It’s only after we’ve been on the beach for a while, watching her little toes rake through the gravel, that I realize Luci has never felt the ground with her bare feet. I can count on one hand the times that my snow-born baby has been outside without a coat on, and she has never been…
Category: Life
A Summit Day
She decided to wear three dresses. One day my sister, Holly, came up to the chalet in the mountains and we pulled out “every wedding dress in the house.” There were, surprisingly, four, belonging to myself, my great aunt, my grandmother and my mother. She’d also brought two she’d ordered online for comparison, a grand…
Hello Again
September 1998. In the grey minutes between picking up my schedule in the gym and the digital bell that began my first day of high school, I wound my way to the musty, forgotten corner of the campus that housed the music room. It was empty, as I’d suspected it would be, since there were…
House Hunters: Kandern
House Hunters International makes me dangerously smug. The House Hunters franchise, as far as I can tell, forms a cornerstone of the Home Garden Television mansion. The basic formula involves someone–usually a couple–looking for a house, then being carted around to three different houses by a realtor. At the end, the couple has to reach some…
Yours Also Is the Night
Yours is the day, yours also the night; you have established the heavenly lights and the sun. Psalm 74:16 “I am one acquainted with the night,” writes Robert Frost. I know this poem–its images wet and grim, its refrain mournful and lonely–well enough to teach it, well enough for the few questions that appear on…
An Experienced Novice
It’s hotter in Texas than we’d like. When we unfold ourselves from inside the narrow tube of the three-hour “express” from Norfolk, Virginia to Houston, we step onto the warm runway and breathe in the foreign, humid scent of February in the Lone Star State. Three flights down, one to go. Living overseas, Timmy and I…
Better and Better
Ceramics Teacher and I were sitting on the counter at Maugenhard boys’ dorm, almost a year ago, two off-duty teachers waiting for cookies to bake and chatting with the dorm mom. We were pregnant, Ceramics Teacher a few months more than I, both excited and a bit skeptical of babies. Along with being the caregiver for twenty-ish…
Choosing Morning
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is…
How The Storm Tried To Steal Christmas
I’ve been trying to get around to writing about our candlelit Christmas for a bit now. Oddly, it’s not easy to set aside time for writing (or even thinking, sometimes), with a wriggly six-week-old as a loud and pleasant constant companion. I’m tempted to write in metaphor, some bit about light and darkness that would be…
Miraculous & Mundane
No matter how far along our spiritual pilgrimage we may have come, we need to be shown time after time that humble ordinary things can be very holy, very full of God. We may hope for vision and revelations and wonderful experiences, forgetting that the context of the revelation of God to each one of…
The Way Home 