Entrance to Maple Hill Cemetery on Memorial Day Today we remember those who serve(d) and sacrifice(d). My father tried to get into every branch of service during WWII, but was unable to because of his congenital nystagmus. (If he had been, would he have married my mother? Would there have been a me?) He was accepted […]
When You Need to Disengage to Redirect
“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” ~Anatole France Home. That’s the word I chose to guide my year in 2015. “It might mean fewer words see the light this […]
Simple Touches of Hospitality
Several weeks ago, our Sunday School class held a Chili Cook-Off. I brought bowls of shredded cheese and sour cream to help calm anticipated spicy fires of the tongue. I also won second place with my vegetarian chili, substituting ginger ale for the beer. The recipe is in GraceTable’s free Fall-Winter Volume I cookbook […]
How To Share Your Faith At Home
It’s harder to be a light within these walls where my real is often not so happy than it is to point people to Jesus in a place of “real” work.
A Harp Journey – Coming Home
In fall of 2011, an aggressive form of brain cancer attacked my mother. When I moved into the hospice home with her, I bagged my harp up and brought it along. I plunked out “Amazing Grace,” and together we just “noodled” around with it. Another musically-inclined patient down the hall was giddy over this […]
The Ache of Answered Prayer
Or is there still some hidden delight? A larger plan that’s not yet come together? Because true joy is not temporal. And my heart aches with love for the truth of that.
Of Green Mohair and Breakdowns
Charlene gave it to him. The same Charlene who scrawled across two pages in his high school yearbook. I tease him and call her “If-Our-Love-Is-True-Charlene.” He laughs and crosses his arms and scratches them like he does when he gets embarrassed. But he still wears it in spite of the holes that have unraveled. He’s practical like […]
Still Saturday Going Still – Or Not
I read the MRI report, so I know what he’ll say. No torn meniscus. ACL graft is intact. (Actually, he says he’s surprised at how great it looks after 15 years–back when he told me I, a 52-year-old woman, had the knees of a 20-year-old.) Extensive areas of cartilage loss. Extensive degenerative change. In other […]
Rockabye Baby
My two-year-old daughter was missing. I’d been sitting in a lawn chair under the Georgia pines that summer morning while I watched her play in the driveway and must have dozed off again. I ran around the yard and through the house and back outside calling for her—not too loud because I didn’t want to […]
Science and Culture Museum at MSU
Across the way, in the Main Gallery, hang several quilts from Southwest China. Because I used to quilt, I’m particularly enamored with how these colorful pieced and appliqued patterns help piece together the cultural heritage of the Chinese people, and intrigued at the way the threads of the past can patch holes in the present. […]
