Lent 2023 - Murrelets

Yesterday the Green Team from my church met in the big back yard of the director of our local ecology center to do some prep work on trees to be plan…

I am entrusted with their bodies and their psyches, and today I want to ask the neurologist about medicinal marijuana, to take the edge off. For them…

When we came out of our houses, we were tender with each other on the sidewalks and streets, walking in the sun. We said hello across the small, poli…

That must have been the saddest moment for them both: the hasty goodbye, when Jesus said to Judas, “Do quickly what you are going to do,” knowing his…

I’m falling in love with someone who’s falling in love with earth in a novel. He’s an alien narrator with a purpose for being here but he’s changing …

My sister was startled awake having dreamed our father’s death as a cloud crossing the moon, as a poem written in chalk on a blackboard and wiped awa…

I was sitting in my cozy place, a corner of the couch, next to a small end table where I have stacked journals, and keep a small glass carafe of book…

I know that I became politically active after [the criminal president] was elected. It shocked and saddened me, and I went to a local political party…

What struck me from the reading—John 8: 51-59—was that Jesus hid himself and left the temple before they stoned him! I love that practical, self-prot…

Where do I belong? Belonging belongs to the past. In the past, we tumbled over each other like kittens or cubs, loving and biting, practicing for bei…

Our communion is an open table and we of the community, in pairs, take around tiny cups of broken gluten-free crackers and purple juice to the rest o…

Sometimes in the night, parched, I pour a cup of water by the light of the refrigerator, just like people in the movies. And because it’s darker wher…

It is written of me that I was a good friend, a good listener. I am grateful for this but know I have forgotten secrets so not to utter them. It is w…

I lay on the table as she laid her hands on the air above me, not touching me, not yet, not without my permission. “Yes,” I said. And first she felt …

“Here’s such a coil!” Juliet to her Nurse, Act II, scene 5, Romeo and Juliet I was wondering why I am still angry at my father for not making su…

I give apple cores to the squirrels, placing them discreetly on the bench of the wooden picnic table on the patio or out among the surface roots of t…

Someone praised me in my sleep for singing, but where is the plot of that dream? Why did I recall the praise suddenly in the car driving home from th…

My father’s house sits on a little rise on flat farmland north of town, sometimes still gray-sided in my mind, sometimes white with green shutters. W…

My husband enacted the couple in Menard’s, using their carts as walkers, inching their way down the aisle, the woman bent completely in half, almost …

I have been thinking of my neighbors, two sisters, a lot these recent days. I read an obituary in the paper and realized it was for their uncle in a …