Closing A Window

Fifteen years ago, in a faraway land, I used to write stories of living and teaching in southwestern Germany. I’d write them here, little anecdotes from the tiny world in which I lived. In the beginning, it was called, quite descriptively, “Kristi Is Teaching in Germany.” Like anyone raising financial support as a missionary in…

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Seventh Grade

I remember seventh grade better than the other grades. That’s not true, actually. I had only five whole school years where I went to school and sat in a desk beside classmates. Five sets of teachers and schedules. Five school pictures and years with both a first and last day of school. So I remember…

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Wading on Epiphanies

At 3:00 PM, the day looks inauspicious, and the plan that I crafted myself before dawn—a plan predicated on a dry Sunday afternoon—seems less pleasant than I’d hoped it would be. I had imagined sitting on a bench while kids skated and scooted around me. I’d imagined tea and apple slices and golden hour at…

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Things That Made 2024 Better

I’ve long finished the year with a list of what made it a better year than it could have been. I’ve always hedged it so carefully, not wanting to label a year “good” or “bad,” when it was so often both, and everything in between. All I have ever been willing to say is, in…

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Fit

Once upon a time, in a faraway village, I walked into a shoe store, with only one object in my sights. The shop was tiny and smelled of leather and glue, for they repaired shoes as well as selling them, and along every wall were shoes of every shape and size, from house shoes to…

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In The Bike Lane

The first time they rode in a real bike lane—not the sidewalk or a wading pool, not an empty parking lot or a school playground—I saw my daughters’ lives flash before my eyes. But not precisely the way you think. I promise. It was this spring, the first genuinely hot May morning, when we woke…

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Fake Grass & Real Friends

The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings. You’ve Got Mail (1998) I don’t remember whose idea it was to sit down in the first…

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Why We Ride

First, something else I didn’t do for money: I recently published a collection of poems that I’ve written over the past five years into a small poetry book. My commemoration of a season of being mostly at home full-time with small kids, it is called Small Prints, a title taken from a blog post by…

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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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