When my daughter, Conley, was a younger version of the funny, charming, dancing, gap-toothed girl that she is today, as I tucked her into bed, she would say in her sweet voice weighed down with sleepiness, “Mom, today was a good and a fun day.” It...
My middle two daughters start high school this week, and that has me feeling so many things. I’m reminded of doing high school drop-off my very first time 8 years ago with my oldest; How you watch them from your car, just praying they’ll face...
As I sat in my last class of the day, Algebra II, which was not only my most despised subject but also the one that I was remarkably inept in, my eyes drifted from the nonsensical letters and numbers on the board to the windows that lined the left...
Is it possible to have an open heart and a closed fist? Is it possible to have an open mind and a closed door? Can one have a humble, meek, lowly spirit one moment and then a spirit of contention, divisiveness, arrogance and intolerance in the next...
Any time I leave the house, I always ask my husband and kids if they need anything from the grocery store or Walgreens or Target or wherever I happen to be headed. They usually do – and it’s almost never something easily located. Daughter 1: “Yes...
Summer for me has always been a great marker of time. More so even than Christmas, as lovely, sentimental, and holy as that season certainly is. It’s so easy to float a summer wind back to visceral warm weather moments, a slightly sun burned body...
Plumes of black smoke stuttered up from the muffler of my grandmother’s abused Buick Riveria as she rocketed down the unfamiliar winding road. Zack and Angie, my much younger brother and sister, squealed gleefully as they tumbled over every each...
The Crestview Cemetery was in plain view. It was way too spooky, too dark, and too unkempt for me to linger any longer than I already had. It never had any visitors. Not even the hoodlums bothered to vandalize it. I glanced over at the tombstones...
Do you have a soul gardener in your life? Soul gardeners live a life of intentional nurturing of others. To these compassionate connectors “you reap what you sow” isn’t just a salient quip to point out the negative consequences of one’s actions; it...
The clock was bearing down on midnight of a day that already seemed 86 hours long when Tony and I crossed into Welch, the once booming mining town that many of the old-timers still called “Little New York” because of the confluence of cultures who...