I step inside, temporarily leaving behind the crisp new light and the tittering of birds to go in search of more coffee, opening the door to an anthem of praise. Adam spins open-palmed, for seconds still unaware of me, his lifted face transformed by joy and peace. I stand still, my hand on the doorknob, […]

On a rainy morning, the drops like sheets, the thickness of clouds casting shadow over waking, Kevin and I wander from our room in search of coffee. Riley pauses at the top of the stairs to greet us, bright-voiced, sunshine breaking. “How are you feeling?” Kevin asks, but seeing her puzzled, wobbly expression, quickly amends, […]

Restoration fills our talk of home. Kevin and I never finish the conversation. We watch Riley pause in every doorway whispering some memorized OCD monologue, bending at the waist like a bobblehead doll, and Kevin says to me, “One day, she’s going to fly through doorways.” Adam stumbles over answering a simple question, searches his […]

“It’s so pretty out here,” I say, the words like an exhale. Golden brown leaves skitter across the asphalt, and everywhere I look I see another vibrant shade–the sky, cool blue; the trees, a sunset arch sheltering our pathway. I breathe a prayer, remembering something C.S. Lewis said, something that fits: We do not want […]

When Riley cries, she turns red, as though her whole body must make up for any failure to express herself clearly in words. This morning as we walk to the car, her eyes, which were already rimmed an angry color, look pink from the press of her palms as she rubs away her tears. The […]

At the end of service, we pray, a passel of kids of every age, and it feels to me as it used to in the afternoons of my childhood when my dad would stretch out in the living room with his head on a pillow and my brothers and I would come at him from […]

“So for some reason, this verse made me think of you,” my friend says, flicking her finger back and forth on the edge of an index card as we settle onto her porch beneath warm party lights glowing in the cloudy afternoon and ferns gently swaying. I cradle the coffee cup in my hands and […]

We should give this hour a name, when the afternoon swells like a bruise and we all feel molasses-slow, our faces stretched into unending yawns, and still, we have work to do. I want to pour myself another cup of coffee, but I think I have consumed more than enough caffeine today, and something feels […]

I don’t know her name–not the sound of her voice, not even the shape of her smile. As it is these days, because of the mask she wears, her eyes—dark and determined and locked on mine–are all I know of her, those eyes and that hair, curling dark around her head in short, wild corkscrews. […]

That breeze today, it tickles my cheeks, warm Autumn winds dancing over rising hills, an invisible thumb tracing the lines of my face. I press my hand flat against the pages to keep them from drifting up. That hand, it’s my mother’s hand, perpetually tanned, rooted with veins like a stretch of earth beneath a […]