asphalt, her breaths ragged and shallow, and I smile, remembering a conversation I’d had with her about breathing.  Riley has been training to run a 5K. Here we all are, just a few days past Christmas, on the other side of the […]

Riley leans against the kitchen counter, waiting out a two-minute timer that counts down while chunks of chicken sizzle in the pan.  She holds a fork aloft as she alternately considers the cooking meat and the digital display, as she murmurs to herself about what’s next.  I watch her head nod gently as she speaks, […]

My friend steps in the house quietly, glancing toward the desk where Riley sits taking an online college course, slipping her arms around me to pull me into a hug. “It’s good to see you,” I say softly over her shoulder, thinking that there’s nothing quite like feeling your arms full of friendship. She draws […]

I’m driving to school with Adam when the notification comes that Riley has texted, and I smile, knowing that she’s awake and is, as she always describes it, “encouraging everyone on the family Wordle thread.” I can see her in my mind, half risen on one elbow, sleep still hanging about her eyes.  I whisper […]

I flip the page on a brand-new week in my planner, wagging my pencil back and forth in my fingers. I had expected to find space for a breath, a quiet stillness on the empty grid within which to pause and practice a Sabbath surrender before writing in my careful strategy for the week. We […]