1Mar 1, 2024
“You with your hand rubbing your forehead,” my friend says to me, chuckling, the computer like a window fusing her home and mine, and us with our rumpled faces, talking quietly in the early morning, talking of life and how it’s hard. I do not, until the moment she says this, realize what I’ve been […]
2Feb 23, 2024
“Have you changed your sheets recently?” I ask over lunch, just as Riley stabs at her salad with her fork, catching up a bit of lettuce, a brilliant coin of carrot. It’s true of us all: we can think no one knows where we’ve been, that no one knows we’ve walked right off course for […]
3Feb 9, 2024
A friend says, the text coming in gently, it must be hard for you to let her just walk through that door. Yes, I type. Yes. I sit in the car, waiting while Riley digs her bookbag out of the trunk, talking to herself in a soothing, rhythmic way. She turns to look at me […]
4Feb 2, 2024
When I get out of the car at the library, I see three children huddled together on the front lawn, their feet hidden in the dewy grass, their bodies turned, their eyes fixed on an old bottle-green minivan. Immediately, I feel a kind of kinship with them, recognizing my spiritual self somehow in the baby […]
5Jan 19, 2024
I watch Riley’s face as she describes her first in-person day in vocational school, how animated she has become, how her eyes shine and her smile deepens, her voice lilting while she recounts all the details to a close friend of mine who, having come over with a tray of baton cookies in her hands […]
6Dec 22, 2023
Riley leans against the kitchen counter, waiting out a two-minute timer that counts down while chunks of chicken sizzle in the pan. She holds a fork aloft as she alternately considers the cooking meat and the digital display, as she murmurs to herself about what’s next. I watch her head nod gently as she speaks, […]
7Oct 20, 2023
I flip the page on a brand-new week in my planner, wagging my pencil back and forth in my fingers. I had expected to find space for a breath, a quiet stillness on the empty grid within which to pause and practice a Sabbath surrender before writing in my careful strategy for the week. We […]
8Oct 13, 2023
The leaves have begun to turn, that’s what we call it, a turning, and not just toward a vibrant end, but also toward the promise of new life. Nature presents her story year after year, the echo of her longing like a comfort, like the soft murmur that serves as the heartbeat of praise, the […]
9Sep 29, 2023
At a stoplight on our way to school, Adam looks at me, his expression all tenderness, and reaches over to flick my ears. He leans across my field of vision, glancing pointedly toward the red light before beginning to rhythmically bend and release the tops of my ears, sometimes tugging lightly on the lobes and […]
10Sep 22, 2023
By the time Riley comes to find me for our prayer, I have slid so far down into my pillows as to be almost completely horizontal, and, to be honest, I keep falling asleep, so the book in my hands keeps lightly knocking me in the nose and waking me up. I have read the […]