On How We Learn the Dance
Of all the prayers that I have given since my children were born, one that I seem to have forgotten, overlooked, and neglected to include in the litany of devotion…
Shelli is an advocacy writer and creative writing teacher. She loves to spend time with her husband (usually in the garden) and their four almost adult children. She also loves to sew (usually for the local community theater), to read, to write, and to drag her family outside to look at the sky. Shelli is passionate about poetry, Broadway show tunes, and telling stories -- of ourselves, our families, and our communities.
On the Ferocious Junglefowl Which We Call the Humble Chicken
It is late afternoon, and in my backyard there is a mutiny afoot. Let me explain. We have chickens—five feathered egg layers who sometimes refuse to lay eggs, winged meat…
Reflections on Salads and Soups
Everything seems soft in the spring. The breezes, the rains, the ground as it thaws underfoot, the low murmur of birds returning to the trees, the gleam of the sun…
On Comings and Goings
You know what is often forgotten, when we talk about family? It is the unspoken moments, the feel, the sense of individual members of the same people, the same tribe,…
Midnight Revelries and Other Ways We Break the Silence
A house with children is never quiet, I think. Even in brief moments of stillness, of sleep, the momentary lull when busy bodies and mouths are kept quiet by the…
On Potlucks and Picnics and the Poetry of Food
The cookbook is old, the spine broken in places, pages faded and stained, dotted with water from being left too close to sinks and glasses, smudged with the remnants of…
On What We Learn from Trees
Imagine a place, high in the mountains of Central Utah, right at the heart of the Fishlake National Forest where there is a glade of quaking aspens ringing the shore…
On Wonder
When my children were small I would tell them, “we are going on a scavenger hunt,” because they were busy and curious, and endlessly in need of being entertained, and…
On the Opening of Doors
The first time I saw a Dutch door I was a young mother on vacation with my husband and his family. We stayed at a cute little cottage near the…
The Goldfish
It is the small things really. The sudden realization that I am alone in a house that is usually filled to the brim with comings and goings, with long teenage…