Sunday was the worst day of the week because it was the day conscientious villagers had to spend an hour in church getting yelled at for their sins. “Death comes unexpectedly!” boomed the preacher from his elevated pulpit. The congregation flinched and the chandelier shook as he weaponized his voice and blasted his sermon at them. Eleanor Porter’s book, Pollyanna, was fiction, but she likely wrote from life. When I was a teenager, I attended a mainline denomination church where there […]

I have this dog; well, actually I have four now, but one is especially unhealthy. First, Poppy went blind when she was a puppy; nobody could figure out why. Then she got pneumonia. This was followed by urinary tract infections. Currently, she is in a dark place. Her tummy hurts; she is lethargic; she throws up and pees on the floor. While the rest of the pack galumphs around her, she lies inert, her unseeing eyes somehow expressing her discomfort.

I have friends who have six children. When the wife expressed a desire to adopt more, her husband said (as mine would later say), “Have you lost your mind?” indicating that they were already child-poor and chaos-rich. The husband summed it up thusly, “Women just like babies.” Which is true. . . My mother had two miscarriages, then she and my father offered to adopt a close relative of hers, but their offer was declined and the child had a

 She was grabbing dirty laundry from her son’s room when she saw it, scrawled over and over at the bottom of a piece of notebook paper: “I hate Mom. I hate Mom. I hate Mom.  . .” Sitting on the side of his bed, she wondered, “Is this what I get for trying to be a good parent?” For a moment, she stayed there, attempting to combine this evidence of contempt with her understanding of the situation. He was mad

My four year old granddaughter pointed them out, “Them are mean ducks,” she warned. She was remembering when she got too close to a Canada goose in the park and it came after her, hissing and flapping its huge wings. Such scary behavior might nominate the wild goose as a symbol for aggression, but the crazy Celts chose it to represent the Holy Spirit. What were they thinking? Aside from their reputation for belligerence during nesting season, wild geese have

Pregnant, barefoot and running late, she piled her four children into the car and hustled them to school. On the way, one of her sons tossed a flour bomb back and forth in the back seat. Catching sight of this in the rearview mirror, she warned, “Stop that! You’ll mess up your clothes; we’re late as it is.” He heard and disregarded her imperative, casting it off with the nonchalance of a born mischief-maker, and the inevitable happened. The bomb