I’m reinventing Thanksgiving, which is not easy to do. Especially since this will be our 40th straight year to host Thanksgiving for family and friends. Ours is a family that loves tradition, and so across those forty years, we have kept things the same; the same beloved recipes for cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin pie;…
The sanctuary was silent. The doors shuttered since March, so I have not been inside our church since. Because of the pandemic, we are worshiping online or outside in an effort to protect each other as well as our community. Still, I miss it so. I miss the fellowship of prayer, I miss the peaceful…
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, I sat alone in a Yosemite forest and wept. My husband and I had been hiking to a major grove of sequoias and were not more than a mile away, when I could go no farther. With my legs like lead and my heart racing, I…
It’s been a long time since I have seen the fireflies in such profusion blinking their love light into the gloaming, but perhaps, I was just not looking. On this warm damp night, I have wandered out to our back yard to check on the status of the moon. Before I can look up, however,…
It’s the hugs I miss most. Joyous bear hug greetings, gentle squeezes of love, and lingering arm-wrapped farewells. All have disappeared like a loose kite on the breeze since the coronavirus took over in mid-March. And if you’re a hugger, like I am, then you feel the loss of those sweet embraces from family and…
“Come look!” announced my husband on an early spring morning over a month ago. “I have a surprise!” I followed him out to the backyard, and there rising up out of the cold brown earth, were a myriad of green stems with sheathed yellow flowers just beginning to make themselves known. “Two hundred daffodils!” my…
The cardinal comes at dawn. His spiky silhouette backlit against a copper sky, the bare branches of our backyard woods his amphitheatre. He is the first one to sing, heralding the coming of a new day. The moon is still up too, hanging opposite the sunrise, its silver essence shimmering in a sea of pale…
The spellers were nervous. And who could blame them? Approximately two dozen 4th and 5th graders lined up on a stage with a gymnasium filled with their peers, parents, and grandparents sitting behind them. In an age of spell check and auto correct, it’s a wonder anyone can spell any more. And yet these 4th and 5th graders could and did, beating out the rest of their peers to get to this competition. Before the spelling bee began,…