“I find jar.” He said it repeatedly, in his serious, emphatic way. And of course, the f’s and j’s are a bit hard to understand from a two-year-old’s little lips, so it took a few moments before I could interpret his sentence. Context always helps. And we’d just read The Blessings Jar out loud for…
There’s a lot of talk these days about being fully present in every situation. Put away the smart phone, just enjoy the moment. Or as Jim Elliot put it (long before cell phones, let alone smart phones): “Wherever you are, be all there.” But I’m not sure if it is possible for writers to ever…
Whenever I am getting ready for company, I start seeing my house through another’s eyes. The bookshelves are stacked to the overflowing, and the desk looks just like the shelves — except it is papers and files that are cascading all over the desk. Dust bunnies lurk in the corners and can always be found…
Every spring we have fleeting thoughts of worry until we see them come in again. Selling organic vegetables brings us more than the usual run of clientele suffering from illnesses they are hoping to cure by eating well. And sometimes, we wonder whether we will see them again next year or not. But he had…
I am related to some of the most beautiful people in the world. I just can’t decide if they seem more beautiful when I’m missing them so far away, or if they are more beautiful when I get to see their faces again after a long absence. My beautiful paternal grandmother is in the hospital…
Each year, it’s a different creature. But this year, it’s earwigs. As never before. Perhaps it’s the mild winter that let them survive to bug us in such great quantity. I haven’t studied their life cycles enough to know. All I know is that I wish it was a shorter one. Granted, the year of…
They got married in a field of wild daisies on the first hot day in June. And from the moment that young bride walked down the grassy aisle on her daddy’s arm, she and her groom (not to mention everyone else) were wiping away tears. The groomsmen added a dash of humor as they came…
We are always in between birthdays at our house. The moment Christmas is past, Daniel’s birthday is looked for with great excitement by his big sisters. They talk about how he will let them help open presents, they talk about birthday hats, they anticipate April with the generosity of big sisters. The spring months bring…
We fell in love to the rhythm of Country music. The cassettes and CDs we mixed for each other became the soundtrack for those years. The songs we listened to reflecting the ups and downs, the excitement and the tears. “Don’t Take the Girl” was the first Country song he played me, the summer of…
It had been thirteen years since I had attended a writers conference. Back in 2000, blogging was pretty much unheard of. But at the writers conference I attended in 2013, every author I met was fascinated by the fact that I was a blogger. Social media was in large part a mystery to them, but…
I hear the rumbles every time Facebook makes a change. I’m going to quit Facebook. I like Google+ way better. And just like that, bloggers everywhere are ready to drop one of the most popular social media networks. Not because their readers have abandoned it, but because the bloggers themselves are fed up with it. I…
When I attended my first blogging conference, every other blogger I met wanted to write a book. They spoke of the blog series they were turning into eBooks, but the dreams they whispered of had phrases like “publisher” and “book contract”. And many of the speakers at the conference were indeed writing books that had…
The End.
The End.
