41Apr 17, 2015
I like the way God built me. She says it like it’s the simplest thing. The words fall easy, fluttering elegant, lighting on a twisty varicose vein that branches pen-thin across my thigh. I had been tracing the bruised lines with my finger. These spidery betrayers invade, cracks in the shell of me suddenly […]
42Oct 17, 2014
I don’t know how much time I have left. Afternoon, and autumn leaves wander and twist to the earth, fluttering through the grass and along the sidewalk. The sun makes a blaze of the trees. I stop for a moment just to see, putting down my work, stunned by the fragility of life. I […]
43Aug 29, 2014
In the car at night and I can’t see her face, just the blur of headlights and the jostle of cars weaving in and out of lanes, just the green-lit signs labeling exits. From behind me, she speaks, and the tentative way she shapes her words tells me that she chooses this time for the […]
44Jun 6, 2014
She’s such a shining, starlit soul. She walks through the kitchen, where I gently lift lettuce leaves with my fingers, sorting the torn pieces into salad bowls. “Mom, what’s that?” She says, with a casual turn of her hand, a subtle gesture toward the line of butter yellow bowls. I know she doesn’t really mean, […]
45Nov 29, 2013
My son digs the bills out of his left pocket, spreading them flat on his thigh. He smiles–a small, delighted surrender, preparing for the giving. And somewhere long past—somewhere God can still see unfolding right with our present, a woman’s feet stir the dust as she walks purposefully toward Temple. Lightly, she walks across the […]
46Sep 13, 2013
On the bar in the kitchen, I find a scrap of paper she has forgotten. The blocked letters and lines and paragraphs seem too serious for her, too stark. Name: _______________________________ Title/Description for yourself (something you would naturally say to introduce yourself): _______________________________. Her handwriting softens the lines, beautiful, plain, easy. Riley. Peace. I lay […]
47Jul 19, 2013
He sits in an arm chair with his small, tender hands pressed hard over his bottomless brown eyes, flaxen curls spiraling soft over his head. Three-years-old and his tone earnest, he counts, leading. 1…2…3… Adam kneels in front of him, bending his long, eleven-year-old legs, pressing his lengthening fingers against his own eyes. Adam’s voice […]
48Jun 21, 2013
Streaks of fire and amber color the clouds, royal streamers declaring another day done, and I sit down with the glory at my back and the warm, afternoon breeze tickling my cheeks. We love Summer for meals on the screened porch out back, where we can hear the birds singing loud and see the worms […]
49May 17, 2013
There’s really only one place to start, only one space for the dying of seed, the breaking of ground. I stand in her doorway–just for a breath, my hand on the door frame, watching light cast aside shadows. She rests, still cocooned, all possibility swathed in quilted blossoms. I whisper thanks and ask for protection, […]
50May 3, 2013
I love so many hurting people. And the impulse I have, because it’s God obliterating me, is to bring them joy. I want to grab the heavy shadows shrouding them and rip them apart with my hands. I want to free them from the grip of the things that steal their laughter. I want to […]