I slide the last pin in place, just at the bottom of the glossy braid.  This one reminds me of a seashell, woven wide and spiraling low, bright at the top where the sun has turned her hair a tawny gold, like wheat.  She smiles and the light moves right into her face. “Thanks, Mom […]

We wind our way along Pier 60 just as the sun dips, melting gold right into the ocean. I stand a moment and just breathe, watching the way the waves rise, wind-shaped right out of the glass sea. The pier is a flurry of activity as the city gears up for a festival on the […]

I find her note on my desk.  It’s just a yellow sticky note written in ballpoint, but the print is her own.  I can almost see her hand gripping the pen. That’s it, a small, blinding-bright effort to encourage, inspired by some of Ann Voskamp’s ideas for living given I’ve slapped up on our refrigerator door […]

Finally together at the end of the day, and the murmur of quiet activity is grace.  Riley sits with her feet tucked under her at the bar, giggling over a word that twisted in her mouth when she said it, all those wispy, mussed hairs falling golden around her cheeks.  Zoe saunters in on sock […]

In the waiting room, she reaches for my hand, lacing her long fingers through my own.  She presses her palm flat against my palm until all the lines meet, intersecting for a stretch and then contradicting, all posts and crossbeams.  Her moon eyes speak paragraphs over still lips, tightly drawn.  They are imploring blue–those eyes, […]

Standing there elegant in front of us all, she says to him, “I choose love.  I choose you. I choose the wonderful things about you and the things that drive me nuts.  I choose the good days and the bad ones,” and her voice doesn’t even quaver. She is radiant with chosenness, and it strikes me that […]

She gets up for me when it’s hard for her even to walk the length of the floor, and balancing on the one healing side, she hugs me, when I know it hurts to be touched the wrong way.  I’m on the way home to a lot of doing she couldn’t now do if she’d […]

I can hear them from the kitchen.  Their laughter–giddy, riotous–bounces and floats, and every so often I catch a “yea, and–“, just the edge of a phrase, the words pointed and stretched for diving in.  They have left this solid, dusty, hungry place for another realm, for a place where garden fairies dressed in glittery leaves co-exist […]

I just want to feel better, she says, looking at me with those eyes–wide, blue like crisp Fall; those eyes that still say Mom, fix this, please, even though we’re both well past the point of believing I could actually do that. Her bookbag thunks to the floor and she tugs at her skinny jeans, […]

Travel weary and temporarily keyless, we knock, feeling as dusty as the door, as parched as the plants.  I run my thumb along the delicate thinning edge of a swooping leaf, crisp and browned, like old parchment.  On the door, the vinyl letters have broken in places and begun to curl away, even as they still […]