In our living room, Josh and Riley stand side-by-side, she, with her hair yanked up in a high ponytail, yanked, like she suddenly does when her mind can’t be distracted by something like errant strands of hair tickling her cheeks, and he, with his face completely open, ready and waiting for whatever I introduce.  They […]

“Mom Jones, how’s your voice today?” Riley asks, pajama-clad and still rumpled with sleep, leaning against the doorjamb in my office, one hand solidly planted on a curvy hip.  She straightens, gathering her hair into a ponytail with her other hand, flipping it absently as she watches my face. “It’s still gone,” I croak, only […]

“Mom Jones?”  Riley’s voice stops me mid-confession. Jones, what Riley calls “our funny last name,” is a silly joke from years ago that eventually became a sign of Riley’s affection. I look at her, startled out of a full-on run to Jesus.  In the space of the last hour, pride and comparison, mistaken identity and […]

In the morning, Adam and I rush out the door on the way to school and I smile at him with his long, twenty-year-old bones and the bud of wisdom in his tender eyes and the snarl of hair at the back of his head where he never brushes, and I think of the strangeness […]

While I dice the chicken, one hand gripping the knife, I teach Riley how to make potato salad. “So, what’s the next thing you need to do?” I ask her, nodding toward an armful of a silver bowl piled high with tender chopped potatoes.  Two eggs, hardboiled with the potatoes, peek out from among the […]

On Saturday morning, Kevin makes a sticky note schedule for Adam, then takes a picture of it and sends the picture as a text.  Roughly sketched, it says, we will go to the grocery store, and then we will go for a hike.  He leaves the actual note pressed on the edge of Adam’s favorite […]

At the end of Adam’s dinnertime prayer—thank you, God, for lemon chicken; thank you, for green beans, always specific gratitude for the foods he likes to eat and complete silence on the foods he doesn’t, uttered in his deep, pausing voice over our table, our steaming plates of food, our linked hands–tonight, Riley carries on, […]

Josh hands Riley a gift bag, jolly red and green, plump with surprises and spilling over with tissue, and we all sit forward, anticipating grace. All through Advent, I have been thinking:  On the surface of things, at least according to the understanding of their time, Mary and Joseph should never have married.  I’ve been […]

I run my finger over the scars on the dresser in my bedroom, Grandma, twice etched, raw, like an incision in the wood in Riley’s handwriting.  Always in twos. I murmur the dark echo of an old cliché, the shadow of an old joke still half bitter to me, but only by half, because God […]

Home from carpool, I pull the wet, clean clothes from our washer and toss them, with a shake, into the dryer.  I can hear Riley in the kitchen, her voice bright and morning-new, counting to Christmas.  “Just 18 more,” she says, with enthusiasm, but I push the button on the machine and lose the rest […]