This morning, while I was walking my 3rd grade son to school, he asked me the question which I hear nearly every morning: “Why do we have to walk to school when we have a car to drive?” Like many questions, this one can’t only be taken at face value. I have given him plenty […]
Before my husband Brent and I began dating in college, we would hang out as friends as a part of a larger group. Sometimes we would play putt-putt or go out to eat or go to a park. On one occasion, we were all sitting around in the living room which belonged to the parents […]
During recent storms (or threats of storms), I found myself looking at the weather app on my phone several times a day. Knowing that my sons were scheduled to have soccer practice that evening, I would check the predictions of bad weather even though I saw only blue skies and innocent-looking, white wisps of clouds […]
A few days before we took our twin daughters to different cities to move into their respective college dorm rooms, I found myself in a parking lot sitting in my van at our older son’s soccer practice attempting to concentrate enough to read a book. Though it was mid-August, it was especially breezy and almost […]
Like many sports-loving, competitive 9-year olds, my son Ezra loves to talk about rivals. While watching a football or basketball or soccer game on TV, he’ll point to the two teams and ask his daddy, “Are they big rivals?” He wants to know the stakes for that game, how important it is to the players […]
This pandemic may be called many things—scary, inconvenient, ill-timed, unprecedented. As a mom to two graduating daughters and two soccer-playing sons, the main word is aggravating. “Why now?” they ask. “Why did this stupid virus have to interrupt my final year of high school/senior prom/graduation party/mission trip/soccer season/out-of-town tournament/church camp?” They’re pretty good kids, […]
Since the task of feeding our family of 6 falls to me, I spend a lot of time in grocery stores. For the most part, I’m a Kroger girl and always have been. Other than a few years when my mom tried shopping at Mega Market (the place in 100 Oaks Mall where you had […]
In 2007 Columbian artist Doris Salcedo created a temporary installation at the Tate Modern art museum in London. Her crew formed a long, dramatic crack in the concrete floor of the gallery. It started as a thin break at one end of the room that expanded and split like the widening tributaries of a river. […]
I am a logophile, a lover of words. When I’m attempting to write something—fiction or non-fiction—I work diligently to dig up the most perfect word from the disorganized quarry that is my mind (especially lately). When I find that prized word, an amazing feeling washes over me. Instead of a runner’s high, I get a […]
I’ve been doing a little sewing lately—a set of curtains, hemming a couple of skirts, and, of course, cloth masks. Fabric is one of those things that most of us take for granted—the cotton that makes the threads that makes the fabric that makes that favorite shirt you love so much so you never put […]