I love the light when it’s fresh at the start of the day.  It’s like a clean window we’ve not yet touched with our fingers; like the diaphanous edges of some sacred space.  Sitting on the porch in the morning feels like resting in the palm of God’s hand as He slowly opens his fingers.  This […]

Here we are in the thick of the morning rush, my foot pump, pump, pumping the break, and she asks, “Mom, what are your plans for today?”  We move along the roadway like a pebble in a clogged stream, jerking irregularly, moving one moment and then suddenly not.  It feels as though I have to […]

I walk in from my first round of morning carpool, and she sits at the bar, twisting a long ribbon of brassy hair around her finger.  Through the open door that extends our home past the threshhold and anchors it truly as part of a much broader world, I can hear the birds tweeting madly, […]

Waiting at the stoplight on the way to school, drizzle dotting the windshield, and I grab my phone to take a picture of my daughter.  The cloud-cast makes her skin look more alabaster than olive-gold; makes her blue-gray eyes look stormy. “What’re you doing?” She asks.  But I catch the hint of a smile, just […]

She comes to find me on the porch, settling lightly on the double rocker next to me, shimmying her body close to mine.  The warm wind picks up a stray piece of her hair and plasters it across her forehead.  She leans against the pillows, considering me briefly, reaching up to tuck that wild strand […]

Her hair blows against my cheek, just one errant, brassy strand.  She laughs, and I laugh with her, taken by those eyes that have always been as blue as the sky just before a storm.  “You know, this is how it would have to be with us,” she says, lifting a hand toward the door, […]

Early evening, and already I feel splintered and scattered and sore from carrying the day.  It has been one of those—the kind of day that wakes me before the sun, pressing into me in the emptied hours, and then sends me chasing time and late for everything; the kind of day in which, right from […]

“When I struggled so much with anxiety, God taught me to pray,” Riley says, lifting her hand and turning it over, as though neatly wrapping the words, a gift.  And then, when later we reach for each other’s hands, she quietly asks God to help her brother talk to us.  Maybe she’s just following Zoe’s lead. […]

Adam finds me sometimes, just to talk about the things that excite him. I’m one of the few with whom he’ll take that still awkward step, because he can appreciate the way that I know him, the way womb-forged bonds overcome every other kind of separation.  I almost always know what Adam means to say before he says […]

In the early hours before the sun rises, we rise, and we’re so tired we move around in silence for a while, fumbling to make the bed, pressing back against sleepiness to dress for exercise before we find an excuse.  We’ve tried so hard for intentionality with regard to first things—time with God, time with each […]