Replenishing My Nice Juice
“HI!” Rowan*, my niece, is two. This is one of her two favorite words. She will be in the middle of dancing about the living room floor, then she’ll suddenly lock eyes with me, stop abruptly, rush over, gaze at me deeply, and say it: “HI!” She’s just made that word completely delicious for me. […]
Inner Piece of My Mind
By the time you get this, it is quite possible that I will have vibrated into a higher plane of existence. I would imagine that my body would still be in this plane, but there’s a chance I will have achieved such a state of enlightenment that you might notice a golden glow around me, […]
Failures Fit for a Castle
“The bear pit was my grandmother’s idea,” Dracula tells me. This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to royalty. Dracula, or at least the man playing Dracula, has what my British friend Becky calls a suspiciously “posh” accent. But, of course, he’s not royalty. He’s the owner of the castle we’re visiting, bereft […]
Friend Medicine
“We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde What was I supposed to say? It was ten years and one month ago. Lisa, a fellow homeschooler, had moved here with her daughter Sarah the summer before. We had slowly become friends when […]
House vs. Barn
A barn can build a house, but a house can’t build a barn. I’ve never forgotten the story I read in first grade. A homesteading family was settling on a new plot of ground. The wife felt they should build a house first, so that she could cook and care for their family. But the […]