I know well my husband’s furrowed brow. I am well acquainted with the set of his jaw and the far away focus of his eyes. His spinning thoughts, the ones that talk louder inside him than spoken ones addressed to him, need hearing. They are the fix it concentrations of a man named Phil whose […]
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“Oh mom,” my college aged daughter said, and could it be I heard a tiny bit of impatience in her voice? “Half the kids I know in college live in the same town as their parents and they aren’t as close as we are living across the ocean from each other.” My whining stopped. As […]
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“She’s my friend,” my daughter said with a nod. “She doesn’t cheat.” My head shot up. “And some of your friends do?” I asked, thinking at least my six-year-old was on the right side of that conversation. “Sometimes,” she said. Then she ran out of the room. A pinkballerina streak, while I stayed sitting on […]
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Last night I dreamed I was in a crowd of people in a store. We were pressed together in a small space and I knew I was too close. Too near. I woke up wound tight like a mummy and with a headache like a bulldozer had plowed through. A lingering image of trying to […]
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1. What you criticize in others, you likely do yourself. Momma took the lesson a step farther. What you criticize in others you probably are aware of because it’s something you already do in your heart. It was Momma’s form of “get that log out of your eye before you go picking around in someone […]
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“It’s easier to just do it myself,” I mutter. A dishtowel hangs from my hand like a tail swaying against my hip. Chores, those supposedly helpful contributions are about to be my undoing. I re-order the haphazard pile of weeping plastic containers, dry them again, and rearrange the stack neatly in the right cupboard. “Seriously,” I […]
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The long marble hallway stretched like a tunnel ahead. I remember the wavy lines narrowed to another corridor where doctors and nurses passed like a hospital thoroughfare of workers intent on going and arriving. Something weird had happened to my eyesight ever since my daughter had been diagnosed with a brain stem lesion. Dark shadows […]
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Maybe now is actually the right time to doubt your faith. How can I say such a thing in the middle of the biggest global crises most of us have experienced? Why would I bring more uncertainty when most of us are terrified by this invisible enemy of our families, our loved ones and ourselves? […]
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It’s an odd time to sell a house. It’s an odd time to move. It’s an odd time. Boxes scatter the floor and emptiness echoes off the walls of the only house we’ve ever owned. Outside a For Sale sign hangs. The Sold sign never got put up because these days only what must be […]
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I don’t know about you, momma, daddy, grandmama, and granddad, but the last few weeks have fogged my brain and tattered my thinking. If today could be superimposed like tracing paper over the outline of one week ago, we would all stare and wonder what happened to life as we knew it. If we put […]
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