Spiral Places

I once called this a spiral place. Nineteen, full of vague longing (to feel safe, confident, connected) and pointed questions (“So, will I just be single forever, then?”), I sat on a sand dune in late summer and wrote myself a letter. They told us to, the staff members running this retreat for student leaders,…

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Things That Made 2023 Better

Notes from the past year, from a gloriously cool and cloudy New Years’ Day. It has been a surprising year in many ways, full to the brim with change and growth and activity, only a little of which made it into words here. Still, looking back before looking ahead has been my practice, a moment…

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The Road Taken

I few years ago, I stumbled on a superpower. I could become invisible by uttering a simple incantation in answer to a question. “And what do you do?” someone would ask. I’d sense my vanishing drawing near. “Me?” I’d reply, looking around as if any number of people were nearby. “I’m a stay-at-home mom.” And…

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Things That Made 2022 Better

2022 hasn’t been the most prolific year of my writing life—few poems, chapters and blog posts found their voice in the midst of a busy life. Perhaps I’ll write more about that later, but lest anyone think I’ve been doing nothing (I know that no one thinks that), here are some of the things that…

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Bells, Books, and Echoes

I think I hear church bells one night. I step outside onto our back doorstep, lean over into the humid, still-hot evening, and strain my ears, my soul, my whole being toward the sound I thought I heard. Nothing. Just summer-still evening air, quieter even than a normal August night. No bells. This is maybe…

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Plans and the Pet Store

The pet store wasn’t supposed to be today’s highlight. I actually didn’t plan to go there at all, as I almost never plan to go the pet store. Certainly not this one, anyway, a dimly-lit, big box affair off of a wide and depressing avenue in the north part of our city. (Yes, our dog…

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Two Decades, from the Delta

For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work among you will complete it by the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6 I have a good memory. It’s the kind of memory that teachers like, the kind that absorbs all of those names and dates, which the most up-to-date pedagogy spends a lot…

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85 Sunflower Seeds

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life A day such as this, in which I endure a measure of sickness or unease, is a reminder that the redemption of all…

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Of Raspberries and Resurrection

 Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. John 12:24 (NASB) I really did think the raspberry bush was dead. I’m not the primary gardener in our family; that’s my husband, the garden visionary, shopper, planter,…

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Blood, Proximity, and Things We Learn to Love

I’ve never known as much about sheep farming as I do now. I could say it was an accident, that I didn’t know quite what I was getting into when I started reading James Rebanks’s A Shepherd’s Life: A People’s History of the Lake District, but that wouldn’t be technically accurate. I worked hard to…

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