Seven women trek carpool cars to my house, as I straighten couch pillows just one more time. . . middle school mirror looking turned to house tidying.  Faces illumine my kitchen filled with a pot-luck patchwork feast.  Puzzle-piece dishes in artful proportion nourish laughs and kind questions that expand the eight chairs squeezed to fit…

Birds gossip in the trees in our front yard.  Two wide maples cast huge shade across green grass and the gray cement made up of driveway and sidewalk.  We three sit in this shade with fat pastel chalks in hand.  The black concrete begs, a canvas.  Grandma makes art: a face, a flower, the word…

It’s late and chilly.  My one-year-old nudges my thigh and points out the screen door.  We’re just letting the dog out, but my daughter’s got a hunger for playing outside.  Hearing a whisper nudge that seems to say, “Why not?” I slide out of the way holding her tiny hand as she has more bravery…

The notes are bouncing around us, and we run. We run down front to the throng of people, my husband 30, and me not-quite-30.  The group’s energy is pulsing, younger than we are, but we run down anyway.  It’s all moving and the song is swelling, and it’s so alive, and we’re lost in the…

Gravy and mashed potatoes got nothing on a momma’s kitchen hug or a May breeze between me and clouds.  Those comfort, and yet I lean toward an atypical comfort, my iPhone, in the sometimes uncomfortable space that is just me. Why does it comfort me to troll with my finger, scrolling through tagged recipes and…

Brave is what I am not.  Generally. I look out at the brave ones from my nervous little nook, wondering what it must be like to be out there traveling, loving, living, and then I realize there is a braveness in just being, in sitting comfortable with myself, calm in the moment that is now.…