A True Story from Home April is young, and I’m in my garden as often as I can be. Today, I have company. My nephew, Bennett, is kneeling in the zucchini patch beside a Red Ryder wheelbarrow. He asked if he could help, so he’s weeding the clover that crept up in early March, tossing … Continue reading A Garden in Babylon
A True Story from Home To me, Mrs. Olave Thurston was the lady in my grandpa’s stories---as if she was another Ma Ingalls or Miss Rumphius. When we ate chicken for dinner, Papa would tell how Mrs. Thurston raised, butchered, and boiled her own. When spring came and I cut fresh flowers for the table, … Continue reading Gravestone Flowers
Autumn came, at first, like a man too fierce to get old, huffing and fuming like his leaf blower, hurrying hot wind, unsettled as a hurricane in the trees until, one afternoon, the last leaf fell, was raked, put away, and he settled into something long, cold, and sweeter.
The kingdom of heaven is as near as the hand at the end of your arm. So turn the dough, stitch the wound, change the sheets, play the notes, stack the wood, sow the seeds and straighten the rocks along the wilderness road.
I do not know if my great-great Grandma Howard was a round woman, or if she was as twiglike as my great-grandma Wanda, or if she had my grandma Karen’s smile, or my dad’s love of German chocolate cake. I only know what Dad remembers, and that is her cinnamon rolls. They were doughy to … Continue reading It’s Recipes We Remember
For Papa Jay on his 88th Birthday, Labor Day 2023 You told me “Eight thirty or so,” but of course, you meant eight, And I knew you’d been up a long time before then Because I ran by at dawn And saw the old hurricane lamp was on in the kitchen And the storm doors … Continue reading Eight Thirty or So
This article was written for and published on The Christian Manifesto blog. “What do you want to do?” people wanted to know as soon as I finished high school. It was a problem, because I was already doing what I wanted to do. I was writing. I was teaching in my local church. I was using my … Continue reading Quiet, Little, & Long
I was planting potatoes one day in early spring when what looked like two B-25 Mitchell bombers rumbled over the trees. I pulled my hands out of the dirt to watch history fly by and remembered there was an air show in St. Louis that weekend. I also remembered reading about the war gardens – … Continue reading Victory Garden
May you wake to the sun that wakes the bees in their boxes and by which you can see your work and spot the queen laying her eggs in golden wombs of light. May you hear the hum of all twenty-nine colonies and may it harmonize with the song of the robins and the breeze … Continue reading For the Beekeeper
The pond shrinks this time of year, when at high noon, the sun brings all the water scraping away from the muddy banks and leaves them to crack under the sun. Papa Jay uses the drought season to find the holes where the pond leaks, and he has done so for many years. A leak … Continue reading But the Sea is Not Full
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