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 […]

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 […]

On the wall in my parents’ living room, our families run in long, hand-linked lines, crooked stretched branches of our family tree running across a grassy field, caught hurrying away from sunset, or so it seems, but really—I remember—we were only trying to distract our children from the family photography.  Perpetual motion machines, children, as […]

On a new summer morning, while running through the thick, honeysuckle-scented air past a short, pear-shaped neighborhood street, we see our Eastern European neighbor, her silver-grey hair covered, as it always is, with a scarf the wind teases just a little in the back. We don’t know exactly where she came from originally, but she […]

Friday morning sun lightly peeks around the edges of the curtains.  I sit snug in the corner of the sofa early feasting on God, and Adam paces the downstairs rooms before school, his feet padding out a metronome count—this this this this THIS—against the floor.  This this this this THIS, this this this this THIS, […]

You know the days can slide right by—Monday becomes Wednesday becomes Friday becomes Sunday, routines going by like a blur of houses armored clapboard-neutral outside the dusty car window.  I can flat out miss the extraordinary in my ordinary, moving way too fast, slipping over a stretch of asphalt. This morning, I snagged, caught on […]

As Riley and Adam and I run beneath a sapphire sky, I keep time in blooms like lace gently swaying in trees that just weeks ago still stood beseeching, their empty limbs desperately reaching for God.  And now, it’s as though creation breathes again for the first time, newborn, naked and filling with life, all […]

In the morning, after Riley pads downstairs with the edges of her pajama bottoms dragging the floor, pooling just slightly around her bare feet, she pauses, just out of sight in front of her desk.  I don’t have to look to know that even as the sleep still clings to her eyes, she’s flipping over […]

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, […]

This four-lane road, the last main thoroughfare before Adam and I get to school, snakes about in hills and curves sometimes tightly compressed and sometimes stretched and rising.  It’s a good analogy for life, this drive, for the way we all get pushed and pressed, the way a day can feel like a long, blind […]