21Jun 30, 2023
I stand on my tiptoes a little now to brush Adam’s teeth, reminding myself not to hum aloud the thread of praise weaving through my thoughts because Adam will feel as though, while he’s already telling me it’s time to finish with his teeth, he must also ask me to stop humming, please, because the […]
22Jun 23, 2023
“I’m concerned about Adam’s schedule for the summer,” Riley says to me, folding her hands in front of her and digging one toe into the outdoor carpet on our back porch. The hinges of the door haven’t yet stopped screeching, and a great wind rustles the leaves of the trees, and I take a deep […]
23Jun 9, 2023
In our house, we have learned to keep time this way, in days since the last seizure, but this is not something we carry along, not at all like some battered suitcase stuffed with all our worries and dragged along behind, but rather something acknowledged and touched by our hands and burned in the pasture, […]
24Apr 28, 2023
“How was your day?” I ask Riley as she slides into the car after work, and what I really mean is how were the last few hours, and what astounds me when I ask is that, as usual, she seems as peaceful as the ocean at low tide, still, like glass. “Work was amazing,” she […]
25Apr 14, 2023
This four-lane road, the last main thoroughfare before Adam and I get to school, snakes about in hills and curves sometimes tightly compressed and sometimes stretched and rising. It’s a good analogy for life, this drive, for the way we all get pushed and pressed, the way a day can feel like a long, blind […]
26Mar 24, 2023
Beside me, my phone vibrates like a bee trapped in a jar, zooming frantically from side to side, beating its wings against the glass. I lift it and flip it over so that the screen blinks on and I can see that the vibrating heyheyheyhey is not the emergency I had imagined it could be […]
27Mar 3, 2023
“Mom Jones, how’s your voice today?” Riley asks, pajama-clad and still rumpled with sleep, leaning against the doorjamb in my office, one hand solidly planted on a curvy hip. She straightens, gathering her hair into a ponytail with her other hand, flipping it absently as she watches my face. “It’s still gone,” I croak, only […]
28Feb 17, 2023
In the morning, Adam and I rush out the door on the way to school and I smile at him with his long, twenty-year-old bones and the bud of wisdom in his tender eyes and the snarl of hair at the back of his head where he never brushes, and I think of the strangeness […]
29Feb 10, 2023
While I dice the chicken, one hand gripping the knife, I teach Riley how to make potato salad. “So, what’s the next thing you need to do?” I ask her, nodding toward an armful of a silver bowl piled high with tender chopped potatoes. Two eggs, hardboiled with the potatoes, peek out from among the […]
30Dec 30, 2022
I run my finger over the scars on the dresser in my bedroom, Grandma, twice etched, raw, like an incision in the wood in Riley’s handwriting. Always in twos. I murmur the dark echo of an old cliché, the shadow of an old joke still half bitter to me, but only by half, because God […]