Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us…
steps
You walk, son. Confident in shoes now, you know no fear, despite frequent tumbles, and boldly climb our four brick steps adult-fashion, holding the rail and hoisting yourself up steps nearly hip-high for you. But going down, you pause at the top: not to turn around and scoot down in the approved backwards-fashion, but to…
ephemera. eternity.
The first blossom is high in the magnolia tree beside our house, and down in the woodsy bit at the back of the yard there's something white showing up against the dusk. I suspect dogwood, but will have to investigate tomorrow. There's still a red mark on my arm from baby's head -- recently surrendered…
i’d be twins
"You see my finger? See my thumb? See my fist? You'd better run!" He shook a muscled fist in mocking threat, and we made feint to run, watching the twinkling blue eyes under the salt-and-pepper flat-top for the next joke. Forty-something years of dairy-farming made Grandpa's hands thick and strong, and the rough-handling of life left…
happy returns
I don't remember what it felt like to wake up that morning, the one rainy Saturday of the entire fall. How do people live through such days? Days that you enter knowing they are going to change only everything? How does an indecisive, usually fearful girl keep on, one step and then the next, toward…
lament. rejoice.
We're topping international headlines with our news of racially-charged violence, and I'm remembering how, after 9/11, my family's Ugandan sponsored child wrote to tell us she was praying for our country: she in whose country the LRA was kidnapping children and brutalizing communities while the world at large barely batted an eye. I've been trying…
time
By divine coincidence this morning my scripture reading included Psalm 90 and the first half of Ecclesiastes. Both are caught up with time, and it seems to me, reading them together, that Solomon was familiar with Moses' Psalm. "The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty, yet their…
by wisdom a house . . .
Sewing long curtain panels together so that the tan stripes match up at the seams, addressing invitations, adding guests to the online list, remembering another kitchen gadget to add to the registry, making reception decorations, playing with hairstyles . . . . When we sit at the table in front of the big window and…
a strange and perfect time
It's a strange time to be engaged, I'm thinking. The highest court in the land just declared same-sex marriage constitutional, attempting to redefine an institution older than original sin. Set our meager few hundreds of years of national existence against the dawn of time and ask if our interpretations of our founding fathers really have any…
sorrows. and words.
A social media share led me to this list of "23 Perfect Words for Emotions You Never Realized Anyone Else Felt". Gathered from John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the invented words are designed to "fill holes in the language," naming feelings for which, previously, there has been no name. "Monachopsis" describes "the subtle but persistent feeling…
Between Blue Rocks 