This piece was written for the February issue of our church newsletter, Grace & Peace. Each year, I get a little better at remembering to plant bulbs. I wait until the garden has fallen asleep and the late chrysanthemums have stopped blooming, those first few frosts biting at their heads and turning them gray. One … Continue reading Bear Fruit With Patience
This piece was written for the January issue of our church newsletter, Grace & Peace. It was on the bright edge of the new year a few winters ago that I set out to read through the entire Bible in 60 days. This meant two months of reading more than 15 chapters per day. I … Continue reading The Feast of Scripture
On the Vocation of Nursing Jared and I spent one long week in the hospital back in February, watching his grandpa struggle to live. We stood at his bed rails all hours of the day, watching the nurses come, check, chart, rearrange IVs, then pass the clipboard of notes to the next nurse, then the … Continue reading Take Care
A month or so before we started dating, Jared offered to send me seeds in the mail. This surprised me, because I didn’t know many guys who planted gardens. I knew fewer who had an abundance of heirloom seeds on hand. When I thought about it, Jared was the only guy I’d ever talked to … Continue reading Seeds in the Mail
Last night, my niece, Elsie, showed me a picture of what her new baby brother or sister might look like in the womb. It is just nine weeks tiny, with black eyes and hands and feet poking their way outward. “The baby is the size of an olive,” Elsie said. I tried to imagine holding … Continue reading The Size of an Olive
A few days ago, I dug my sourdough starter out from the back of the basement fridge, lifted off the tea towel, and found it was black and hard as stone. I said, Of course. This would be the year my starter died. My biologist friend had told me just last week that it’s quite … Continue reading The Year My Sourdough Starter (Nearly) Died
A True Story from Home April is young, and I’m in my garden as often as I can be. Today, I have company. My nephew, Bennett, is kneeling in the zucchini patch beside a Red Ryder wheelbarrow. He asked if he could help, so he’s weeding the clover that crept up in early March, tossing … Continue reading A Garden in Babylon
Before the sun slipped down on the Sabbath, Mary might have pressed aloe leaves and squeezed their gum into a dish, mixing it with myrrh and water. Carrying it to a buried Jesus at dawn must have felt like a last, little fragrant offering. But when she saw the sunrise streaming into an open tomb, … Continue reading Leaves of Healing
I watched one afternoon in October to see my neighbor’s chainsaw whir and whine and whistle clean through the trunk of his tree, and I felt the wrongness of it, as he stood on a ladder to dismantle it limb-by-limb. “I was putting off knowing it. All that day there had been a crashing in … Continue reading Upon the Death of a Bradford Pear
In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of a woman named Mrs. Almira Todd, who lived in a clapboard house on the coast of Maine---a gardener and a landlady and "an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame." They grew out from her gray-shingled walls and up her steep gables, … Continue reading Scent on a Spring Breeze
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