Books I’m Sharing This Summer
I love sharing what I love. The books below are ones I’ve enjoyed, mostly recently, then enjoyed all over again by gifting, or re-gifting, to a specific person I think will enjoy them too. So much book enjoyment!
Jumping in the Swimming Hole (Summer Recap –> Back to the Ordinary)
My new-found summer hobby as a 40-something is an immense achievement. Not polar plunge, exactly, though reading Katherine May’s chapter on it in Wintering made me want—or at least imagine wanting—to try. But cold water swimming, again and again. I have come to know, through lived experience, that the pain of being cold fades, and the vitality, sometimes verging on ecstasy, I receive in exchange for being willing to be cold is better than not being cold.
Minnesota Woman Finally Finishes Last Journal
St. Cloud resident Barb Peterson announced yesterday that after sixty-two years of faithful journaling, she has finally used her last journal.
Goodbye, Fatty
The Christian scriptures do not have a clear teaching on the presence of our beloved animals in heaven, but they do describe it as a time when every tear is wiped from our eyes. I am not the first to wonder if for this to happen, the pets we love here must indeed make their way to us there in some form.
They Won’t KNOW!
“I just have to get my smoothie cup, I can bring it with me.” I nod to the opaque pink Owala tumbler on the counter. This last sentence ripples with electricity through my smallest daughter, sending her into a concerned high alert. “Smoothie!!??” she asks, incredulous. “But what if they won’t know what’s in your cup?”
A Writer’s Life
What luck! A child awakes in the night to vomit and you get to hold back her hair and wipe her mouth and enfold her in your arms and whisper to her that you are there for her. She nestles in close, comforted by your very presence. This is truly the essence of life, and you are living it right now. It will also make a great story when you sit down to write about it.
Where is the life . . .
All that immense productivity cost me the ability to be curious, reflective, creative. I don’t want to argue that this is valuable—I’m taking for granted here that it is. I’m just observing that productivity came at its cost. Where is the life we have lost in living, as T.S. Eliot asked; where is the beauty and curiosity and creativity we crowd out with our productivity, I add.
Look at the Birds
What am I hoping to see as I look at him? That he does not sow or reap or store away in barns and yet his breakfast awaits? But I’m less moved by his food than by his existence. Birds: what a crazy invention of an animal, like a child’s reckless concoction—look ma, it flies!
Calling vs Assignment
What I didn’t understand then was that the work was a calling for a lifetime—but at that organization simply for that season. That organization was a temporary assignment.
Mid 70s, Early March
First flush of warmth since that cold stretch, a month running it was, bitter, too cold to dissipate the ice encasing cars and sidewalks. We worked so hard to clear a path with pickaxes, not shovels. One month later, no transition time, no chance to wear cardigans, we go straight to short sleeve tees as summer descends, briefly parachuting in.
We Can, We Can, We Can
The woman walking the other direction gives a bare hint of a smile, a glint of half-hidden joy as she passes my daughter running down the sidewalk, determined little limbs swinging merrily, bike helmet still on. The woman is still smiling as she passes me a moment later, carrying the scooter my daughter abandoned. She meets my eyes, a flash of amusement in hers, a graceful half nod, keeps walking, wordless.
Native Perennials
Volunteering with the local elementary school, a fellow mom recounts her history in our neighborhood. “We just closed on a house in the neighborhood, and this is our first year at the school. But I’ve been living here since my 20s,” she confides, “I used to walk around here with my boyfriend at the time, looking at all the parents with strollers and dogs, thinking how that was everything I wanted, the house, the kids, the dog. . .”
I’m a Sports Writer Now!
I went to sleep the Sunday after the Seahawks beat the Rams, winning a chance to redo / undo the 2015 Super Bowl loss to the Patriots, buzzing with this essay idea. Football was the white noise of my childhood, a place that felt safe. I thought about watching with my dad when I was ill. I remembered a special game we watched together weeks before he died. And I knew I wanted to do the work to get this into the world before the big game.
Back on the Horse
Remember that that feeling of the first Monday back at work after the holidays? Did you drag your feet, struggling to get back on the well-trained horse of ruthless productivity? I must have heard the phrase “I’m having a hard time getting going” a dozen times. (Or perhaps the predictable, or at least...
2025 Reading Recommendations
For some reason, my reading pace slowed as I exited sabbatical and simultaneously launched several ventures over the past year . . . Much of what I’ve managed to read has been for the spiritual direction training program I’ll graduate from this April, after two and a half years. Even when not...
