It’s an old, familiar, childhood question.  If you had just one wish, and you knew it would come true… It’s a genie question, hovering in smoke, the answer thought-whispered over snuffed out candles, wispy and curling.  Just once, it was a question of Biblical proportions, only God posed it differently, to a young king:  Ask […]

Saturday night, and the descent happens just this quickly: We sit around the table licking frosting from our fingers, when she finally lifts her cupcake in one flattened palm, admiring the shape of it from all sides.  She has her own way—her own “technique,” she says—for savoring food.  When it comes to cupcakes, she tastes […]

Early morning and Lights twinkle, the Advent candles burn their persistant hope, and in the kitchen I stand still, watching my daughter pause over her pricked finger and the blood rounding into a bubble at the tip.  I know she’s crying by the way she catches her breath, the slope of her back, the angle […]

“DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) is a medical emergency, and without treatment it can lead to death.” This truth makes me shudder as I kneel beside my son and scrub the leg of his jeans where he points, where some of the toxic sickness missed the bucket beside him and soiled his clothes.  Sick Adam is strong, […]

The waiting settles in—somewhere deep in my bones—laying a heavy hand against my eyes, clouding everything like the veil of early morning fog blanketing the horizon, obscuring the sharp lines of roof tops, cloaking the striving limbs of the trees. Two and a half hours at the doctor’s office, and I come home to dirty […]