June 12, 2025 Birthday Cake Start with a clean house.OK, well, if not clean exactly,Your messes discreetly set aside.Company ready. Flour the floor,Inadvertently, as youFlour the cake pans,7 of them,To make, as requestedChocolate and strawberry. Old champagne in the fridge,Was it leftover from Easter?Flat for weeks,Like so many things left around the housePast their prime,You failed to discard it...
June 6, 2025 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 protests that inevitably erupted when asked to do something...
June 3, 2025 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, and in full disclosure, a show which I’m enjoying again years later, watching through a second...
May 29, 2025 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 ceremony and enthusiasm, ushered to the small elevated platform in the school gym. Guiding...
“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 have also asked this question. Maybe, like my friend...
May 7, 2025 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 several stories down from the second floor of my house, where I perch. The sky is often inky gray when I first come, early, to...
April 30, 2025 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 backdrop of our wedding colors, the perfect foil for the swoonworthy fluffy pale pink Sarah Bernhardt...
April 28, 2025 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 no way I could run to hundred miles. But in the race I was meant to take part in...
April 10, 2025 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 the beach, I’d skip sandcastles and hole up with a laptop overlooking the ocean, pecking out paragraphs. I’ve started...
“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. A sun-kissed early spring evening, not-cold for the first time in memory, spring bulbs emerging in force. I could get more...