With My Name On It
An incredibly convoluted announcement of changes coming next year, as only an Enneagram 4 could write. XOXO – Jeannie Rose “Why don’t you have a website using your name?” It was the third or fourth time someone had suggested it recently, as I’ve been seeking advice and on how to build the...
Fasting For Myself
Isaiah 58 Below is my contribution to our church’s 2025 Advent devotional, written for today, December 15, on today’s Old Testament reading. Sunday after church, and all my kids want is a screen. “No screens on Sundays” doesn’t compute as a way to rest—what is rest but zoning out, no one bugging you?...
Prayer All Morning Long
Prayer is my mind racing to try and solve the various work on my plate: write the stubborn paragraph, cook the meal I’m responsible for next Monday, hash out an agenda. But the paragraph is comprised of thin wisps of words which float away as soon as I’ve thought them, however brilliant...
I’m Cool Right Now
We got a text from our *child’s school alerting us in advance that our child had not been chosen for something for which they’d put a metaphorical hat in the ring. “We’ll announce it tomorrow, and we’re letting you know so you can prepare your child as you think best.” “How should...
What AI Can’t Do
A few weeks ago, my schedule created an accidental interesting mashup of ideas: the Center for Christianity and Public Life conference (which I wrote about here), overlapped briefly with a trauma-informed care course I’m taking. To join a live small group conversation with the course trainer, renowned psychologist Dr. Dan Allender, I...
Ordinary Times World Premier!
One week ago at this time, I was just getting my tired kids to bed, too late, full on afterglow from a delicious evening of new friends, brave stories, and sumptuous cheese boards. I won’t say the next day was pretty, with overtired little bodies struggling through daylight savings. But any storm...
Recovery Week
One of the first things I do each morning, before slinking quietly out of the dark room to avoid waking my still sleeping husband, is open the drawer under my bed and remove the workout clothes on top of the pile. Exercise has long been a part of my routine, a thing...
CCPL Summit Recap
Have you ever seen one of those ads that starts off with a supposed brand confession and apology? “We admit it, we were wrong when we said we were one of the best skin care lines. We’re so sorry to everyone who purchased our products.” The big reveal is utterly predictable, even...
Celebrating Stories of Ordinary Saints in Your Life
Dahlias & Arugula
I initially wrote this as one long stream of consciousness paragraph, which, upon reflection, felt like a mean-spirited way to convey the experience, though perhaps more artistically accurate. I’m not famous enough to expect people to suffer through such a confounding form, so I decided to revisit the original text with paragraph...
Nothing In My Hands I Bring
Nothing in my hands I bring. It’s a line from an old hymn, and a refrain that periodically echoes through my imagination. Any Christian could tell you it describes a core element of our theology, that salvation is not earned, but is a grace freely given. But true as this may be as a matter...
Where Is This Vitriolic Radical Leftist Hate?
“I didn’t want Charlie Kirk to die, I wanted him to be different,” my friend Jonathan wrote in a recent substack. Jonathan is a black man, the kind of person Kirk might have had in mind when he said “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun...
DIY Ordinary Time Workshop
Use this as a self-guided meditation to practice finding what matters most in the every day. Gather: Introduction: Humanity has long held up the good the true and the beautiful as core virtues. For me, these all stem from God, because this is who God is. God, and thus these qualities of God, pervade the...
Hot, Potato Summer
In a world where every summer must be christened a new flavor of ___ girl summer, mine for the past few years have increasingly been singing the same melody: one long, hot, potato summer. Sitting down with my breakfast at the appointed time on the first day of school, kids safely dispatched,...
Feedback is a Gift (Even If It’s Wrong)
Honestly, Summer Break
*Can I be honest with you? *said the chronic oversharer . . . I write about finding what matters most in the ordinary. But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that isn’t because that’s the place I naturally inhabit. I feel a bit sheepish saying it out loud, but I have...
Birthday Cake
Birthday Cake To the members of the Mid-Week Retreat Core Group, who have become family and love our kids well. XOXO
We Can Learn How to Do Hard Things
I don’t recall exactly the circumstances in which I began telling my son: “We can learn how to do hard things!” It became a mantra during Covid, when I was, unwillingly, his sub Pre-K teacher when the world went virtual overnight. We—mostly I—would say it repeatedly, almost chanting, to push back the...
