A trio of birth stories. During this week of autumn, our family has three birthdays, mine and those of our two sons. I call it Birthday Week but it’s actually a little longer than 7 days due to one overdue baby and one emergency C-birth. “Week” speaks to my sense of concentrated blessings, a set…

No, I’m not being mean or unfriending people. It’s just that I have moved three times since building an impressive Roll-O-Dex (young folks, that’s an old brand name) from the paper-based world in which I was a paperwork queen. Somewhere in the early 2000s, I had hand copied my literal card file of names and…

But sadly, her best just wasn’t very good. I have been fussin’ (as we say in the South) in my heart for a long time over a teacher whom I thought was mean and discouraging to my child. While she was nice enough to my other kids, she seemed to think … what? That this…

As seen in Canajoharie, New York the gaze of the eyes and the outstretched hand there is a dark wall . . . flames of a mortal’s light burned from place in the back through this heart of darkness the liquid light glows on ruffles and melts on foreheads and cheeks caches of precious tallow…