We started married life in an upstairs apartment of a small house in a small town. Below us lived our landlady and her son. I always heard her puttering about in the kitchen. She puttered and muttered in German, which is a whole other story. Our first apartment wasn’t chic, but we were just happy […]
Continue Reading
There were days, dark and bare. Black and silent. And though those days are mostly past, sometimes even today, when I least expect it, the veil, which holds suffering inside, seems to evaporate with fresh tears. Grief is like that. It swells in unconfined waves, and calms again like peace in a storm. And sometimes, […]
Continue Reading
“Eat your peas and carrots,” turned out to be a big order for one of our daughters. Solid food, that big step of introducing all manner of foreign texture and flavor into a baby’s mouth was met by hilarious expressions. The eye-watering, mouth-contorting, forehead-puckering, “what have you done to me?” ended with an all-out baby […]
Continue Reading
I am sitting in a waiting room again. Waiting…’cause, that’s what people do in a waiting room. Wondering…which goes with the territory. Worried…it’s part of the package too. It will be a pattern in our lives for a time. Not one we desire, but part of something bigger. Patterns. Like translucent tissue smoothed onto folded […]
Continue Reading
His eyes lighted when he saw me walking toward him in the crowd. My grandson headed straight toward me with a smile, and sidled up against my side. He stretched his arms around me and squeezed my waist. He’d grown so tall, I realized. These ten-year-old uninitiated hugs were becoming rare. His peeling away had […]
Continue Reading
I’m sitting inside and watching the perfect snowfall out our Virginia window. It came at a most inappropriate time, when our plans had to cancel, and schedules had to be re-scheduled. But, still, it is a perfect snow, with big flakes, thick, steady, and heavy. And despite the inconvenience, I’m moved by its purity and […]
Continue Reading
My British friend with her lovely accent once said to me, “Americans have been putting tea into the water since the Boston Tea party, and from then on they’ve kept right on doing it the wrong way.” Her sassy remark has helped me remember a tea-technicality ever since. And on more than one occasion, it […]
Continue Reading
“Are you being married?” our then four-year-old grandson asked. His whole body shoved forward to fit into a space in-between my husband and myself’s quick hug in the chaos of a kitchen swarming with grandkids. “Don’t be married!” he whined while he huffed and puffed and wiggled his short body against our legs and into […]
Continue Reading
It’s a snowball of sorts. Little things turn into bigger things, the list of to-do’s explode until there is simply no way to accomplish all of it, and a minor set back becomes a nearly impossible major reset. And a pain. This is life. It snowballs. Out the back of our house my husband and […]
Continue Reading
We sat in the old farmhouse dining room, around the table where my mom had hosted generations of family. And we divvied up the old pictures, bits and pieces of written history, and trinkets of her life well lived. Someday, my children will do the same. The china, the pictures, and the stuff which seems […]
Continue Reading