Longing

Longing.  This word won’t leave me alone.  It first jumped out of the pages of Mere Christianity (by C.S. Lewis) a few weeks ago, and since then, it has worked itself into every book, every movie, and every mini-drama of my life.  The word itself can give me the feeling.  (((Do you know what I mean?)))…

The Daily Turn #14: walking with myself

If I could go back, I would walk with myself like a mother and child holding hands. I would say: Don’t be afraid of growing up. Don’t worry that you may lose one by one (to imagined fires, through open windows, at the hands of nonexistent strangers) every one, and that you couldn’t outlive the…

The Daily Turn #13: Daddy’s Garden

Walking again today through my Daddy’s garden I become a child. The scent of honey-sweet allysum is carried by the first wind of the end of summer. I can not find a poetic way to say that the towering hastas smell like honeysuckle and gardenias combined, but I don’t mind, because I do not yet read…

The Daily Turn #7: Human

After a long day ofrealizing I am human–Meeting and failing to meetneeds that rise likeGreat ocean wavesand fall and break andpull everything underwith a force that coulddrown you.How insignificant I seem,standing in their wake–looking out fromthe blistering shoreto where the golden horizondrops off the edge of the world.You could never swim there if you tried….

On Childhood

Sometimes I wonder what my children will remember about their childhood. I look back on my own childhood as a glow–colored by bright black-eyed susans and zinnias of every color in my Daddy’s garden.  I’m the youngest of nine children, and almost all of my childhood memories are centered around my family and home.  My…