“I’m concerned about Adam’s schedule for the summer,” Riley says to me, folding her hands in front of her and digging one toe into the outdoor carpet on our back porch. The hinges of the door haven’t yet stopped screeching, and a great wind rustles the leaves of the trees, and I take a deep […]

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, […]

Home from wrestling the road and picking up my young adults, I take up the work where I left off, affixing congratulatory labels to some cookie bags I’m assembling for the kids who will transition out of our children’s worship group to another grade level this Sunday.  The bundles are love and sweet and joy, […]

The day has gone long and, hungrily, we reach for plates; we stir seasoning into steaming bowls.  Kevin glances at Adam, who stands at the desk, absorbed in a video game, something about a leprechaun in search of a pot of gold. Quietly, the Father says to the son, “Hey, can you set the table?” […]

“How was your day?” I ask Riley as she slides into the car after work, and what I really mean is how were the last few hours, and what astounds me when I ask is that, as usual, she seems as peaceful as the ocean at low tide, still, like glass. “Work was amazing,” she […]

The moment Adam and his friends take the stage, their faces lighten with sudden recognition, as though with the stage lights beaming and the violins singing and the performance blooming, they have all at the same moment just realized they can dance.   Their mouths relax into broad grins, and gradually their lips slide apart, and […]

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 […]

Josh and Riley bend over the island in the kitchen, a wedding planner splayed open in front of them.  Riley’s hand bobs over the cover page, where she carefully writes their names, not formally, the way I would have, just Riley and Josh. In truth, almost everything about this is different for them than it […]

I wait through traffic with a prayer on my heart.  Adam sits beside me, bobbing his head in time to the music—what a beautiful Name it is, having dispensed with my pick-up pleasantries about his day with a perfunctory, “Good,” as in, it was good and that’s all there is to say about it.  As […]

Beside me, my phone vibrates like a bee trapped in a jar, zooming frantically from side to side, beating its wings against the glass.  I lift it and flip it over so that the screen blinks on and I can see that the vibrating heyheyheyhey is not the emergency I had imagined it could be […]