When I was married, I gifted with great ceremony white lilies to three older women that I loved. My blood mother. My stepmother. My mother-in-law. I carried the long and elegant stems across the pebbles toward their wooden folding chairs. All three of them died young. Cancer, cancer, and a freakish surprise sort of thing […]
Hope
Blue Skies
Winter in Denver is much better than winter in Cincinnati. You can argue with me all you want, but guess what? Three hundred days of sunshine a year means you’ll feel that golden warmth shining on your face more often than not. Even in those dark cold days between the Super bowl and March […]
When We Find Life in Leaving
Standing over the stove, you can tell she’s in her element. The woman can cook. She may not be able to recite the recipe exactly, and may have to tell you in three separate phone calls the revisions to the recipe, but cooking is her love language. That and waking up at 5 am to […]
Living in the Boring Chapter
It seems to me that most people live semi-ordinary lives with straightforward paths. You graduate from elementary school to middle school to high school to college and then you start working. My life has often consisted of jumping headfirst into a random major change, freaking out because it was harder than I expected, finally acclimating […]
Recycled
“White woman, why water full of sorrow flow from face?” The young woman’s Chenglish needed no translation and neither did my tears as she poured rosewater into a wooden bucket to soak my feet. She was wearing a Louis Vuitton jacket, sequined sweater and rice hat: a fashion style as common in Kunming, China as […]
Same Leaf, New Perspective
I desperately want to make a clean break from it. For more years than I can remember it’s taken up camp in the pit of my stomach and invaded my mind like a Philistine army with a Goliath heading the charge. It’s followed me around, rocked me violently to sleep, crawled, slithered, sunk into my […]
What I Didn’t Resolve in January
January is often a time of change. For me, it’s when I realize that my mid-February birthday is coming. One January, I broke up with a boyfriend, unwilling to continue in that unhealthy relationship as I approached a quarter of a century. This January, I quit my job. I’ve been hearing the whispers for a […]
Leaving Home and the Geographies of our Days
Every time we leave, I always hope for a clean break, where you wince but then rip off the band-aid and you’re okay. Where the pain is quick but then fades, and soon, you’re just left with a scab. Or I hope that if the pain does remain, it’s still beautiful in its own right, […]
Clean Breaks
“He’s lucky, it was a clean break.” People say this sometimes when a leg or arm or ankle is broken. I teach high school and I am always surprised at how often my students end up injured, often seriously. “It was good that the break was clean.” How can a break be good? I’ve never […]
Dreaming Big
I do my best dreaming in the shower. Not fairies and Ryan Gosling kind of dreaming, but world-changing and life-exploding dreaming. I started dreaming those kinds of dreams about two years ago, dreams that keep building on one another and making me ask, “Really, God, REALLY?” {Sitting here now I can almost hear Him […]
Welcome to The Mudroom
Back in the day, I used to write for Cornerstone magazine. The staff was a community inside of a community: artists, proofreaders, marketing, writers, mailroom. It was frantic and insane and glorious. I miss that sense of secrecy, the privilege of beholding a work of art before anyone else does, the camaraderie of common deadlines and […]
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