I’ve been thinking about tomatoes. Not the uniformly red tomatoes of about the same size and shape that you can buy in the produce aisle at your local grocery store. No, I have been thinking about late summer tomatoes grown in a backyard garden, the gloriously uneven and brilliantly colored globes sheltered from the midmorning…
Twenty years ago, when I started having my babies, I was gifted some very lovely blankets by wonderful women I knew and loved. Some of my favorites had crocheted edges, and I would admire the handiwork when I held my babies wrapped in the beautiful blankets that offered warmth and reminded us of the love…
I love puzzles and mysteries. There is such a thrill in the victory of finally figuring out the solution. Last fall our family participated in a tropical island plane crash themed “puzzle room.” In order to escape the imaginary island, we had to solve a series of puzzles with only the items we found in…
In an ancient Hindu fable, six blind men encounter an elephant for the first time. Each man touches a different part of the elephant’s body with vastly different conclusions. The version of this story in poetic form was a beloved children’s picture book I remember fondly. As I contemplated our tenet this month on seeking…
When I was a senior in high school, my mother decided to go back to college and finish what she had started many years before. She had started college right after high school, but got married after her second year, promptly got pregnant, and had to quit school because in those days (the 1940’s), women…
This is the second time I sat down to write today. When I started this morning, or rather, tried to start, I had just logged into the computer when my son called me from the garage to let me know that our freezer was full of food that was no longer frozen. Needless to say,…
It is back-to-school time where I live. I have been spending most of my time recently buying backpacks and pencils, getting my calendar updated with parent teacher conference dates and school sports schedules, and learning the new procedures and policies that are required to go to school during a global pandemic. It’s a very busy…
Can we all just agree that 2020 has turned out to be nothing like any of us would have expected? Whether we’re talking social distancing, face masks, hand sanitizer, homeschooling, or a run on toilet paper, all of us have been forced to adapt to new realities. Some of them have happened rather seamlessly, while…
There is a story my children like to tell, when they are especially annoyed with me, or when there is a new audience, or when they want to remind me of the frailties and foibles of being human and it goes like this: We were going out to dinner one night, a sit-down dinner in…
We Seek After Knowledge and Wisdom This summer I have had the amazing opportunity to live in southeast Alaska where my husband got a job as a deep-sea fishing captain. This was a dream come true for both my husband and me. For a while now we have wanted to step away from our busy…