Living Dangerously
There’s a scene in Gossip Girl, a show I greatly enjoyed while living in New York City during and after law school as a mental break from all that law—and which made me, in its portrayal of the emotional and relational challenges of my city’s super wealthy, grateful for my ordinary life,...
Dancing Off Stage
Haven does not want to be on a stage. It is clear on those accidental occasions when she is put on one anyway, when, for example, the current of the school calendar winds its way through events like ‘spring concert,’ and ‘poetry festival.’ With a dozen other four-year-olds, she is, with great...
The Blackberry Bush
“How can you tell a story about plants or chores that would be very interesting?” A friend offered this honest response to my invitations to join the upcoming experiential storytelling workshops. “Maybe it takes someone who’s good at creative writing,” he continued, with an unspoken note of regret: And I’m not that someone. Perhaps you...
Nothing Gold Can Stay
From the chair where I sit most mornings to pray and write, I can see out a window to an expanse of sky draped lavishly over a spread of trees, a break in the city-scape afforded by a sliver of a national park that follows a through road in a stream valley...
One Peony
The peony plant is in its third year. By now it should be developing deep roots, eyes forming along the original tuber as it spreads underground to form multiple stalks, shooting up into an abundance of blooms. This plant is a dark red color I adore, the deep maroon that formed the...
The (Relay) Race Marked Out For Us
I was supposed to run a Ragnar Relay this past weekend, something I’ve always wanted to do. These are the long-distance races that often cover enough ground could see the distance on a globe, from a coastal range peak to the ocean, for example. Two hundred+ miles. Absent divine intervention, there is...
What I Am Afraid Of
All my life I’ve wanted to publish books. When I went on a mission trip to Haiti as a youth, I filled a small spiral notebook with a line by line of the entire experience, the intended first draft of the book I planned to publish about it. On family trips to...
Whatever Is Good
“I meditate on what is great” – the opening lines of a song I’ve been taken by the past few weeks. The end of a long work day, a frantic push to get something done on an impossibly tight timeline, the baton momentarily passed out of my hand. My son, the only child at home....
Giving God My To Do List
I arrive at my four-day spiritual director training and retreat, intended as an interlude of learning and refreshment, with a backpack of things to get done. Stack of books I want to read, both ones I haven’t finished from the most recent assigned readings and—why not?—one more for personal growth—my fun reading....
My Totally Unofficial 2024 Sabbatical Reading Recommendations
One of my stated goals of the sabbatical I took between April-December 2024 was spend more time reading for the joy of it. Do you love to read? I do, in theory. But in ordinary life, it seems I love less the reading, and more self-improvement. I’m mildly embarrassed at the designation...
New York City Subway
Four women on the subway platform, chatting animatedly, discussing the evening’s plan—a show and meeting someone later if I’m overhearing correctly. Which is the stop to get off at, and is that other co-worker going to be joining? one of them asks, I think wistfully, with the standard New York night out...
A Leader’s Guide to Boundaries
What do you do with Despair?
I don’t know about you or your community, but my community has been shaken over the past few weeks. Not in order of importance, and not exhaustive: I may not have mentioned what is most distressing you—the list of ways the world is broken is long and varied. But whatever it is,...
The Prize Elephant
On any given day, our kids’ room is littered with dirty clothes. Their trail of discarded attire reveals distracted wandering over the course of the seemingly simple act of getting dressed: pants inside out on the carpet, underwear tossed in a corner, dress nestled in next to a pillow on the bed....
I’m Sorry This is Late
I’m sorry this is late. It is Thanksgiving. Recovering from the Thanksgiving holiday. Preparing for Christmas. Christmas. Recovering from Christmas. New Year. Kids at home for days etc. etc. Back to school chaos. Snow days. Sick days. Unfortunately, I suspect we may all be running out of excuses reasons for whatever it...
Last Day of Christmas Beans
Among the things we are grateful for this past year, my husband added this: those times when at least one child eats my cooking. Pleasing a single child is not so hard. Our eight year old son meets the dinner table with surprising flexibility. I ask which cross-section of the options I...
Death before Birth
This is the season where Christians worldwide commemorate a birth. But before the birth comes the waiting, the in-between season of Advent, a space for holding contradictions. Christ is coming, Christ has come. I love the contradictions. They don’t force a choice, don’t foreclose possibility. Is the world desperately broken or is...
