When someone says the word ‘box’, what visual stirs up inside you? Do you see a plain old cardboard box? Do you see a pink box with decorations and sparkles? Maybe you see a striped box with glorious gifts inside. The word ‘box’ has all kinds of connotations in my life. Let’s talk about the…

Grandma died on a Friday. Grandpa died just two years earlier on a Friday. The house felt empty, utterly alone. Everything stood still, frozen in time. Her kitchen, that only a week before was a bustle with baking, now stood lifeless. My trip back to Grandma’s kitchen was wrought with emotion. Such sadness plagued me…

“Nana, why is that old lady so grumpy?” Amelia’s granddaughter crawls up onto her lap. They sit together in the lounge of the nursing home. “Well my darling, sometimes we all have bad days, don’t you agree?” “You don’t ever get grumpy, Nana.” “Well now, I wouldn’t say I never get grumpy, but I have…

He’s watching me, waiting for that perfect moment, but those perfect moments don’t exist. I peek at him again from over the top of the funnies section. My mother sits innocently across from me, eating her toast. I know something is on his mind and I wish he would just spill it. My dad clears his…

It wasn’t the sun so much as the humidity that made her uncomfortable. Little droplets of fresh sweat formed above her brow but she didn’t bother to wipe them away.  She sipped her homemade strawberry concoction out of the plastic, neon-orange cup her daughter loved. She had splashed some vodka in the blender just to…

His sad, mocha-brown eyes say it all. Don’t leave me here, Momma! He will never forgive me. It won’t matter that he ‘s only eleven months old; he will remember everything. When he turns sixteen, all the hurtful feelings of desertion will crawl back into his heart. He will lash out at me when I…

Forgive the cliché, but a little birdy once told me that if I stopped to smell the roses once in awhile, I would recognize significance in the most random events. So one day it happened that I was out for a stroll, when the wild cries of a Killdeer caught my attention. Set the scene…