plan

  • Hope

    Hope

    On December 31, 2019, I had a lot of hopes.  At our sweet friends’ New Year’s Eve party, I shakily wrote my resolution on a thin piece of cardboard: ‘attend my first writer’s conference’ and then I paused and added something like, ‘pursue publishing’.  In the weeks that followed, I applied for and received a…

  • Rain

    Rain

    I had a great plan to celebrate my husband’s fiftieth birthday. He’s an outdoors kind of guy, and I love a metaphor, so the plan came together quickly. Go for a hike symbolic of life-so-far with the family in a nearby park, have friends surprise him on the path at various points, finish the day…

  • Page

    When I was a child, my faith life was whatever my parents taught me. There was a loving God, and rules, and if you did the right thing, and helped your neighbor, all would be well. If my early-adult life was a house, I would have painted one room ‘religion’, another ‘family’, another ‘work’, another…

  • Possible

    I dropped my kid off in the dark to catch the bus that will take her and her classmates to Washington DC. On the way home, the sky lightened, and it was the particular kind of spring light that makes everything look impermanent. Houses and buildings took on a cardboard quality, like they were a…

  • Door

    I am always sending things out: ideas, emotions, hope, and it sometimes seems that I am sending these things out into a shapeless void. I place pieces of my heart in sealed envelopes, put them in my outgoing mail, and never hear anything ever again. This is a false view, of course, and self-centered and…