Holidays

“The bird gots no head! The bird gots no head!” My tow-haired three year old burst through the door to tell our family the news. Reluctantly, I followed him outside to investigate, and it was true. The remains of a once beautiful male cardinal lay there decapitated. “Yuck,” I said and removed the carcass. Our energetic Labrador retriever had changed my lesson from bird diversity to bird mortality. Obviously, spreading seed on the deck rail was a bad idea. However, […]

“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

In the sixties, Patricia McGerr published a short story entitled “Johnny Lingo’s Eight Cow Wife.” Yesterday, when it came to mind, I thought I’d have to spend days digging in internet archives for it, but I was mistaken. You can still easily find this tale about the transforming power of love. In the story, a young man offers to pay eight cows for the plain, dejected, Polynesian girl he loves. Her father is elated— he thought he’d be lucky to get

When my mother was a little girl, she and her siblings were separated and sent from home to live in bad places. Her brothers were shipped to an orphanage almost 500 miles away, and Mom was left to grow up with her paternal grandmother, a mean-spirited, angry woman. Upon arrival at her new home, she was assigned a bedroom in the back of the house where she wouldn’t bother anyone. She lay scared that first night; it was dark and

I didn’t know where I was, but I was standing on a vast plain beneath a leaden sky. The ground was hard and the grass was dead. The light, dim and dreary, revealed no colors except the everlasting gray. The air was stale and hot and barely breathable. There was no sound, either of birds or insects or wind. There was no evidence of life—somehow I knew there was none. Life, with all its richness of color and sound and

The third advent candle is the “joy” candle. But, what is joy? Most of us equate the word with “happiness,” except that it’s happiness on steroids, a”delight”, an “exhilaration”, an “exultation” even.  Happiness is all about earthly satisfaction, but joy, which may arise from terrestrial circumstances, also contains an element of the sublime. There is no better illustration of this than the joyful meeting between the Bethlehem shepherds and the angels:  In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in

The nativity set I purchased for my grandchildren has a border collie in it- not a Roman drover dog, not a Canaan dog- a border collie!  And the Scottish canine isn’t the only mistake. The smiling camel, which presumably carried the three tubby wise men, shouldn’t have showed up until much later; the angel on the roof is nowhere mentioned in scripture ; and- a PIG!  Apparently, these Jews didn’t keep kosher. Whether or not the designer of the nativity set knows

It was the fall of 1971, and three friends left Birmingham to attend Auburn University. Our parents drove us because we didn’t have cars. I didn’t even have a driver’s license. Two of us ended up lodging in the oldest dorm on campus— the kind with community bathrooms and cold showers. The third amiga got lucky and landed a spot in a newer dorm with larger hot water heaters and. . . air conditioning! While Jenny and I sweated in front of

It’s November. Leaves are falling, skies are gray, and my son-in-law has been here visiting the deer. While he’s with us, I never need an alarm clock. I wake up abruptly just before dawn, smelling coffee and hearing the front door click shut. The hunter exits like a ghost, neither waking  his brothers-in-law nor the four dogs. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that our pony ignores him as he threads his way through the barn, down the gulley,

Not so long ago, the drive to church was a noisy affair. The car was jam-packed with family, and we were usually running late. But today I would be arriving early and alone. As I drove, mental post-it notes whirled through my mind, and I felt a little anxious. I’d worked on this map project steadily for a month: compared gospel accounts,  read articles, scrutinized atlases, pestered  my well-traveled friends with questions about Jerusalem and the outlying areas, all to

Celebrating Thanksgiving 1988, with a new dog was the last thing I wanted to do; we had four children then: ages 7, 5, 3 and 1. But Jon had seen a litter of Lab puppies, and wanted me to see them too. Not being quite so dumb as a post, I met this proposal with strenuous objections, overwhelmed by visions of doggie poop and baby poop- not to mention nocturnal walks in the snow with a shivering puppy. Jon countered