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The Boogie Started to Explode
When my daughter was two, her developing speech couldn’t quite articulate the words hair clip. Instead, what came out of her mouth was hippie kip. Naturally, charmed by our creation, Byron and I started copying her words, and in no time at all, a hair fastener, in our household lexicon, was always referred to as
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End O’ Semester and Dontists
The end of the semester always lands with a crash–a head-snapping bump at the very least–and never moreso than when final exam week is topped off with a root canal. As I sat in the endodontist’s office this past Friday morning, nervously fidgeting in the exam room, one of the office workers decided to come
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There Is Gentle
When I was pregnant the second time, I harbored a fear. I was afraid that the baby inside me would be a boy. I’d spent the previous couple of years hanging out with a sweet, calm, kind little girl. I liked the little girl. When I’d take her places, like to the library, we’d sit together
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Wazzat?
I recently had an email exchange with a college friend who reads this blog. The exchange started when she messaged to josh me, semi-accusingly, about the point in my previous post where I mentioned road tripping to The Alamo in Texas–yet I had not called or visited her (she lives in Austin, TX), and how
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Narrative
At my college, we offer regular, semester-length classes (sixteen weeks) along with a different option: the eight-week class. The eight-week option was created to help our students pack as much learnin’ as possible into the shortest reasonable time frame. One would be justified in having reservations about the eight-week classes, as our students often have
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Thirteen Years Since the Blue Moon
You better believe I’m trotting out this old chestnut for its yearly airing. If there are any new readers out there, this’ll be a new one, but for many of you, it will be cause to muse, “Wow, another year’s gone by already?” For me, I like to re-run it because then I’m motivated to
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A Time to Every Purpose
In the last weeks of his life, I would talk to my dad on the phone frequently. He was in Montana. I was in Minnesota. It was January, and at the same time his heart and lungs were deteriorating, my body was busy helping those same organs grow inside the baby I’d been carrying for
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Feel Like Whistling Even With a Shoe Full of Slush
Didn’t February last about seventeen weeks? And then Daylight Savings slammed into our bodies–which were already trying to figure out how to get through a day without drooping. What’s more, we’re in the midst of a snowstorm here today, currently racking up 6-10″ new inches on top of the existing white mounds. Spring is approaching,