A Cautionary Tale
Empty. Full. Overflowing. The images these words convey are versatile and shifting. My kids head out the door to school and a prayer for the road calls on the love of God to so fill them that it spills out of their backpacks and touches everyone around them. The overflow of abundance, leading to generosity....
Wild & Precious
Did you have a time when you asked what you would do with your life? Did you find an answer, then stop asking? I thought, when I was younger, that’s how it worked. People got jobs and that settled it. Fireman. Teacher. Pilot. As a college student, back when it wasn’t weird to be unsettled,...
Cooking My Feelings
I pull nearly everything from the crisper out onto the counter, the staples you can munch mindlessly, raw, that I keep on hand for my best kid-hack, the ‘rainbow platter.’ The wilting scallions. The zucchini starting to go off. To this I add the pittance of vegetables I have grown and harvested...
The Morning After
It’s a beautiful day in DC, sunbeams filtering through starbursts of leaves against clear blue sky; my fall flowers glimmer in the front yard, birds chirp cheerfully in the trees. It’s all so normal and lovely—a stark contrast from the funereal mood of the city. A friend whose husband is traveling, like...
The Glowing Red Door
I return home after ten days away and without any effort whatsoever notice what’s wrong. The neon pink mums I labored to plant before I left didn’t get watered, and they’re shriveled now. Squirrels have dug in the pots, seeking homes for buried treasure and leaving a trail of dirt in their...
Before We Are Brave
“I don’t think she likes me anymore,” my daughter confided after school, talking of her new best friend—the one she’d made over the summer, just after her previous best friend moved across the country. Tears glistened in her eyes, lips quivering, brows tilted inward and down. Her normally bright face looks up...
Stay Put
[Fortitude as an essential virtue which allows the ‘house’ of our soul to be kept in order for the presence of God; “s]uch fortitude is not the virtue of the dashing soldier. It means rather the virtue of the keeper of the fortress; the inconspicuous heroism that sits tight. And in the life of the...
Volunteers
I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the past month, in my quest to evolve from “person who unleashes a steady stream of words on my laptop” to “writer people actually read.” (The fact that I’ve created these categories betrays my anxiety about being a pretender, as though I don’t count...
Interruptions
A rainbow of living interruptions seen on a walk in the woods The polka dot white freckles on the tan hide of a young deer, cautiously tearing at leaves as it makes eye contact with me, fifteen feet away on the trail, it’s mother a few feet to the left. Would I...
Jesus Snorts
As I’ve simultaneously embarked on my sabbatical, which ought to make me rested, and my training to be a spiritual director, which ought to make me good, I’ve stumbled into an uncomfortable reality: I am often cranky. Angry, even. Without dwelling too long upon the actual anger and what to make of...
The Dogs of Envy
It’s the same joke every time: “to be alone in nature, we need all this?” This, followed by a sweeping gesture at the mounting stack of bags of equipment and bins of gear we assemble for our few days in the woods. In the bags and bins, a portable bedroom, kitchen, furniture,...
Some Plump Fruit, Fall
Not every beautiful thingmust be converted to use,to poetry, or post,to morality tale, or medicine.Some swaying, sunlit leaves can simply glimmer,Some sunsets are merely to behold,Some plump fruit, fall.
(Missing) The Real El Salvador
October 2003 I had forgotten my camera that day. I was disappointed I could not capture the beauty of the lake we visited, but, and it was probably a suggestion from someone in the group less brooding and with fewer visions of grandeur, the idea was raised to photograph it in my mind. To use...
I Shall Not Want
“I shall not want” the chorus echoes, a refrain I hold like a worn lovey. It is hard explaining this to my children, who cannot fathom a world without the primal fire of wanting, or why that would be a good thing. “Think about everything you want, the things you need, the...
Poetry Playing the Long Game
We scoot down the neighborhood streets on our annual pilgrimage to the massive cherry tree from which are, generously, strung three swings. Opposite, someone has thoughtfully placed a bench for parents to sit and enjoy the scene. Every April these blossoms explode into magnificent pink pom poms, lush, fragile, effervescent. They are...
Allium Ash Bread
I habitually ask for bread when we eat out, which isn’t often, not because I want the bread as much as I do the sauce. It is not generally considered restaurant manners in our culture, although I’ve certainly done it, to full on lick a plate prior to it being cleared, but...
Baked with Love
I had an order to start fulfilling the same night I had to take my son to urgent care with a severe case of please don’t let it be pinkeye, a play for the preventative doctor’s note a parent seeks to keep their kid in school rather than being sent home mid-day...
