Things On My desk
MY DESK IS THE KITCHEN TABLE.A LIST — *Exercise 001 from the brand new Substack Mondays Are Free, a reservoir of writing exercises by Ross Gay & Patrick Rosal and curated by Essence London & janan alexandra
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Reading Evangelicals: Readalong
I wrote this in 2022 and never posted it. While working on my Substack newsletter this week, I dug out this file and am posting it here with no edits to its original form. In late 2020, I read Jesus & John Wayne by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. In this work, Du Mez focused in …
Mid Year Book Review
I have had a good reading year to the midpoint – 40 books! (43 counting July, so far). A few thoughts in the rearview mirror — Back in January, I read Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar…..I would not normally have picked this up, but I have a weird little sliding doors sort of connection …
Anchors Hold
If I was making a list of my anchors in Place (physical locations), I would probably include Morning Shade Farm. I have been picking berries on this particular U-Pick farm most summers for a very long time. Because the west side of Morning Shade runs adjacent to my uncle’s farm, which was my grandfather’s before …
Life is Just A bowl of Cherries
We have a couple cherry trees in our backyard that have been let grow through the years, making most of the cherries simply clusters of bright red spots way up in the sky. When we moved here three summers ago the cherries were past harvest time, fallen to the ground or picked off by birds. …
Specialty Garlic Season
I was in the produce section of New Seasons grocery story on Monday when I saw this pile of garlic scapes labeled Specialty Garlic (sourced from Oregon, though I didn’t capture that fact clearly in my quick photo snap). I felt pretty spot on, having just harvested our first garlic scapes of the season the …
Echoes of Mary Oliver At Pruning Time
We have a hobby fruit orchard on our property. The trees had already been seasonally pruned when we put an offer on the house in March 2022, and a new growth cycle was just beginning. When Ethan and I flew down from Alaska to help my parents move into the house a couple months later, …
2023 Reading Review
I enjoy skimming end of the year reading lists so I skimmed my own list of books that I read in 2023. Because I simply keep a list and no additional notes on books, it is interesting to look at the list and see titles I can’t remember anything about. There are a few titles …
Boots to light the way
They keep your feet dry, and that is what boots are for. – Mrs. Quimby Only grown-ups would say boots were for keeping feet dry. Anyone in kindergarten knew that a girl should wear shiny red or white boots on the first rainy day, not to keep her feet dry, but to show off. That’s …
Talking About My Birds
They call it an atmospheric river – all the rain that has been falling and falling and falling and falling on us these recent days. The temperatures have been warm. Old records are breaking, new records are setting. It’s a gloomy contrast to a week ago when we were on the tail end of a …
Taking Notes – Advent Day 2: Hope
It’s been a hard go for lots of reasons that won’t be said here now. But sad weighs heavy. Voices I spent time with today…… The first step in healing is allowing your story to break your own heart. – Katherine Wolf, The Good Hard Story Podcast Ep 42. More and more, any practice of …
Rummaging in the Barnyard Memory Bin
Your chickens are just so good at being chickens! says my friend when I send her yet another picture of the girls. And it’s true!! That is exactly what they are good at!! I never imagined my love for these chickens. I had no interest in owning barnyard fowl. I have vague sensory memories from …
The Prayers of the People
About 6 weeks ago I was walking through our backyard when I looked up and noticed a speck of a spider suspended in the air, high over my head. I stopped and studied the situation. I could not see the threads that were holding the spider hanging in the wide empty space between two trees …
what even is saving time
It is Saturday morning and I can gratefully report that I have nearly recovered from last Sunday’s time change. When I was much younger the twice yearly time change was not a big deal, it was simply what we did when the calendar said to Spring Forward or Fall Back. I generally did not like …
Ride the wind
suspended in spaceheld by threads I cannot seeSpider gives me pause
With a nod to Margaret wise brown
By the big red barnlies a lonely eggand no sort of hen in sight.
Sunday afternoon
I took my sadness to the dahlia fields and let it walk in beauty.
Morning Shade Farm
Year after year I come to this place where Memory waits to greet me.
So sorry For Your Loss – Dina Gachman
I have a book overdue at the library, but before returning it I decided to dip in a bit to see if I wanted to put it back on my hold list. Yesterday morning I picked it up and started reading, by the end of the day I had read all the way through. So …
September Time Slip
Walking through the pasture Grass crunches And I just got off the school bus.
Backyard Lights
The evening sun slips in through the trees and sets the crepe myrtle ablaze.
be still, my soul
Sometimes at day’s end I sit in the barnyard with chickens and find rest.
The Gravity of Joy – Angela Williams Gorrell
How to find joy when life seems awful is my kind of clickbait, though absolutely not in the perjorative sense of the word. Cruising through headlines a couple weeks ago I saw this one from the Washington Post and clicked. In the article author Steven Petrow describes his sister Julie’s “birthday bash/going away party” celebrated …
Turning in the melon patch
…..vegetable patches require a quid pro quo between plants and humans, where the plants get to keep growing so long as they produce tasty, nutritious fruit for human consumption. – Camille T. Dungy, in Soil