“I’m not upset at you,” Boyfriend says. He’s lying down for a nap, newly discharged from the hospital. “I’m almost never upset at you.”  ...

The Christmas tree in my mom’s house is covered in the “old ornaments” right now.   This past weekend, barely in time for the holiday,...

I often joke about how I feel old. My knees and back frequently remind me that I am no longer in my twenties. Staying up late will be...

I learned the meaning of the word “community” at an early age, but it has changed for me through the years.   As a kid, community meant...

My neighbor across the street tells me he has asthma, as he pauses from mowing his lawn with a push-mower. It’s early April, but the...

It’s an unseemly warm Ash Wednesday today. Bulb flowers are threatening to bloom before March, with stems and leaves pressing up through...

I recall hoping for snow days as a child with fingers crossed. Wishing on the stars that sparkled clearer and sharper in the cold of...

The weather is unseasonable right now. A warm snap makes the air balmy, the breeze still scented with the crispness of fall leaves....

Hope wakes me every morning and gets me out of bed—firm and insistent as that sunshine. And there’s a lot of sun in my life. Yesterday...

Hospital waiting rooms feel like thinly-veiled restlessness. To know them is to resent them—the breath of anxious love hangs in the air...

Today is my sister’s birthday. She would be thirty-nine today, if she hadn’t left this world as teenager who still watched Disney movies...

I got my haircut today at my barbershop. I sat in the chair a regular, knowing which barber coaches pee-wee league football and who likes...

Yesterday I returned from a professional conference where I was one of a few dozen people in my field working in my area, at my level, in...

Several inches of snow came overnight. It’s now above freezing. This morning, I listen as it melts off of our pines and sugar maple and...

There was frost on my windshield this morning when I left my house for church. It was not the hard and wicked frost of winter. It was...

My great-grandmother, Blanche, made a dessert salad for church picnics and holidays that was canned fruit, whipped cream, and love. She...

My life has been made of speculative fiction for quite a while. This year has been a pile of good books and bad health. I have enjoyed...

My mother loves to decorate with things she describes as “primitive.” Rough wood. Cast iron. Antique farm equipment gone to rust. All...

My uncle died yesterday of an illness no one bothered to investigate in a nursing home in the middle of nowhere. He had been placed on...

Yesterday was Groundhog Day, and the beginning of February often brings fearful storms to the places where the prairies kiss the Ozarks....