I joke and call myself a hoop jumper, me with my hair flying wild around my face and my exercise clothes still on from before carpool; me with a pen in one hand, and a mess of papers stretched across the desk in indistinguishable stacks, some paper-clipped, some loose and, as Kevin would say, “flapping […]

“The way the game works,” Zoe says, sitting across the table and all that history, tossing a deck of playing cards back and forth loosely in her hands, “is that you don’t get to know the rules. You have to figure them out as you play.” She and her friend exchange a glance, and friend […]

I slide my thumbs over the curves of an apple, holding it under the tap. Water splashes over Granny Smith green, green like early leaves with sun shining through. Before slicing in, before bruising the fruity flesh, I wash. The water chills my thumbs, my palms. Zoe leans on the bar, suddenly open, telling me […]

Kevin walks in the door and the afternoon rushes right in with him.  It’s as though the jostling traffic, the dying sun, and dozens of fading fragments of conversation cling to his shirt sleeves, his warm cheeks. They fall off his shoulders, these things, as the strap from his leather bag falls to the floor […]

They cast a long shadow on the lawn, all legs, son in so many ways like his father.  It’s striking.  Nothing really prepares a mother for the moments when she looks at her children and sees something of the adults they’re becoming, the careful sculpting of the future.  No matter how broad those shoulders get, I […]

“Hey now, offer him grace, okay?” She sits in front of me, tears pooling in the pit of the day, and I wash onions off of my hands with soap meant to smell like a sunrise sail.  It won’t be enough.  I know that, but I try anyway.  Hours from now, my fingers will still smell […]

We are not an easy family to love. I mean, even for us the loving isn’t always easy.  We are difficult, tired, a ball of chaos with accessories.  Everywhere we go, there are tote bags filled with an eccentric conglomeration of things—our accoutrements, I call them: stuffed monkeys and calculators; dry erase markers, insulin pens, […]