1Dec 30, 2022
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 […]
2Dec 11, 2020
The kitchen smells savory-rich, of comfort and warmth and vacation, of salty, sizzling bacon, slowly melting butter, and just lightly, of syrup. This morning, we cook up breakfast sandwiches assembly-line style, sipping coffee and talking, our voices rising and falling among the clatter of plates and pans. Here and there, a chuckle, a yawn, a […]
3Nov 24, 2017
“I can’t–” “Here, I’ll help you,” she says, my Riley, who once said nothing. The kids at our table–this table, finished with glitter and glue and flecks of marker and fingernail polish, finished with a whole history of growing and laughing and living—these kids flat press their little hands on construction paper, tracing, jagged-cutting the […]
4Sep 22, 2017
The journal was a gift from my parents; the cover black, like pitch, like a blind dark day. Butterflies explode from the corner, brilliant blue, buttery gold, every size, hundreds of them by surprise, overwhelming all that flat emptiness. I run my fingers over the raised edges of their wings, feeling the fine lines, the […]
5Nov 12, 2010
You know, sometimes God says things to me with such strength, such PUSH, that I am crazy not to hear Him and insane not to move with Him. He makes me laugh out loud, because He knows. He knows He has to speak to me in a thousand different ways, and loud enough that even […]