Young hands celebrate September with posies of pink erasers budding on the end of slim yellow stems and hours dressed smartly in routines. It’s the rite of back-to-school days:  the folding open of fresh notebooks, the lacing up of maiden shoes, the packing of new lunch bags.

It’s the ceremony of new school days.

We do that… Read More

I have flailed and I have failed. Too many days I have meted out grating cacophony, loose and disordered.

There’s a time to stir porridge, but someone howls, “I can’t find socks!” and I’m digging about for two purple ones the same size, preferably holeless, to soothe teary angst, while oatmeal burns black.

There’s a time to collect curious ones to read a stack of nourishing words, and the washing machine sirens its last spin and I’m stringing up a pinned necklace of wet towels and children and reading time… Read More

I remember that place, that deciding place of how to educate our children. I remember its weight.

I recall standing there with pudgy hands wrapped around my leg, peering down that road diverged in the yellow wood. Unsure of the next step, the faint whisper from a faint heart came, “Which road for us, Lord?”

We stayed there for awhile waiting, asking, listening. And we found that to hear His voice on how to wisely educate children was best heard on one’s knees. He will speak: Keep your nose in the Book.… Read More

“Gather and knot.” That’s all I ask them.

It’s all anyone will ever ask of them, really.

So they try.

First, young eyes and minds gather. Stretching fingers of tree limbs catch sky, saturated in blues. Green’s but a fleeting whisper through the woods, the sky all loud and showing through.  I watch them see.

Having gathered, then they knot the strands, slow and tentative.

“The wood’s green clouds drift in on spring.” Our just-teen says the words, but his eyes keep searching the landscape, looking for more idea threads.

“I think… Read More

It is an entirely unremarkable moment, one I repeat every day at noon, all throughout the fall and winter. I am cutting squash, chopping, scooping, dicing. But today, as I scoop out the tangly pulp, seeds scattering and falling on the countertop, I scoop deep into me and feel the wrapped tendrils of who I am.

I am startled. Scraping out that pulp, I face my own insides. I am taken aback at what twists and knots within me. I test again. Yes. Raw, messy fear. Can it be that is… Read More

Mother ducks pick feathers from their chests to line their nests

Houses may be bought, built, or borrowed. But homes can only be made, and that with ourselves. Or so the ducks told me.

They told me without a sound, just simply as they preened and nestled, oil on canvas. The children press in close too, for a better look at Alexander Max Koester’s painting Ducks, and I read aloud the caption below

Socks hurl across the kitchen, a hail of chaos splintering morning routine and order. Thunked in the back of head, I spin from sink and into the face of a grinning twelve-year-old. I am set to return with volley of words about maturity and setting an example and simply folding laundry instead of rocking the boat. His younger brothers are already whipping back knitted wools with mismatched sweatsocks. And then one of the statutes of the Geneva Convention of Motherhood flashes across my interior screen: Ignore negative attention-seeking behavior so as not affirm it. I can still remember… Read More

Love is patient.

Is there a reason why patience is the first qualifier in the biblical “love chapter” describing the characteristics of love? I wonder. Only because I am a mother who is long on love and, too often, short on patience. I mean, why not first, “Love is gentle,” or “Love is tender?” Or, better yet (to my feeble mind), “Love is a flash of divine revelation, a supernatural infusing of the spirit of God.” It is all that, yes. But first, of utmost importance, (I’ll trust the order of the… Read More

The New Year wears hope like a fragrance. The scent, tender, young, sweet, carries in on the wind, and carries me.

So I watch it come, this first day of the first month of a brand new year, breaking over the horizon, breaking up through our jaded hopelessness. Just on the rim of our clean farm fields of white, a new time, fresh hope, dawns.  Do these fields of unspoiled winter await new tracks, like an unfurled year awaiting new ways of being? Pristine and blue in morning light, this… Read More