I love to sit on the cool dark porch just before dawn, listening as birds twitter and sing at such volume I imagine their banditries and bevies and breasts crowding the limbs of the trees with jumpy, sometimes swoopy chaos.  There comes a disembodied tuning, the calls and responses not unlike the huddled collaborations of […]

“I guess it’s about that time,” Kevin says, his morning voice soft as new day, whisper-light as that dawn blush warming up the quiet blue sky over the treetops, those trees, still unlit, wearing green as deep as night. I hear timid pops in the joints of his rocking chair as he stands to go […]

We sit down, expanded family stretched out in the middle of a row up at the top of the lecture hall where they’re hosting graduation for Josh’s and Riley’s college program, and my mama mind thinks, it’s a lovely view from up here, really, perched as we are like birds on a line, watching from […]

Rain falls outside, a whisper of sound, and looking out the window, through drops like tiny diamonds on the glass, I soak up a saturation of breathing green, the thickness of leaves and wild, dazzling grass. Glancing back toward my phone, the Bible app open, my finger paused on a phrase, I wonder what it […]

On a getaway vacation, Kevin and I explore new terrain, hiking through El Dorado State Park in Colorado.  El Dorado means the gold or the gilded, a term that became popular in the gold rush days, when at another time people crawled this craggy land looking for the gold veining the Colorado Rockies, living hard, […]

I sit by the sea, digging my toes into soft sand, soothed by the crashing waves.  The sparkling vastness of the water glimmers behind my reading, God’s letter in my hands, soft from all my folding and unfolding. A prayer plants me like a seed buried to live in a wild, fertile love so big […]

Riley comes home from work happy, initiating this, “Hey mom? One of the patients was so kind to me today.” She unloads her arms of purse and coffee cup, then unclips the badge from the collar of her shirt, and I wonder what it is about coming in from a day that we somehow also […]

I am strategic about where I place the pillows at night, once-in-a-blue-moon when Kevin travels, when I pad quietly up the stairs to go to sleep, having thought to start the dishwasher that he always starts at the last of the day, having thought—because I have to—to trace his nighttime steps around the house on […]

“Hey Riley?” Zoe’s voice comes light from my phone, which sits on the kitchen island in the center of the room as Kevin and I turn and twist around finishing dinner; Adam, announcing his echolalia, paces a fast, hungry track around the perimeter; and Riley sits at the bar facing us, wearing a listening grin, […]

Running late, as usual, I feel stressed. I imagine myself purpling and breathless, like some vile thing has me by the neck as I sit out in the car thumping the steering wheel with my thumbs, willing my Riley to finish her checking rituals—and yes, I took my morning pills, and yes, it looks like […]