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 […]

“I love you.” He says it slowly, the way he says everything, but lifting the word you, as if in emphasis.  It’s not enough just to fling the words into the air above her head and walk away.  He knows this.  Purposefulness has been a recent goal.  So instead, Adam bends his lean frame toward the […]

Twinkle lights cast warm light over their cheeks, their tawny skin, their sun-gold hair.  The summer breeze lifts long, errant strands—mermaid-streaked deep maroon-purple, steel blue.  The girls slide their thumbs over their foreheads, corraling without thinking.  As the day fades along the edges of the dinner hour and the five of us gather on the […]

There’s only ever been one perfect love; only one that didn’t come out all lopsided, with smudges all over the edges. Time races up behind me and I have no choice but to microwave the butter I forgot to take out ahead.  I need it to cream, and ice-cold butter doesn’t cream.  I unfold the […]

Today, this extravagant Gift: Gently, he traces my cheekbone with the edge of his thumb, just lightly.  It is a simple, wordless gesture, so powerfully warm as to thaw the edges of the day. “I know,” I say, “I have a nasty bump there,” thinking immediately of the blemish on my cheek, red and tender […]

It only takes a moment for things to crumble. At day’s end, twilight throws last rosy beams across the kitchen table, lighting up flecks of glitter melted into the clear coat years ago during some school project, making Riley’s golden flyaways shine like a gossamer crown faintly visible on her forehead.  She has just finished […]