It’s that time of year again: May Madness. Finals, graduations, recitals, Mother’s Day, and we have a birthday (7th) and wedding anniversary (16th) in our family to round it all out. Needless to say, I’m hiding in my bedroom with books of poetry more than usual. Still, it’s amazing to watch our kids blossom. They’re […]

I heard one of the best writing tips of my life this week listening to an old episode of On Being. Naiomi Shihab Nye suggests to try writing just three sentences a day. That’s it. Three sentences. What happened today, what you see out the window, what you’re worried about. Whatever. I just imagine if […]

I just loved this thread from Summer Kinard recently, about how what our world needs right now are “sea-level” saints. She says it much better than I ever could, but the idea is that as great as “up on the mountain” saints are, they’re not the ones physically in the trenches with our broken world. […]

Now that Lent is over and the Easter season is in full swing, I thought it would be a good time (!) to share two Lenten reflection books that I really enjoyed this year. Probably I should save this post for right around the beginning of February next year…but there is little chance I’ll remember […]

This NPR story has been on my mind this week: Known For Its Floods, Louisiana Is Running Dangerously Short Of Groundwater Louisiana has a lot of problems – rampant industrial pollution, abysmal rates of poverty and chronic health problems, bottom-of-the barrel education, to name a few – but I, like many others, didn’t think that […]

I set myself a writing goal for Lent: one poem a day, related in some way to the daily readings. I knew it would be a challenge, but I sit down to write almost every day anyway, so it should have been just the first part of my usual writing time, repurposed. I did not […]

So…we painted a piano green. In our defense, the sound board is warped, and it won’t hold a tune anymore. But we didn’t want to put it on the curb…so we’re turning it into a planter. (Can’t you just imagine some purple basil in there?) I thought I was painting it a nice deep sage […]

No deep thoughts this week, so here’s the garden update: The scraggly bush-tree that was a stump when we moved in 2 1/2 years ago has shown its true colors. It is most definitely a Japanese magnolia, which I have wanted in my yard since I first met one almost 20 years ago at Tulane. […]

I was digging through old unpublished posts, in case there was something I had forgotten to finish up, and found this little jewel from 2018. If I were just disciplined enough to keep track of all the hilarious things my kids say when they’re “playing pretend!” I have no idea what the game was, but […]

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