cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
This one is for the outsiders. The ones who walk into a room and wonder if they’re going to find a friend. If people are going to see them, welcome them. “Will I be overdressed? Underdressed? Will I say the right thing? Will they think my jokes are funny?” This is for the ones who,…
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It was dinnertime on a Sunday, which means the countdown to bedtime had started a little early and was slightly more enthusiastic than normal. I had been craving cauliflower for a while, which isn’t something I’m particularly proud of, but here we were. My husband and two daughters looked on as I picked up the…
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I was a twenty-something, mindlessly folding church bulletins with a group of young women. We talked to pass the time. One of the women said, “I can’t wait until I’m forty. Your life is settled by then. It gets easier.” The fact that none of us laughed is a testament to our naïveté. Many years…
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“Don’t go,” I plead as I nuzzle my head into my husband’s dress shirt. I feel like I’m 3 years old and my daddy is leaving on a long trip. My chest feels achy as he grabs his brown leather shoes from the shelf in his closet.
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Like so many others everywhere, we are self-isolating at home during this unexpected and truly frightening threat. My husband and I find ourselves in a “high-risk” category, not just because of our age (we are “elderly” on paper, it seems). Russ has been on a blood thinner since 2002, and my battle with septic shock…
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I will never forget the based-on-a-true-story movie, The Impossible, about a family who, while vacationing in a paradise resort in Thailand, was hit by the 2004 tsunami. The scene that grips me most is when Naomi Watts is reading on a lounge chair and suddenly sensing something is not right. That something terribly powerful is…
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When the world shut down and we all came home, I turned my red desk to face the window. It felt too vulnerable and a tad inappropriate to have so many eyes on my bed behind me. The door seemed an acceptable view for strangers on screens and so, the construction zone across the street…
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Last night, a writing prompt was given to a lovely group of sisters with whom I was virtually gathering. For a moment or so, we were to write about fear. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, but I was soon to find out. As a single woman, living alone, I live a life…
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I had run out of ideas of how to get through the chaos that was building so that we could help the children learn. I wanted to quit and felt like a complete failure. My principal, though, was wise and kind. She listened intently, saw both my despair and my goodness, and simply responded,
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There’s something about the whole world choosing together to be alone. Like a kind of permission, or a moment of tag—“It” has finally caught up to you after you tried running so far and so long, and now, tired and exhausted, you have a chance to turn and accept what is, to become It, to…
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