The cicadas have come, like a thousand sirens in the trees. I was ten last time they emerged from the ground en masse, littering the grass and molting on every tree. I was still wearing my brothers’ basketball shorts and running around sticking the bug shells on peoples’ shirts after church. I remember how we … Continue reading Year of the Locust
May came—the green, bright end to the school year—and we’d shut our math books before noon, eat on the porch, then run to the swings or grab bats from the garage. The apple tree would blossom, the mowers would hum, and it would have been a shame to sit at our desks and miss it. … Continue reading By Wisdom is a Schoolhouse Built
On the day the moon eclipsed the sun, I happened to be with Jared in Arkansas, where spring had brought the dandelions a little sooner and where the bees were busy at their hives. I also happened to be near totality, where, in the big, southern sky, the sun dwindled to nothing more than a … Continue reading The Ninth Hour
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
My pastor said last Sunday that it's no mistake where we meet Jesus. I met him at the kitchen table, when I was still small enough to fit on my dad's lap. He had unlatched and pulled the two halves of the table apart, so there was a gap where the leaves might go. On … Continue reading At the Kitchen Table
We read Miss Twiggley’s Tree so many times that both covers tore off, including the final page of the book, which offered the moral of the story. But the last page I had was enough. It pictured the inside of Miss Twiggley’s house, tucked deep in the boughs of a willow tree, where the entire … Continue reading A Set Table in a Safe Tree
There is a basic qualification to be a volunteer Storm Spotter for the National Weather Service, and it is blessedly simple: Look up. Were anything more technical asked of me, I would not have taken the class; but as it is, I already spend a lot of time watching the sky. It turns out that … Continue reading Look Up
A good writer is one who recognizes that there is always more to the story than they're capable of telling. The world is vast, and they will never come to the end of it. John wrote his gospel with this humbly in mind. He had undertaken the formidable task of writing about his Rabbi and … Continue reading All the Books in Eldredge Public Library
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