When I was thirteen, we moved to a rural neighborhood where the front yards were small forests and the driveways a mile long. If I went for a walk, I always had a posse of friendly dogs following me. They didn’t know where I was going; they just wanted to share the adventure. We’d wind our way through tick and snake filled woods and explore the Cahaba River, watching water ripple over rocks. At one point, I even had a […]
Avoiding Invisibility Continue Reading »
I’ve had a hard time adjusting to Midwest living. People up here have laughed at me for twenty years because I’ve never acclimated to the cold. The problem is they are satisfied with an anemic version of heat —any temperature higher than 800 practically gives them the vapors, and where I’m from, that’s fall weather. The first winter I lived through in Cincinnati was rough. Snow was deep on the ground by Thanksgiving, and none of us had winter boots.
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
A Glad Gospel Continue Reading »
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.
Hope in Small Places Continue Reading »
“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, Yuletide carols being sung by a choir, And folks dressed up like Eskimos. Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe Help to make the season bright. Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow Will find it hard to sleep tonight. . .” “The Christmas Song” by Mel Torme and Bob Wells It’s an American Christmas song, a peaceful, comfortable tune, and every year my husband, the Nat King
A Different Kind of Peace Continue Reading »
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
Adopted in Love Continue Reading »
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
Love with a Side of Pain Continue Reading »
Last summer, when I visited the beach, I decided to venture into the ocean and experience the waves after years of wading along the shore. It was a mental aberration, a failure to acknowledge my current physical status: bad feet, hips and knees, poor balance and atrophied muscles. Instead, deceptive memory took me back to a more youthful, capable self. A self who didn’t make grunting noises when she got out of bed. “How hard can it be,” I thought,
Timeless Hope Continue Reading »
The last thing I wanted to write about on the anniversary of my husband’s death was the subject of “envy.” Thinking about it took me back, and I didn’t want to go back. I lived through it once and learned from it once; now I wanted to leave it. More than that, I wanted to escape from those memories — leave them on one side of a chasm and leap to freedom on the other. However, in this life there is no
The Chilling Effect of Envy Continue Reading »
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
Standing in a Sandstorm Continue Reading »
Outside my window, a tree is blooming. The flowers appeared suddenly, but the process began during the cold, dark days when the tree looked dead. Programmed to respond to an almost imperceptible increase in daylight, the tree’s “on switch” was flipped before change was visible. The same thing happens to us when we respond to light during periods of darkness. My husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and died a year later. After 34 years together, my fellow traveler
Growth Through Suffering Continue Reading »
