Category: love
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To number our days
My father recounts a sunny afternoon in grade school when he returned home breathless and tearful: a traveling, weeklong science fair had just begun at school. When my grandmother Sharon asked him what was wrong, he lamented that he couldn’t possibly attend all the workshops—there simply wouldn’t be enough time. He would have to make…
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When the world is hushed
Sometime during the summer of 2020, the girls and I were enjoying a juicy meta-conversation about our creatureliness (how we are like animals) after reading a few chapters of Gary Paulsen’s The Hatchet. I had been trying to develop a readaloud habit that I like for years, but it had felt like torture. I, the…
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Truth “balm”
The first time I stepped away from full-time work as a public school teacher and began to learn about other ways of schooling, it was messy. I “flipped my lid” in anger often, and was full of shame about it afterwards. On one of the worst days in memory, I actually said aloud that the…
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Everywhere an altar
I recently haunted a local memorial garden for bereaved families who have lost a child. I had been there before the loss of our oldest, while hiking with our three children, and found it meaningful. Now, I’m part of the place–a lovely, thoughtful spot overshadowed by trees, connected to a sunny wildflower meadow. Around a…
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To work is to love.
The very first, white-hot migraines marched into my life while in uniform, behind a steering wheel. As an Asbury student and Army cadet, I headed every Wednesday to UK’s Buell Armory for our ROTC training labs, often returning with pounding headaches, nausea and light sensitivity. Thankfully, because I spent these commutes with Zach, we also…