In the “good old days” it came as an exciting package in the mail. Now it is just one more email, once again one I was on the verge of deleting because it came from someone I don’t know. It was the title that caught my eye. I had just finished with a Zoom committee…

It feels like a new era has begun. After seemingly endless months of masks and staying at home, life is beginning to open up again. In April we drove to Brooklyn to return a granddaughter who had spent five weeks with us in order to participate in EMU’s production of Shrek, A Musical. It was…

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an…

I wrote this essay several years ago when we were still living in Northern Virginia, but it feels relevant for these days of COVID, racial violence, and gun killings. I often find it hard to fit all of life together. Today I felt discombobulated. I missed turning on Godwin Drive to get to my writing…

Friends often ask, “How long have you been working on your book?” I never know what to say—what constitutes working on it? Sitting down and titling a blank page Chapter 1? Reading old letters and journals? Writing individual essays? Telling stories to grandchildren of when I was little? Attending writing workshops and reading books about…

I’ve been rather quiet for a while. Let me explain why. Of course, there was Christmas. We did only a bit of decorating, but not as much as usual. I cooked a few foods traditional to our household, and baked some cookies for giving away, but not as much as usual. We didn’t attend any…

I’ve been thinking about Advent and the ways God breaks into our lives, usually at times and in places we least expect it. Sometimes we don’t recognize what happened until later. All this reminded me of an experience in my past, a gift of grace in a difficult time. * * * Wayne, Jeremy, and…

Life feels full of questions right now, with answers and certainty sadly missing. That is why it was appealing to put to rights a world I can control—Doll House Land where house cleaning and reorganizing was due. For the past year the doll house has stood uncovered in the middle of the basement room. It…

I am fast losing those in the generation above me. My father and mother have been gone for years, followed by many of their siblings and cousins. While I have not lost any of my uncles or aunts to the pandemic, they are continuing to slip away, their passing made more poignant because I can’t…

The lights dimmed. Chatter subsided. Cate took her place on the stool in the center of the small stage, tossed her hair out of her face, played a few warming-up chords on her guitar, and then paused. “I want you all to imagine there is a klezmer band here tonight—imagine a rollicking clarinet and an…