Brioche – Part III
Brioche is a physically and emotionally demanding project, a labor of love. I bequeath it upon my loved ones on special occasions, a long holiday weekend or a beloved teacher’s birthday. It’s what you do when you want to wow someone. I once blew my daughter’s friends’ minds when, on my turn...
Brioche – Part I
In my culture, you got married after college, and then you got a KitchenAid, the holy grail of kitchen implements reserved for those elevated to the status of wife. I did not follow this plan. I remember declaring defiantly that when I graduated from law school, I would buck the system and...
Brioche – Part II
The bowl of my 2006 KitchenAid mixer is filled with flour, milk, sugar, levain. I turn the mix speed to “stir,” the lowest it can go, and it spurts to life. But brioche dough needs more than “stir” to past the windowpane test. When the mix speed passes 2, the machine begins...
Pretty Good Bread – Stories
How many times have you searched for a recipe online, found some promising concept on a food blog, then been forced to scroll past paragraphs of inane commentary about the writer’s feelings about the weather and her (it’s always a her) kids’ crazy fall schedule and her trip to Florida? I’m putting fellow women in...
All The Feels Cake
When someone is hurting, or celebrating, or the source of help or hope in your life, don’t you feel the urge to do something about it? Words like “I’m sorry,” “hooray,” or “thanks a ton” float up naturally like bubbles, but as quickly can burst with hollowness, as you push up against...
Clementine Cake
A friend offered to bring cake to our weekly small group meeting, but held off when she heard I was planning to bake a cake. “My dessert can wait til next week. I can’t say no to a Jeannie Rose cake!” I replied, “It’s mostly an excuse to use up some clementines...
Soda Bread
For years I said I was a cook, not a baker. I don’t do well with precision but I’m great with improvising. There you go. When did this change? I attribute it, at least the sourdough part, to Michael Pollan’s chapter on bread in Cooked, whose rapturous account of the glorious, almost...
Batard, Boule, Miche
You probably know, if you like bread enough to read these, that a boule is a round loaf, and a batard is an oval loaf. You probably also know, but in case you don’t, one step in the bread-making process is called proofing, where the dough rests, ferments and rises, typically in...
Ana-Maria’s Friend’s Extras Banana Bread
Ana-Maria entered the house laden with bananas. At least three bunches, but once you’re at a certain volume of bananas, precision becomes difficult. We stashed them on the toaster oven, which surface they were more than sufficient to cover. Her friend had thought she was ordering six bananas. You can guess what...
‘Love Thy Neighbor,’ Really? Is That All You’ve Got?
Early Reviews Are Promising
For the last few weeks, instead of writing I’ve been attempting to discern sheet quality by enlarging photos online, scrubbing toilets (just one toilet, actually), wiping away dust with endless squirts of Lysol, scouring shades of sky blue paint for the one that looks right in our now-bright basement light. (That quest...
From Dust to Instagram
December 2022 There’s always a lot of dust and contractor trash bags before there’s anything that looks nice on Instagram. As with renovations, as with life. For the longest time, one of the main hindrances to using our basement as a retreat space has been the dilemma of how people would get there. Not as...
Macarons Supersized
I went hunting for ways to use up bananas that didn’t involve bread, and naturally found my way down a rabbit hole of puddings. I’m not southern, but I’ve lived around enough of them in DC to understand the value of a good banana pudding, and to know I wasn’t willing to...
Introducing Rock Creek Sanctuary
September 2022 We are starting the process of converting our basement apartment into a mini retreat space. We deeply value hospitality, and desire to use our home to create welcome and connection. For most of the time we’ve lived in our house, we’ve had people unrelated by blood or covenant living in the home with...
My Own Personal Desert
The Messy Middle
Part One There’s dirt all over the floor. I suppose there must be a tidy way to pot amaryllis bulbs, but it isn’t the method I’m using. A stack of fresh pots, Costco-grade box of foil for wrapping the pots, a bag of potting soil, a Chopstick for poking drainage holes–I’ve pulled...
Go, Tell it on the Mountain
The evangelist appears to me in the form of a 70-something man in bright green bike shorts, pausing along the trail and waving frantically in the direction of where I sit below, by the creek. A woman walking a dog passed by–was she the object of his motioning? No, she continues on...
