The holiday season–that busy stretch of weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year–is often filled with Comings and Goings. Someone traveling somewhere and remaining for a while. Guests. Visitors. We had many. Did you? Here’s the thing about Comings and Goings: some are more welcome than others.
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Dear Friends, I wanted to give you something for Christmas. Something free and different. Yes, yes. I know that everything on this website is free (okay, well, if you click the links to my books you’ll see that the books aren’t free). And the Advent readings are certainly free. But they aren’t different. Okay, […]
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Recently I was asked to write about the empty nest. I’m not sure I can, so I wrote about Advent instead.
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This year, Sunday, December 1 is the beginning of Advent, the four weeks of the church calendar leading to Christmas Day. Once again I’m posting the four readings I wrote last year. Each one considers a different person in the nativity story, and each offers thoughts as […]
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I woke up on the early side this morning and sat at the kitchen table with my Bible and my coffee cup. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the light was: everything to the east a pale gray. Naturally, I thought of words. “Effusion,” I thought to myself. “This is an ‘effusion’ of light.” The […]
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These moments are immortal, and most transitory of all;… Beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolve it again and again. Martin Buber, I and Thou On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, I had to pull Everett’s box out from under my bed. I have a box for each of […]
Read more“You get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something.” ~Joan Didion Back in my teaching days, […]
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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, I taught school. Er, rather, I taught English. Er, humanities. Er, students. I taught humanities (which included English) to students. And I loved it. Which meant that, occasionally, I got to talk about prepositions. Which I also loved. Prepositions, you say? Why yes, I say. Prepositions.
Read moreLast Wednesday when I drove Emma to school, the pollen hung in the air like a scrim. It comes every year: two weeks of early spring in which our world is silted with a gritty yellow dust. It coats railings and window sills; it clings to cars, dusts the newborn leaves, and pools in untouched […]
Read moreEverett came into the kitchen yesterday and said, “I’m sad Christmas is over.” And it is. Suddenly. Our tree is still up, some decorations still out, but Everett is right. Everyone is back to work or school, and yesterday my parents went on their way. So now–for real and for true–we seemed to have turned […]
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