The sleuths were on the job before seven this morning, trampling up and down the house in safety glasses and sun hats, peering through magnifying glasses for clues, and waiting beneath the attic door for robbers to emerge. They were not quiet. The other morning it was music: drums, shakers, tambourines, and an untrained pianist.…
Five Minute Friday: lift
He holds up his dimpled hands, and I bend to hoist him over the bump that is his brother. Sometimes recently, with post-COVID fatigue and an irritated pregnant hip, it’s a struggle to lift myself, let alone a thirty pound toddler. But he buries his face in my shoulder and squeezes his arms right around…
particular rain
The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree. It rains on the umbrellas here And on the ships at sea. —Robert Lewis Stevenson Children watching rain. I hear them in my van’s back seat wondering at how the drops travel up the windshield but down their windows, and I remember the…
Five Minute Friday (on Sunday): fix
Fix. verb [with object] "fasten (something) securely in a particular place or position." All my life, I dug in my heels, clinging, white-knuckled, to whatever my "now" happened to be. That place, that age, those people. Change caught and tore me away, again and again, and I mourned each fresh transition, seeing always endings rather…
The law of the world
A counter-psalm The law of the world is imperfect, wearying the soul to death; the testimony of the world is false,establishing fools in their folly;the precepts of the world are wrong,grieving the heart;the commandments of the world are impure,blinding the eyes;the fear of the world is filthy,swiftly passing away;the rules of the world are altogether untrue and…
broken bowls
It had already been a long day when I stretched up on tiptoe to shelve a bowl from the dishwasher. Somehow its glass lid slipped down, ricocheted off a stack of other dishes waiting to be shelved, and landed, shattered, on my usually forgiving linoleum tiles. I didn't cry, but my disappointment must have been…
Five Minute Friday: ahead
Today a sun-slant caught the diamond on my ring-finger in such a way as to scatter minuscule rainbows all across my book page. Each diamond-facet a momentary prism, dazzling. I mostly don’t notice the diamond: more than five years’ wear has made it familiar. I don’t feel the rings on my hand unless I think…
my picture
It was just a simple drawing, Bic stick pen on ordinary construction paper, wobbly windows thanks to an unruly lap baby. But still, it looked the way I’d pictured in my mind, and I had plans for how I’d finish it. But a million things called me away from the table where we’d been drawing.…
In the country: October 2020
Incursions of red wasps into the barn mean we avoid it on walks. Since spring they've had five large rattlers here, a menacing black widow, and her brood. The pines are dying, and a bullet whizzed past my dad's head in his woods-bound back yard. • But see now red spider lilies crowd the fence…
Haste the day
Last night my little boy called me to his room a second time after he’d been put to bed, after I’d returned to reassure nightly fears of darkness with the comforts that God was with him and that I would not go outside and be eaten by a bear. I fought frustration as I returned…
Between Blue Rocks 