It’s been a long yawn to full Autumn in Virginia. Trees have hesitated to blush but few have succumbed to their eventual fiery reds and yellows. This season seems hesitant to drop its leaves, although that will come by the bushelfuls, but for now October holds on, unwilling to reveal its wintery stark brown nakedness […]
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My dad, talented in all things musical, had a sharp ear and perfect pitch. “Should have been a B-flat not a B-natural.” He could be working the back forty, but when I struck a wrong note on the piano, he surfaced. Huffing and puffing in his dirt smeared Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls Dad appeared next to […]
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My friend looked in his rearview mirror and saw the sign to a church, which propelled him to whip his car into an unplanned detour. His life’s trajectory changed that Sunday by his decision. Each time I hear the story, I have a picture in my mind of that mirrored reflection, its sliver view, and […]
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One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four… The smell started as a vague drift of unpleasantness. But as I cleaned off the counter, a sniff of something not quite right remained. After a few hours I came back into the the kitchen, and it smelled like a cadaver lay under the sink. A rotten potato’s […]
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“The temperature will be 94 degrees Fahrenheit, but it will feel like 104,” says the weather man. And I smile. That is my world. He is describing me. It’s kind of a faulty default. My actual situation seldom reaches the extremes of how I feel or what I anticipate. Perhaps you are different, but my […]
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“Did God save us to let us starve?” I may not have said it quite like the complaining Old Testament Israelites are recorded after their exodus from Egypt, but I may have had that very same attitude. Their question in other forms has grumbled through my own vacant soul-wanderings. The Israelites said to them, ‘If […]
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“I don’t know where we’re at,” Phil’s dad used to say from the front seat of his handicapped van. In his later days my father-in-law, sweet and intelligent seemed to live in an anxious state of lost. He leaned far forward against the taut seatbelt, and peered with squinted eyes at the road ahead. The […]
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It had been an overlap day, when one commitment led to another with hardly a breath in between. Three grandsons sped through their home kitchen where I tried to do some cleaning up after lunch. Unfamiliar with exactly where to put things in the kitchen, I searched through cupboards and filled the sink. A familiar […]
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There is a whole lot of unseen upkeep in life. Changing sheets, mowing lawn, washing laundry, servicing the car, making meals, planning groceries, unplugging drains, buying supplies, fixing broken appliances, all that unseen upkeep of daily life. It’s tiring. It’s monotonous. It’s necessary. It never ends, does it? Yet, if I don’t do the dull […]
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A friend recently phoned me and began our conversation with, “Are you bored now that you are retired?” My four children are in various throes of raising our grandchildren. I watch them and remember their seasons. I title them like book chapters I’ve read, from Stormy Beginnings to Umbilical Cord Rip-Tide. I wonder if it […]
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