Paint & Wallpaper
The termite issue is nearly resolved. After spending the last few weeks consulting with engingeers and reviewing bids from contractors and electricians to fix what may or may not be actual structual damage to our house, we’ve landed on a solution. With bids ranging from $3500 to $35,000, it’s a relief to...
A Risk Worth Taking
It’s unfortunately the case that roasting a rotten eggplant does nothing to improve the situation. I love eggplant, enough that I displaced some tomatoes this year to make room to grow it for the first time. I’d call it a success; we harvested a few fruit before leaving for a long summer...
Imperfect Information, Uncertain World, and Termites
The third contractor came today, taking a peek at exposed beams in the unfinished part of our basement to provide an estimate at the cost to remediate the termite damage we inherited. In a hot urban market, waiving inspection is what it takes to have an offer accepted, and we didn’t know...
In Praise of Soccer Dads
I’m the only soccer mom this morning. It’s windy and cold, fields wet with the leftovers of the early stages of Hurricane Ian and threatening more rain at any moment. “Yeah, the dads drew the short end of the stick today!” one of the other parents calls out cheerfully, as I join...
Shopping List
A week ago, it was a theoretical dream. Now, it’s a contract with a guy to widen our garage door and an order for handles for the 3 interior and 2 exterior doors. There’s money on the table. Renovating this space will take time and money. Especially because we want it to...
Back From Vacation Soup
Back From Vacation Soup Remove all passable contents of your fridge and stare at them. Wait for inspiration to strike. Put together whatever works for you. Or, to make what we ate, as described here, do as follows: Ingredients: “Just shy of 1lb” of carrots, peeled and trimmed and cut into large-ish pieces (don’t be...
SO Good, SO Good
In advance of vacation, we can look forward to the time away as a kind of salvation from the normal life that has grown to feel wearisome, like a burden. We’ll leave our boring normal life, and experience a taste of real life, something beautiful and thrilling. We’ll rest, we’ll adventure, we’ll...
In the Top 500
July 2022 This is a sweet season with my five year old son, or as he explains it when introducing himself to church friends coming over for a potluck tonight, “I’ll just say I’m six, because I’m almost six.” He learned to read this year, practically overnight. We were on vacation for the school’s mid-winter...
Get All the Aliens
There’s beautiful silence for a little while. The kids are off somewhere playing contentedly, and in the space this creates, I become absorbed with something of my own. This feels like a down payment on the promise of future free time as we evolve out of this all-consuming stage of three kids...
Nap Day!
Editor’s Note: there’s a backlog of material from earlier in the year I haven’t gotten to finishing up yet, but I’m finally home after a long season of travel, and it felt right to write about what I’ve just been doing. Expect to see more of the early spring make an appearance in the weeks...
Some Part Grace
It’s Saturday, and I’m ready to tend my garden. We’ve been back since Tuesday evening from the third of four spring trips (accidentally running nearly back to back from March to early May, when I’ve been planning to take a very long nap). Trip three was a much planned and eagerly awaited...
Everything is Given You
The turning of the seasons, and in particular, the hidden richness in the fallow winter season, have long been of special interest to me. When I lived in Brooklyn, I loved walking through the Botanic Garden in the dead months, hunting for the smallest signs of transformation. A bud months away from blossoms just starting...
Not Yet Born
Basking underneath bare trees,Face kissed by the barest breeze,Gentle sunshine now descending:Winter isn’t never-ending.The leaves have not yet filled the sky,Not yet born, already die.I lay upon the almost greenAnd wait in spring’s sweet in-between. Written at Corhaven, Virginia. What if waiting wasn’t something to escape, but a season in its own...
Exactly Bird Sized
I hear,from the bench where I sit in the woods,six or seven distinct voices: High-pitched trills,Consonant thrum,Wandering warbles,Insistent monosyllabic bursts. The knock of a woodpecker against the tree opposite me. Each bird speaks its own language,sounds exactly like what it is,no shame in a higher pitchor shorter song. Each bird, exactly that bird’s voice;Each bird,...
The Only Shining Thing
The grip of cold is past,But not its gifts:The trees are sticks,The yard, still bare.Tufts of withered grass,Papery leaves, wind scattered,Whitewashed reeds,Seed pods: velvet husks, lone dried bean,Its time to sprout long past.The garden, gone.Beyond the fence, brown brush.Fallen branch.Amidst a mound of dirt Crowned with a sewage lid,A tiny creeping weed,Tendrils...
Epsom Salts and Spaghetti
I can’t stop thinking about two very different kinds of violence. No one can avoid the war in Ukraine; it’s constantly on the news, on my feeds, on our minds. Is this Hitler invading Czechoslovakia, the first shot in a multi-year world war three? Is this going to end with massive nuclear slaughter? You don’t...
Sitting Down in the Chair
1/28/22 Our daily routine doesn’t leave a lot of free time: get the kids ready, school/daycare drop-off, work til a few minutes before pick-up ends, rush to pick-up, playground detour, make dinner, eat dinner, bedtime…and only once all that is done, a few precious obligation-free moments. Often by the time they’re all down, it’s late...
Tour of Roses
Valentine’s Day has come and gone, which means it’s time for my favorite garden chore: pruning roses. I love pruning of all kinds, at least, the non-metaphorical kind. But pruning rose bushes takes me back to my parents’ house, with their immense days of dry summer sun and luxurious swaths of space...
We’ll Always Have Philadelphia
For the last year, our oldest child has been begging for a toy kitchen. Our former neighbors had the ubiquitous IKEA kitchen. Before they moved, our son would plead to go play at their house, even though their kids are younger, so he could access his favorite toy. Now that vaccines have made playdates possible...
A Lot of No
Valentine’s Day: get out the clippers. Washington, DC is graced with a long, soft fall, swerving briefly into winter in January before careening between tempting spring warmth and unnerving cold for a few months, detouring through weeks of rainstorms before nose-diving into swampy summer humidity. So, not necessarily your ideal rose weather....
Birthday, Present
Our baby is 18 months today. She’s our last, and my intention from the moment we decided to try for a third has been to be present. It is so tempting to jump ahead to a future stage that promises fewer demands on my time, a little more freedom, a little less...
A Good Year for the Roses
My garden aspirations far outpace my time, talent and knowledge. My mom has been gardening all my life, tends a gorgeous, enormous yard att my childhood home and to my mind, knows all there is about cultivating beautiful plants. But she’s still taking a master garden class, has books like “Edible Perennials”...
A Luxury Fit for an Omnivore with Free Will
It would have been my dad’s birthday. His nickname was “Burr,” and my family celebrates “Burr Day” every year with something he loved: sweet treats. When he was sick, but could still enjoy them, we would gather the best pastries from three or four specialty bakeries in driving distance and assemble a...
The Birds of the Air
I’ve got lilies and birds in my own front yard.I didn’t put them there,I don’t keep them there.As they are fed and watered through the natural course of things– a nature put in place deliberately, so Jesus told us, by God’s own self,So I do nothing to deserve their beauty, their symbolism–there...
No Carb Santa
Today’s cake begins last fall, with pancakes. More precisely, our five year old son’s desire to share the joy of pancakes with his soccer team. Our pre-soccer Saturday morning tradition, in addition to those glorious morning snuggles, is sourdough discard pancakes, made from the gloppy, sour mash leftover from feeding my sourdough...
Holy Snuggles
When I see the school administrator lighting up my phone Tuesday morning, my heart fills with dread. Since early December, when we left for an early holiday family visit, we’ve had one blissful day of all three kids in childcare. There’s a direct correlation between number of days in a row the...
Snow Angel
I have a gift for you.Here it is, at your disposal:A clear blue sky,Glistening sun, A snowy field,silence.You are invited, if you choose,To lay down. No one is forcing you.You may remain on your feet,Walk those sensible boots back to a warm, dry place.No one will know.Or you may, if you choose,Nestle yourself Into this...
This is Not a Sitcom
The rain feels fat and semi-solid, like snow that has only just melted moments before landfall. We’re holed up indoors, except for one intrepid trip down treacherously compacted-snow-covered back stairs: time to put the Christmas decorations away, now that we’re in Epiphany; time to empty a week and a half of frozen...
Ginger in five variations
My spiritual director tells me she thinks God is inviting me to make a cake. At the end of our session, we sit in silence together. You think that sounds awkward, try sitting in silence with someone over Zoom. But it doesn’t feel awkward to me, it feels like a reprieve: permission...
On Seeing You, We’re Overjoyed
“They went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then...
Not like January, but like snow
I feel a pang of guilt every time I go out to the back yard. There’s always something ugly about it, something ragged, overgrown, in need of tidying. There’s almost always something growing too; the rate at which growing things outpace my available time is part of the problem. There’s always more...